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 March 2017 open thread here.
GiveWell has been planning to separate the Open Philanthropy Project from GiveWell for over a year. We’re happy to announce that as of June 1, GiveWell and the Open Philanthropy Project are separate organizations. GiveWell sold assets and transferred staff to the Open Philanthropy Project LLC, an entity created for the purpose of potentially acquiring the Open Philanthropy Project’s assets and continuing its operations. (Read more about the Open Philanthropy Project LLC here.) The transaction was unanimously approved by GiveWell’s non-conflicted Board members.
We do not expect this change to impact most of GiveWell’s donors. We’re proud to have incubated the Open Philanthropy Project as part of GiveWell and are excited to see what it achieves as an independent organization.
Our cost-effectiveness analysis plays a critical role in the recommendations we make to donors. For example, as a direct result of our cost-effectiveness calculations, we place a higher priority on filling funding gaps at the charities we recommend that work on deworming programs and distributing malaria nets than we do directing funding to GiveDirectly, a GiveWell top charity that distributes direct cash transfers. We believe that GiveDirectly is the strongest organization we’ve ever seen, but according to our analysis, cash transfers are less cost-effective in terms of impact per dollar donated than deworming treatments and malaria nets.
Accordingly, cost-effectiveness analysis is a major part of GiveWell’s research process. We dedicate a large part of a full-time staff member (Christian Smith)’s capacity to this work and others involved with GiveWell research spend a considerable amount of time engaging with our cost-effectiveness model throughout the year. We consider this analysis a key part of our output and publish our model online so that anyone can check our calculations, enter their own inputs, and see if they agree with our approach and outputs.
This post will provide some basic information about how our cost-effectiveness analyses inform our charity recommendations.
We’re often asked why GiveWell doesn’t recommend any organizations that focus on providing surgeries. This post will describe:
This post will highlight GiveWell’s work with IDinsight, part of our Incubation Grants program to help grow the pipeline of potential future top charities and improve the quality of GiveWell’s recommendations. We previously highlighted the work of No Lean Season and Zusha!, Incubation Grant recipients and potential 2017 GiveWell top charities. Unlike these organizations, we don’t expect IDinsight to itself become a top charity. Instead, we hope it will help GiveWell support the development of more top charities and increase our understanding of the organizations we recommend.
IDinsight is an international NGO that aims to help its clients develop and use rigorous evidence to improve social impact. GiveWell is partnering with IDinsight to support organizations’ development of monitoring and evaluation information of the type we’re interested in. This is the first partnership of this kind for GiveWell.
Since we released our 2016 recommendations in November, we have received about $4.9 million in funding for making grants at our discretion. We noted at the time that we would use these funds to fill the next highest priority funding gaps among our top charities. We have now reassessed the funding gaps for our top charities and plan to allocate $4.4 million to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) and $0.5 million of the funding we received for granting to the Deworm the World Initiative.
Our updated recommendation for donors
We have also updated our bottom line recommendation for donors seeking to follow our recommended allocation. We now recommend that donors give 100% of their donation to AMF, which will continue to have a pressing need for funding after the grant from GiveWell’s discretionary funds and after accounting for expected fundraising.
This is an update on the recommendation we made in November 2016 of giving 75% to AMF and 25% to the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI). We will update this recommendation again in November, and may do so sooner if we have new information that affects where we think additional donations would have the greatest impact.
We continue to recommend all seven of our current recommended charities as top charities and think all offer outstanding opportunities for donors to accomplish significant good with their donations. We have not completed any updates on our standout charities, and that list remains the same.