The GiveWell Blog

Incoming Program Officer: Lewis Bollard

(updated on: ) | by Holden

We’re excited to announce that Lewis Bollard has accepted our offer to join the Open Philanthropy Project as a Program Officer, leading our work on treatment of animals in industrial agriculture.

Lewis currently works as Policy Advisor & International Liaison to the CEO at The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). Prior to that, he was a litigation fellow at HSUS, a law student at Yale, and an associate consultant at Bain & Company.

Our process, and our bet on Lewis

We hired Lewis using a broadly similar process and criteria to what we described previously. (Because we have recently laid out the basics of that process, this post is much shorter.)

In Lewis’s case, the “mini-trial” we did as part of the interview process focused on exploring some disagreements we had about the relative value of (a) targeting corporations in the hopes of improving farm conditions vs. (b) targeting the broader public. Lewis created writeups laying out his thinking, and we had extensive discussions that resulted in some updating on both sides. We will be writing more about our strategy for this cause in the future.

Lewis initially came to us via a referral from Howie Lempel, who co-led an animal law reading group with him when they were both in law school, and was then recommended by several other people we spoke to in the field. Based on the referrals, interviews and the “mini-trial,” we see the following strengths:

  • We’ve been extremely impressed by his thinking and communication style. We see him as a very strong generalist.
  • We believe Lewis has a passion for, and strong knowledge of, the cause he will be focusing on.
  • We believe that our core values with respect to this cause are highly aligned. In particular, our primary goal is to reduce suffering of animals as much as possible, and we believe this will sometimes mean pushing for incremental improvements in how animals are treated rather than focusing exclusively on reducing meat production/consumption.

Our reservations come from the fact that Lewis is relatively early in his career:

  • He has only 3 years of work experience, and accordingly does not have a very informative track record as a funder or advocate.
  • While he has some strong relationships in the field, he is not as well-connected as a more senior candidate would likely be.
  • We believe he will have a steep learning curve in order to get up to speed on philanthropy, and, secondarily, on some parts of the field he has been less exposed to.

We are betting that Lewis’s strong generalist qualities will allow him to quickly develop the relationships and expertise he needs to recommend outstanding grants. We recognize that this is a risky proposition. We are comfortable with the risk, partly because we feel that this cause (treatment of animals in industrial agriculture) has relatively few organizations working on it, and the need for pre-existing expertise and connections is not as great as it is for our criminal justice reform Program Officer.

Because Lewis is a New Zealand citizen, our offer and his acceptance are conditional on our ability to secure a work visa for him. We expect that to be completed in a few weeks, and we’re anticipating that he will start in October.

September 2015 open thread

(updated on: ) | by Alexander

Following up on our open thread in April, we wanted to have another one.

Our goal 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 if there’s feedback or questions you’d prefer to discuss privately. We’ll try to respond promptly to questions or comments.

Update on GiveWell’s web traffic / money moved: Q2 2015

(updated on: ) | by Tyler Heishman

In addition to evaluations of other charities, GiveWell publishes substantial evaluation of itself, from the quality of its research to its impact on donations. We publish quarterly updates regarding two key metrics: (a) donations to top charities and (b) web traffic.

The tables and chart below present basic information about our growth in money moved and web traffic in the first two quarters of 2015 compared to the previous two years (note 1).

Money moved and donors: first two quarters

Table_2015Q2MoneyMoved.png

Money moved by donors who have never given more than $5,000 in a year increased about 80% to $1.54 million. The total number of donors in the first two quarters increased 94% to about 6,000 (note 2).

Most of our money moved is donated near the end of the year (we tracked about 70% of the total in the fourth quarter each of the last two years) and is driven by a relatively small number of large donors. Because of this, we don’t think we can reliably predict our growth and think that our year-to-date total money moved provides relatively limited information about what our year-end money moved is likely to be (note 3). We therefore look at the data above as an indication of growth in our audience.

A tax-deductible top charity for Australians

(updated on: ) | by Rebecca Raible

Updated November 2022: Australian donors can now make tax-deductible donations according to our Top Charities Fund and to some of our top charities through Effective Altruism Australia. Australian donors can also donate to some of our top charities through The Life You Can Save. You can find a list of tax-advantaged donation options for other countries here.

For many years we’ve received emails from donors asking whether donations to any of our top charities were tax-deductible in Australia and we’ve had to tell them that we did not have a tax-deductible option to offer them. So, we’re happy to share the news that the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) has just received Deductible Gift Recipient status in Australia, which means that donations to AMF (Australia) are now tax-deductible. You can read AMF’s announcement here.

AMF has been seeking this status since 2009 and we are glad that its efforts have paid off. Of GiveWell’s top charities, AMF is the only one to have tax-deductible status in Australia at this point in time. More information on the tax-deductibility of donations to our top charities in various countries is available here.

AMF has told us it is happy to share information about its experience with the application process with other organizations that are considering applying for Deductible Gift Recipient status in Australia. It has posted information about the process, including some of its application materials, here.

The process of hiring our first cause-specific Program Officer

(updated on: ) | by Holden

Earlier this year, we announced Chloe Cockburn as our incoming Program Officer for criminal justice reform. Chloe started her new role at the end of August.

This hire was the top priority we set in our March update on U.S. policy. It represents the first time we’ve hired someone for a senior, cause-specific role. Chloe will be the primary person responsible for recommending $5+ million a year of grants in this space. As such, hiring Chloe is one of the highest-stakes decisions we’ve made yet for the Open Philanthropy Project, certainly higher-stakes than any particular grant to date. As such, we are writing up a summary of our thinking (including reservations), and the process we ran for this job search.

We also see this blog post as a major part of the case for future grants we make in criminal justice reform. Part of the goal of this process was to hire a person with context, experience, and relationships that go well beyond what it would be realistic to put in a writeup. We expect that future criminal justice reform grants will be subject to a good deal of critical discussion, and accompanied by writeups; at the same time, for readers who want to fully understand the thinking behind our grants, it is important to note that our bigger-picture bet on Chloe’s judgment will be a major input into each grant recommendation in this area.

Note that Chloe reviewed this post.

Table of contents:

History of philanthropy case study: The impact of philanthropy on the passage of the Affordable Care Act

(updated on: ) | by Milan Griffes

Benjamin Soskis, who has been working for us on our history of philanthropy project, has completed a case study of philanthropy’s impact on the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

The case study focuses first on the Atlantic Philanthropies’ funding of Health Care for America Now! (HCAN), as well as on HCAN’s activities and impact. The second part of the study surveys the activities of other funders involved in health care reform, such as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Commonwealth Fund.

The case study concludes that, as a whole, philanthropic spending had a critical, though not necessarily easily quantifiable, role in the passage of the ACA. In the following passage, Dr. Soskis quotes HCAN’s Doneg McDonough:

“There’s just no way health reform would have passed without the [philanthropically funded] outside efforts going on. No question about it. Beyond that, it gets a little fuzzy. How much of an impact did [any particular intervention] have and which things actually were critical to making the ACA happen?”

This last statement, with its combination of broadly conceived certitude and localized indeterminacy, epitomizes one of this report’s central findings regarding the claims of philanthropic impact. (Case Study, Pg. 4)

Dr. Soskis’s study also examines the difficulty of disentangling the impact of any one funder from the impact of philanthropy as a whole. He writes:

In fact, disaggregating the specific contributions of particular philanthropic funders and determining how to weigh them against each other proved one of the most significant challenges of this project. This would be an issue for any major policy initiative, but for national [health care reform], given the large number of funders involved and the efforts to coordinate activities between them, it proved even more challenging. This suggests one of the main paradoxes of evaluating the impact of philanthropy on the passage of health care reform legislation. Precisely those features which many considered essential to the passage of the ACA – the breadth, variety, and scale of philanthropic initiatives – also made it especially difficult to evaluate the contributions of any particular intervention. And the report highlights another paradox as well, one which presides over the entire study of policy impact evaluation: the more significant the legislative achievement, and the greater the impulse for various stakeholders involved to claim a definite degree of impact, the less likely it is that any determination of clear causal agency is actually possible. (Case Study, Pg. 4)

Read the full case study here (.pdf)