The GiveWell Blog

Our recommendation to Good Ventures

(updated on: ) | by Catherine Hollander

Today, we announce our list of top charities for the 2018 giving season. We expect to direct over $100 million to the eight charities on our list as a result of our recommendation.

Good Ventures, a large foundation with which we work closely, is the largest single funder of our top charities. We make recommendations to Good Ventures each year for how much funding to provide to our top charities and how to allocate that funding among them. As this funding is significant, we think it’s important for other donors to take into account the recommendation we make to Good Ventures.

This blog post explains in detail how we decide what to recommend to Good Ventures and why; we want to be transparent about the research that leads us to our recommendations to Good Ventures. If you’re interested in a bottom-line recommendation for where to donate this year, please view our post with recommendations for non-Good Ventures donors.

Note that Good Ventures has not finalized its plans for the year and may give differently from what we’ve recommended. We think it’s unlikely that any differences would have major implications for our bottom-line recommendations for other donors.

Summary

In this post, we discuss:

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Update on No Lean Season’s top charity status

(updated on: ) | by Catherine Hollander

At the end of 2017, we named Evidence Action’s No Lean Season one of GiveWell’s nine top charities. Now, GiveWell and Evidence Action agree that No Lean Season should not be a GiveWell top charity this year, and Evidence Action is not seeking additional funding to support No Lean Season’s work at this time.

This post will discuss this decision in detail. In brief, we updated our assessment of No Lean Season, a program that provides loans to support seasonal migration, based on preliminary results Evidence Action began discussing with us in July from a study of the 2017 implementation of the program (hereinafter referred to as “2017 RCT”). These results suggested the program, as implemented in 2017, did not successfully induce migration. Taking this new information into account alongside previous studies of the program, we and Evidence Action do not believe No Lean Season meets our top charity criteria at this time.

Evidence Action’s post on this decision is here.

GiveWell’s mission is to identify and recommend charities that can most effectively use additional donations. While it may be disappointing for a top charity to be removed from our list of recommendations, we believe that adding and removing top charities from our list is an important part of our process. If our top charities list never changed, we would guess we were (a) acting too conservatively (i.e. not being open enough to adding new top charities), or (b) not being critical enough of groups once they’ve been added to our list (i.e. not being open enough to removing existing top charities).

We believe this decision speaks positively of Evidence Action and demonstrates our mutual commitment to updating our views based on new evidence. GiveWell has interacted with hundreds of organizations in our history, and very few have subjected their programs to a rigorous study in the way that Evidence Action did last year and, at smaller scale, in 2014. We’re excited to work with a group like Evidence Action that is committed to rigorous study and openness about results.

Summary

In this post, we will discuss:

  • The history of GiveWell and No Lean Season. (More)
  • How the 2017 RCT updated our views of No Lean Season. (More)
    • What did the 2017 RCT find? (More)
    • How did we interpret the RCT results? (More)
    • What does the future of No Lean Season look like? (More)
  • Conclusion

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A grant to Evidence Action Beta to prototype, test, and scale promising programs

| by Olivia Larsen

In July 2018, we recommended a $5.1 million grant to Evidence Action Beta to create a program dedicated to developing potential GiveWell top charities by prototyping, testing, and scaling programs which have the potential to be highly impactful and cost-effective.

This grant was made as part of GiveWell’s Incubation Grants program, which aims to support potential future GiveWell top charities and to help grow the pipeline of organizations we can consider for a recommendation. Funding for Incubation Grants comes from Good Ventures, a large foundation with which we work closely.

Summary

This post will discuss the following:

  • Why Evidence Action Beta is promising. (More)
  • Risks we see with this Incubation Grant. (More)
  • Our plans for following Evidence Action Beta’s work going forward. (More)

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Publishing more frequent updates to our cost-effectiveness model

(updated on: ) | by Catherine Hollander

We’ve recently made a number of adjustments to improve our research process. Not all of them are easily visible outside of the organization.

This post is to highlight one of them: Publishing more frequent updates to our cost-effectiveness model throughout the year.

Summary

This post will explain:

  • What changed in how we make updates to our cost-effectiveness model. (More)
  • Why we made this change. (More)
  • How to engage with updates to our model. (More)

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September 2018 open thread

| by Catherine Hollander

Our goal with hosting quarterly open threads is to give blog readers an opportunity to publicly raise comments or questions about GiveWell or related topics (in the comments section below). As always, you’re also welcome to email us at info@givewell.org or to request a call with GiveWell staff if you have feedback or questions you’d prefer to discuss privately. We’ll try to respond promptly to questions or comments.

You can view our June 2018 open thread here.

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Allocation of discretionary funds from Q2 2018

| by Natalie Crispin

In April to June 2018, we received $1.2 million in funding for making grants at our discretion. In addition, GiveWell’s Board of Directors voted to allocate $2.9 million in unrestricted funds to making grants to recommended charities. In this post we discuss:

  • The decision to allocate the $4.1 million to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) (70 percent) and the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI) (30 percent).
  • Our recommendation that donors give to GiveWell for granting to top charities at our discretion so that we can direct the funding to the top charity or charities with the most pressing funding need. For donors who prefer to give directly to our top charities, we continue to recommend giving 70 percent of your donation to AMF and 30 percent to SCI to maximize your impact.
  • Why we have allocated unrestricted funds to making grants to recommended charities.

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