The GiveWell Blog

Request for input

| by Elie

We’re planning to redesign our website in early 2015. We last worked on our website in 2009, and it’s time to refresh it.

Please let us know if you have any suggestions you’d like us to consider. In particular:

  • Is there functionality you wish our website had?
  • Is there information you wish were easier to find?
  • Is there a message you think we should be more actively communicating?

If you have thoughts, please share them either via blog comment or by emailing us at info@givewell.org.

Update on the Ebola outbreak

| by Holden

Over the past couple of months, we’ve put some time into trying to understand the Ebola containment effort and whether it represents a strong giving opportunity. Our process has included conversations and correspondence with about 15 people including major private donors to the containment effort and representatives of the UN, CDC, WHO, and Doctors without Borders. We have also kept informed on the outbreak by reading updates from the UN, CDC, WHO, and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. (More on our process)

Yesterday, we published a writeup summarizing the status of the outbreak and control effort, the picture of funding provided and needed, and our view on the cost-effectiveness of donations.

The key points, in our view, are:

  • It has been very difficult – we think unnecessarily so – to get a picture of the funding needs and the likely impact of additional donations. It’s inevitable that a situation like this one will be difficult to understand and follow as it’s unfolding, but we’ve struggled to find even fairly basic information. We haven’t been able to find any consolidated estimate of how much total funding is needed for core activities and how much of that funding has come in so far. The closest we’ve found has been an appeal specific to UN partner agencies and major NGOs; this appeal doesn’t appear to account for the (significant) activities undertaken and funds provided directly by donor governments. (Note that Center for Global Development scholars have expressed similar sentiments about the lack of reliable information on donor contributions, in a post titled How Much Is Actually Being Spent on Ebola?) Furthermore, the description of planned activities for the UN partner agencies and major NGOs is very broad and high-level. We’ve found very little information on how additional funds would be spent. More
  • Substantial funding has come forward, particularly from governments. As of November 28, over $2 billion in funding for immediate relief efforts had been tracked, and more recently the US Congress approved over $5 billion in funding “to contain and end the Ebola outbreak at its source in Africa, enhance domestic preparedness, speed the procurement and testing of vaccines and therapeutics, and accelerate global capability to prevent the spread of future infectious diseases.” (It appears that about half of this will be spent domestically.) We believe that this outbreak may have been less compelling for individual donors than disasters such as the 2010 Haiti earthquake and 2011 Japan earthquake/tsunami; on the other hand, it has attracted significant funding from governments, perhaps in part because of fears that the outbreak might spread beyond Africa. More
  • There has been significant progress toward stopping the outbreak, though there are still areas with intense transmission. It’s hard to have high confidence in data about the containment effort, but broadly speaking, it looks as though the effort has ramped up significantly; that it has largely (though not completely) met its goals regarding safe burials and case isolation; and that the overall number of cases in Liberia (where the outbreak has affected the most people) has declined substantially and come in very far below projections made at the beginning of the outbreak. The situation appears to be worst in Sierra Leone, where there are still major Ebola “hotspots,” and it remains possible that the course of the outbreak could change rapidly. More
  • On the margin, we don’t expect additional donations from our audience to be critical to stopping the outbreak. We see the current funding gap as hindering how far into the future the Ebola response team can plan (e.g. contracts for some employees lasting 2 months instead of 6) or leading to the use of lower-quality equipment (e.g. ambulances with a dial-up modem instead of a VSat) rather than as, for example, preventing work in some areas altogether. More funding may be needed in the future, but we are optimistic that government donors will come forward with the bulk of such funding. More
  • We aren’t recommending additional donations to the containment effort in place of donations to our top charities, but we do feel the containment effort has been an outstanding use of funding. We estimate that the several billion dollar effort, taken as a whole, could easily have saved lives as cost-effectively as our top charities – something that we don’t believe is usually the case in a disaster. We doubt that additional donations from our audience – beyond what has already been committed and will likely be committed in the future from others – would have comparable cost-effectiveness. We see the commitments governments have provided as outstanding uses of funds and hope they deliver on their commitments and close any remaining funding gap. More
  • We remain interested in opportunities to strengthen disease surveillance over a longer time frame, to prevent the spread of this outbreak and help contain future outbreaks at earlier stages. We previously argued: “The best opportunities to prevent or contain the epidemic were probably before it was widely recognized as a crisis (and perhaps before Ebola had broken out at all – more funding for preventive surveillance could have made a big difference).” In our conversations around this outbreak, we have heard that there may be opportunities to rebuild health systems with stronger general surveillance capacity, and we are interested in this as part of our work on biosecurity (a likely priority of our Open Philanthropy Project work on global catastrophic risks).

As is usually the case in a vivid and widely publicized disaster, a large amount of funding has come forward, and it’s been hard to understand the developing situation and the role of additional donations – two factors that generally make us unlikely to recommend giving. In this case, the size of the threat and the potential difference to be made by a containment effort were unusually large, and we believe that the funding that went to this effort has generally been money unusually well spent.

Should we expect an ongoing study to meet its “goal?”

(updated on: ) | by Holden

One of our newly “standout” charities, Development Media International (DMI), is in the midst of a randomized controlled trial. So far, all we have from the trial is information about self-reported behavior change, and we’ve tried to use that information to estimate how many lives the program will likely save (for purposes of our cost-effectiveness analysis). We estimate that the measured behavior changes should equate to about a 3.5% reduction in child mortality. However, DMI is hoping for a 19% reduction, and by our estimate, if it falls short of 10-14%, it will likely fail to find a statistically significant impact. What should we put more credence in – GiveWell’s projection based on available data about behavior change, or DMI’s projection?

Ordinarily, I’d be happy to consider the GiveWell estimate a best guess. I’m used to charities’ estimates turning out to be optimistic, and DMI’s estimate is based on a general model rather than on the actual data we have about its impact on behavior.

However, I find myself very uncomfortable predicting a figure of 3.5% when the people carrying out a study – and paying the considerable expenses associated with it – are expecting 10-20%. I’m uncomfortable with this discrepancy for two reasons:

  • It’s a little hard to imagine that an organization would go to this level of expense – and reputational risk – if they weren’t fairly confident of achieving strong results. Most predictions and projections charities put out are, in a sense, “cheap talk,” by which I mean it costs a charity little to make strong claims. However, in this case DMI is conducting a study costing millions of dollars*, and by being public about the study, they face a significant public relations risk if the results are disappointing (as our projection implies they will be).
  • I also struggle to think of examples of studies like this one – large, expensive, publicized studies focused on developing-world health or economic empowerment – that have turned out to be “disappointing” from the perspective of people carrying out (and/or paying for) the study. Though I do know of a fair number of studies showing “no impact” for an intervention, I believe they’ve generally been academic studies looking at very common/popular interventions (e.g. improved cookstoves, microlending). These “no impact” results were noteworthy in themselves, and didn’t necessarily reflect poorly on the people conducting or paying for the studies. I have a much harder time thinking of cases in which a major developing-world study found results that I’d consider disappointing or embarrassing for those carrying out or funding the study. The only one that comes to mind is the DEVTA trial on vitamin A and deworming.

I haven’t taken the time to systematically examine the intuition that “developing-world studies rarely find results that are disappointing/embarrassing for those carrying out the study.” It’s possible that the intuition is false; it’s also possible that it’s an artifact of the sort of publication bias that won’t affect DMI’s study, since the DMI study’s existence and hypothesis are already public. Finally, it seems worth noting that I don’t have the same intuition about clinical trials: indeed, failed clinical trials are frequent (especially in the relatively expensive Phase II).

With that said, if my intuition is correct, there are a couple of distinct possible explanations:

  1. Perhaps, in developing-world settings, it is often possible to have a good sense for whether an intervention will work before deciding to run a formal study on it. Accordingly, perhaps expensive studies rarely occur unless people have a fairly good sense for what they’re going to find.
  2. Perhaps publication-bias-type issues remain important in developing-world randomized studies. In other fields, I’ve seen worrying suggestive evidence that researchers “find what they want to find” even in the presence of seemingly strong safeguards against publication bias. (Example.) Even with a study’s hypothesis publicly declared, we believe there will still be some flexibility in terms of precisely how the researchers define outcomes and conduct their analysis. This idea is something that continues to worry me when it comes to relying too heavily on randomized studies; I am not convinced that the ecosystem and anti-publication-bias measures around these studies are enough to make them truly reliable indicators of a program’s impact.

Even with #2 noted as a concern, the bottom line is that I see a strong probability that DMI’s results will be closer to what it is projecting than to what we are projecting, and conditional on this, I see a relatively strong probability that this result will reflect legitimate impact as opposed to publication bias. Overall, I’d estimate a 50% chance that DMI’s measured impact on mortality falls in the range of 10-20%; if I imagine a 50% chance of a 15% measured impact and a 50% chance of a 3.5% measured impact (the latter is what we are currently projecting), that comes out to about a 9% expected measured impact, or ~2.5x what we’re currently projecting.

In either case, I’ll want our cost-effectiveness estimate to include a “replicability adjustment” assigning only a 30-50% probability that the result would hold up upon further scrutiny and replication (this adjustment would account for my reservations about randomized studies in general, noted under #2 above). Our current cost-effectiveness estimate assigns a 50% probability. Overall, then, it could be argued that DMI’s estimated cost-effectiveness with the information we have today should – based on my expectations – be 1.5-2.5x what our review projects. That implies a “cost per life saved” of ~$2000-$3300, or about 1-1.7x as strong as what we estimate for AMF. It is important to note that this estimate would be introducing parameters with a particular sort of speculativeness and uncertainty, relative to most of the parameters in our cost-effectiveness calculations, so it’s highly debatable how this “cost per life saved” figure should be interpreted alongside our other published estimates.

DMI has far less of a track record than our top charities this year. In my view, slightly better estimated cost-effectiveness – using extremely speculative reasoning (so much so that we decided not to include it in our official cost-effectiveness estimate for DMI) – is not enough to make up for that. Furthermore, we should know fairly soon (hopefully by late 2015) what the study’s actual results are; given that situation, I think it makes sense to wait rather than give now based on speculation about what the study will find. But I do have mixed feelings on the matter. People who are particularly intent on cost-effectiveness estimates, and agree with my basic reasoning about what we should expect from prominent randomized studies, should consider supporting DMI this year.

*The link provided discusses DMI’s overall expenses. Its main activity over the time period discussed at the link has been carrying out this study.

We’re happy to talk to you!

| by Elie

If you’re currently trying to figure out where you’ll give this year, and you think it might be helpful to talk to us about your decision, feel free to contact us at info@givewell.org.

We work hard to put all the relevant information about our recommendations on our website, but we know it can sometimes be hard to fully digest, so don’t hesitate to reach out to us and talk. Talking to donors about their plans for allocating their giving is something we do regularly and we’d be happy to do more of it.

We’re not sure how big a response we’ll have to this and we have limited staff (especially over the next couple of weeks), so if you email us please let us know how much you’re thinking about donating. If necessary, we’ll prioritize larger givers, though we hope to be able to speak with everyone who gets in touch.

Donor coordination and the “giver’s dilemma” – part II

(updated on: ) | by Elie

We recently wrote about three questions we faced that relate to donor coordination. This post is a continuation of that topic and may only appeal to donors who are particularly interested in this issue.

Over the past two weeks, we’ve been discussing the question: how should we allocate funds that donors give us for regranting to our top charities?

We plan to allocate these funds according to the recommended allocation explained in our previous post up to the point where one of our top charities reaches the maximum target from individuals we have set (explained here).

The question we face is: what should we do if we move more money than we expect, and one or more of our recommended charities reaches our maximum target from individuals before the end of giving season? In that case, how should we allocate funds given to us for regranting?

We see three options:

  1. Give according to our recommended allocation even after charities hit their max targets. This options maximizes some donors’ agency. For example, if Alice (hypothetical donor) gave $10,000 to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) in early December, we would not take Alice’s gift into account when deciding how to allocate funds given to us for regranting. Were AMF to meet its maximum target from individuals, we would still allocate funds there and Alice’s gift would cause AMF to receive $10,000 more than it would have had she not donated. However, were we to keep giving to charities beyond the maximum we believe they can effectively use, we would be allocating funds suboptimally. Many of the donors who give to us for regranting do so because they want us to use our judgment about where additional funds will do the most good. If we mechanically follow our predetermined allocation, we would not follow these donors’ wishes in allocating their funds. We also believe it is likely that many donors who give to a specific charity would not want us to allocate funds beyond the maximum targets we have set for organizations. To continue the example, our guess is that Alice would often say, “I would rather donate to one of GiveWell’s other top charities once AMF has closed its funding gap.”
  2. Give where we think it’s needed most. In the event that one or more of our top charities passes its maximum target, we would reallocate funds to the charities with remaining funding gaps. For example, if AMF were to receive $5 million before the end of giving season, we might choose to reallocate the funds given to us for regranting to the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI), the Deworm the World Initiative (DtWI) and GiveDirectly up to their maximum targets from individuals. The benefits here are clear: we would direct funds to charities that we believed to have more pressing gaps. The potential problem is that our doing so would arguably take agency away from other donors. For example, if Barbara gave $10,000 to AMF in early December, and AMF reaches its $5 million maximum target from individuals in late December, we might choose to allocate funds we hold to charities other than AMF. This means that Barbara’s gift did not effectively cause AMF to have $10,000 more; instead, it effectively caused the other charities to which we allocated funds to have $10,000 more. If Barbara wanted to support AMF and only AMF, our decision to reallocate the pool of funds over which we have discretion removed her ability to cause the charity of her choice to receive additional funding.
  3. Compromise with donors who request it. In our previous post on this topic, we wrote about the compromise we reached with one donor who was planning to give to SCI. He believed SCI’s funding gap was larger than we did, and planned to give $1 million to SCI, so we compromised by meeting in the middle: we increased our target by half the size of his donation ($500,000). In this option, we would reach a similar arrangement with donors who have given or plan to give to our top charities, disagree with us about the charities’ maximum targets from individuals, and therefore want the charities to receive more funding even if it would cause them to go past the maximum targets we have set. We would do the same thing with these donors as we did with the SCI donor by adjusting our maximum targets by half the size of their donations.

Our tentative plan is to take option #3. Specifically:

  • As a general rule, we are not planning to allocate funds to charities such that they would receive more than our maximum targets.
  • Any donors who disagree with us about our targets should email us at info@givewell.org to let us know. If they tell us the size of their donation (and we can verify it), we will increase our targets by 50% of the size of their donation for purposes of allocating funds earmarked for regranting. This post is our announcement of this fact. We aren’t planning to announce this elsewhere.

We believe that this plan will result in relatively few donors emailing us and GiveWell largely reallocating funds given to us for regranting according to our best judgment if/when one or more of our top charities hits its maximum target from individuals. We have a few reasons for believing this is the right course of action:

  • I corresponded with five donors who are long-time supporters of GiveWell top charities, none of whom give to GiveWell for reallocation. They encouraged us to follow our intended path and were not particularly concerned about the problem of removing donor agency (generally speaking — there was some disagreement). In particular, one noted that, over time, all donations are eventually fungible. That is, if donors give more to a charity than it can effectively use in year 1, it is more likely that we recommend it receive less money in year 2. (This is what happened to our recommendation of AMF from 2011 when we first recommended them to 2013 when we said that AMF had limited room for more funding.)
  • Our impression from conversations with many people is that very few donors are concerned with issues of donor agency. We think that most people who land on our website and make a donation would rather we use our judgment to allocate funds optimally than allocate funds suboptimally to maximize the agency of their decision to support a specific charity.

Generally, we see a real distinction between (a) setting targets for charities based on incentives, how strong we think the charities are, etc. and (b) setting targets for charities based on how much we think they can productively absorb. When donors give differently from our recommended allocation, by default we interpret this as a disagreement with us on (a) but not necessarily on (b). As such, we are hesitant to “offset” donations on the basis of (a), but we are much less hesitant to do so on the basis of (b). We set “room for more funding” targets taking into account funds available from other sources, and this means that in some long-run sense we’re always creating the possibility of “offsetting” others’ donations.

It’s possible that we’ll change our mind based on reactions to this post.

Additional questions and answers about our plans:
How will we allocate funds in the event that a charity hits its maximum target?

We’re not yet sure. It’s possible that we will allocate surplus funds to GiveDirectly (which has the highest maximum target from individuals and is unlikely to reach it), but it’s also possible that we ultimately decide to allocate at least some funds to AMF (whose maximum target is more of a “soft” and approximate cap) or to standout charities. We have found that we need to go through a period of intense debate and reflection before we decide how to allocate funds in a given situation; that’s not something we’ve done yet for the hypothetical situation outlined here.

When do we plan to allocate funds given to us for regranting?

We are currently focused on funds that come in during giving season. Our accountant will close the books on December in mid-January, and we will grant funds out in mid-February.

How will we allocate funds that have already been donated for reallocation?

Some donors gave for regranting before we clarified the language on our donate page, and may have intended that their gift follow the allocation stated on our donate page. We plan to email these donors to tell them our plans and ask them whether they’d prefer that we allocate their funds (i.e., funds we have already received) according to our target allocation rather than according to the plan laid out in this post.

Are we concerned that this policy will incentivize donors to try and avoid this plan?

It is possible that this policy will cause some donors to (a) wait to give until after we’ve allocated the bulk of the funds we hold or (b) don’t report their gifts to us.

We think this will happen to some extent but will likely be relatively minimal. Our targets are based not only on funds given by GiveWell-influenced donors but on all funding an organization receives, so eventually we will learn about and incorporate their gifts into our targets.

Staff members’ personal donations – giving season 2014

(updated on: ) | by Holden

For this post, GiveWell staff members wrote up the thinking behind their personal donations for the year. We made a similar post a year ago.

Elie Hassenfeld
My wife and I are planning to give more to GiveDirectly than the GiveWell allocation.

Organization GiveWell allocation Our allocation
AMF 67% 45%
GD 13% 45%
SCI 13% 5%
DtWI 7% 5%

I agree with the relative strengths and weaknesses of each organization as summarized in this table but I differ from the reasoning behind the GiveWell allocation in two ways:

  • I put less weight on explicit cost-effectiveness analysis. Conceptually, my goal is to maximize the impact of my charitable contribution, but I put less weight on the explicit cost-effectiveness models we create than others. Those models are highly dependent on hard-to-estimate inputs and often include many assumptions that we were forced to make based on very limited information. The models are available here; we plan to more clearly and explicitly lay out the inputs about which we are least certain and the ones that are most likely to materially affect our the bottom line in a post in the near future.
  • I put more weight on organizational strength. GiveDirectly stands out from our the other top charities on three factors listed in our summary table: transparency and communication, ongoing monitoring and likelihood of detecting future problems, and organizational track record. As a general observation, I have consistently found it more difficult than I expected to accomplish what initially appeared to be relatively easy goals (personal or organizational). This has reinforced my intuition that excellent organizations are significantly more likely to succeed than others, and GiveDirectly’s overall excellence increases my estimate of the impact it will achieve.

I’m not donating to GiveWell, because I don’t find it appropriate to donate to my employer, for similar reasons to what Holden wrote last year. Absent that consideration, I would consider direct support of GiveWell to be the best giving opportunity.

Holden Karnofsky
I plan to give according to the recommended GiveWell allocation this year. To keep things simple, I will be giving to GiveWell and earmarking my gift for regranting.

In last year’s post, I laid out my thoughts on giving now vs. giving later, and why I find it important to give something now (and to give it somewhere besides GiveWell itself). I don’t have much to add to that. I agree with other staff members that this year’s giving opportunities are stronger than last year’s, but in my mind the difference isn’t big enough to cause me to deviate from my regular giving, which I generally determine as a percentage of my income.

I expect each of our top charities to receive significant funding this year, so considerations of “upside” and of helping an organization grow aren’t as salient to me as they’ve often been in the past. With that in mind, and with fairly significant (though highly uncertain) estimated differences in cost-effectiveness, I’m fairly comfortable privileging health interventions over cash transfers, up to the point where room for more funding becomes a major issue.

Natalie Crispin
Should I wait to give?

I believe there are strong reasons to give this year, rather than waiting for future opportunities. These include:

  • GiveWell’s top charities this year offer strong opportunities to do good. As a point of comparison, donating to GiveDirectly this year is probably at least as strong an opportunity as it was last year when I allocated all of my giving to GiveDirectly, and this year I plan to allocate only a small portion to GiveDirectly because of opportunities to accomplish as much or more elsewhere.
  • I do not feel compelled to wait for Open Philanthropy Project recommendations. I put more weight than some of my fellow GiveWell staff members on high likelihood of impact, in part to help emotionally motivate myself to give in the future. Also, given the size and complexity of the task that the Open Philanthropy Project has taken on, it could be several years before there are opportunities available to small donors that the project believes are as strong as GiveWell’s recommendations.

Where should I give?

I plan to follow GiveWell’s recommended allocation this year by giving a gift to GiveWell for regranting to top charities at its discretion. Allocating funding between charities involves complicated trade-offs on many different dimensions: program cost-effectiveness, confidence in the organization’s ability to carry out the program, confidence in the organization’s ability to spend funds in the near term, judgements about the upside and risks of helping an organization scale up, etc. I don’t feel fully confident in my own ability to weigh these factors and fully understand what we know about each factor for each charity, but I feel confident in the process that we used to create the overall allocation: detailed analysis for each charity, write-ups that are reviewed at multiple levels (from high-level reviews by a Co-Executive Director to careful checks of each footnote citation), and several rounds of staff debate. Relying on this allocation helps counteract potential personal biases from spending much more time thinking about AMF and SCI (as part of contributing to that research) than about other top charities and standouts.

I have some concerns about our allocation, but ultimately I don’t think they are important enough to outweigh the above benefits. My main concerns are:

  1. Are we making too small a bet on AMF? AMF will receive most of my contribution, but in some ways, the bet GiveWell is making on AMF is conservative. Among our top charities, AMF is working on the program that I believe is the most cost-effective. It is extremely transparent and has strong processes for monitoring net distributions. It has now allocated most of the ~$10 million that it received due to GiveWell’s recommendation two years ago. I think it’s possible that we should be making a stronger bet now, perhaps advocating that AMF gets ~$20 million (twice what they got before) rather than $10-15 million, in order to see what AMF can accomplish at that level in the next two years. Because it can take AMF a year or more to finalize distributions, caution now limits our ability to learn about AMF’s capacity to move funds over the next two years. However I have not decided to allocate a larger percentage of my giving to AMF, because (a) total funding available is limited and I believe the other opportunities that are available are stronger than the ‘big bet on AMF’ option, and (b) there will be opportunities over the next 6 months to a year to learn about AMF’s progress and to reevaluate AMF’s room for more funding.
  2. Will SCI be able to productively spend as much as we think they will? Our estimate of SCI’s room for more funding is more speculative than that for other top charities, primarily because of our lack of understanding about how SCI has spent funds in the past and our ongoing challenges communicating with SCI about its future plans. I’m concerned that SCI will not be able to use funds to scale up deworming programs as quickly as it thinks, because of non-monetary barriers (such as lack of mapping data for new country programs, limited in-country capacity), and that as a result it may use funds for less beneficial purposes (such as increasing budgets without increasing the number of treatments, funding treatments in low prevalence areas). Having worked on GiveWell’s investigations of SCI for several years, I may have instincts on this issue that other staff don’t have; on the other hand, my close involvement may bias me toward weighing communication difficulties too strongly. In the end, I think the room for more funding we have estimated for SCI is a reasonable guess based on what SCI has told us and its strong track record of starting and scaling up deworming programs.
  3. Are we discounting a one-time opportunity to learn about the effects of cash transfers? GiveDirectly may use funds it receives in December 2014 to increase the sample size of its study of general equilibrium effects of cash transfers, which could increase the benefits of giving to GiveDirectly this year, since transfers would not only benefit families directly but would also improve our understanding of the impact of cash transfers. It’s not clear how likely it is that additional donations from individuals would increase the sample size – the ideal sample size according to GiveDirectly would require $15 million in cash transfers and GiveDirectly has raised a portion of this already and may be able to raise the remainder from other sources.
  4. Is our allocation to Deworm the World Initiative too high? The case for DtWI’s room for more funding in the next year seems weaker to me than that of other top charities. But, ultimately I’m OK with GiveWell’s recommendation, because the amount that GiveWell is recommending is modest and the potential upside of supporting a strong organization working on a cost-effective program is high enough to justify the investment.

Alexander Berger
I think our recommendations this year are stronger than they were last year, and I’m excited to support them. Since I’ve been less involved in our top charities research this year than in previous years, I’m also inclined to just follow the recommended GiveWell allocation.

However, I am planning three small deviations from straightforward adherence to our recommended split:

  • I’m planning to give GiveWell itself 10% of my gift. I think GiveWell is a relatively mature research product at this point, one that I value greatly, and I think it makes sense for individuals who value the research to give part of their gift to pay for it.This is a bit of an evolution for me, because I’ve previously written that I disagreed with Holden and Elie about the potential risks from being too dependent on Good Ventures. I still don’t think that it would be a particular problem for large donors who rely on our research, especially Good Ventures, to cover the bulk of our operating costs (since they also account for the bulk of our money moved).The main reason I decided to give to us is non-consequentialist: I don’t like the dynamic of us asking donors (other than Good Ventures) who are considering giving a large amount of money based on our research to direct it to us instead of our top charities. We do this, rather than making the rounds of all our donors to ask them to give ~10% of their gifts to GiveWell, because it is much more time-effective. I think that’s the correct decision on our part between the two choices, but it would be better still for us not to have to because our donors had adopted a norm of giving a portion of their gift to cover GiveWell’s operating expenses.10% is a relatively arbitrary amount, and it’s significantly more than our top charities recommendations cost to deliver. Our work on top charities takes up approximately half of GiveWell’s overall budget, with the other half directed to the Open Philanthropy Project. Our budget for the next 12 months is about $2 million, so the actual cost of delivering our top charity recommendations on a forward-going basis looks like ~5% of money moved. Since some people are unlikely to pitch in, I think it makes sense for those who are willing to do so to err slightly on the higher side.Because money donated to our operating budget is largely fungible with money donated to top charities, I see this as a relatively costless decision.
  • I’m not planning to give to Evidence Action’s Deworm the World Initiative. Though I think they’re an outstanding organization, I think they’re likely to raise enough from other donors to meet their funding needs for this year. Additionally, the marginal projects they’ve described strike me as quite different than simply delivering more deworming (though they still strike me as good). If donors don’t fill their two-year gap this year, I think we’ll know about and be able to address it next year.
  • These previous two changes would result in my gift being 64% AMF, 13% SCI, 13% GiveDirectly, and 10% GiveWell. Although I think our overall funding target for AMF is approximately correct (I wouldn’t want to see them double it), I think it’s probably a better giving opportunity, all things considered, than our other top charities, and I don’t think our funding target is sufficiently precisely estimated that I should defer strongly to it at the level of a few percent. Accordingly, I’m planning to round my donation to: 70% AMF and 10% each to SCI, GiveDirectly, and GiveWell.

The decision to deviate slightly from our recommendations (which I had not been initially planning to do except for the 10% to GiveWell) was partly informed by reading other staff member’s contributions to this post and realizing that many of us were inclined to defer to GiveWell’s recommended split. I’m deviating partly to try to communicate that I don’t think total deference is the appropriate stance: these are hard decisions and disagreements should be expected. I don’t think donors who use our research should feel that there is a very high bar for deviation from our recommended allocation.

Eliza Scheffler
I am giving 50% of my donation to GiveWell for re-granting to recommended charities.

  • Donating to GiveWell for re-granting to top charities seems strictly better than donating according to the recommended allocation, because it leaves GiveWell greater discretion in allocating funds in the event that we move more money to top charities than predicted. (Recommended allocations were determined based on an estimate of expected money moved, and I think this estimate was conservative).
  • I expect there would be significantly diminishing marginal returns for funds used this year beyond the maximum for each charity. Underlying this intuition are concerns about the challenges of quickly expanding staff capacity, finding additional locations with comparably high disease prevalence and implementation capacity, etc. I therefore want GiveWell to have discretion in how to allocate funds beyond the maximums.

I am giving 30% of my donation to GiveDirectly, specifically.

  • In addition to the positive factors that others have stated, I see GiveDirectly’s commitment to research as one of its most notable strengths relative to the other top charities. Its work in this area seems potentially very high leverage, given that it is aimed at influencing the policies and portfolios of major funders. For example, GiveDirectly’s study on macroeconomic effects was designed to address a gap in the evidence base for cash transfers that policy makers cited as limiting their ability to implement cash programs. GiveDirectly is also pursuing projects in partnership with aid agencies to “benchmark” traditional aid programs against cash transfers.
  • This year, GiveWell’s recommendations did not put much weight on “upside” factors like an organization’s potential to influence other funders and programs. In GiveDirectly’s case, this factor is highly speculative, because the work is relatively new, so there is a very limited track record. However, I feel we have seen some positive signals already and I expect we will report more on this work in the coming year.
  • I want to support GiveDirectly so that it has greater flexibility to pursue research and partnerships, both from the additional funding and the time not spent on fundraising.

I am giving 10% of my donation to GiveWell’s Standout charities.

  • As a GiveWell donor and employee, I want to reward our Standout charities for their transparency and commitment to generating and/or acting on rigorous evidence. I also want to increase the incentives among Standouts (and all charities) for continued openness and participation in GiveWell’s process. I think there are relatively high learning benefits for GiveWell in continuing to assess these charities, which seem unique to me in ways that depart from a strict adherence to our criteria.
  • GiveWell’s Standout charities seem to be within what I consider to be a close range of the estimated cost-effectiveness of our top charities. Though I have lower confidence in the impacts of Standouts, there are various “upside” factors which I can imagine contributing to their true long-run impacts. These factors include institutional capacity building, increasing competition in health products and services, and causing attitudinal and behavior changes in health that may be self-perpetuating over time. (Some of these factors may apply to top charities as well.) While “upside” is extremely difficult to rigorously assess, especially on short time horizons, it still matters in modeling a charity’s true impacts. I have tried to keep these kinds of considerations in mind without putting too much weight on them, because they are highly speculative.

Finally, I am saving 10% of my giving until I have more time to look into opportunities that are not GiveWell-recommended. If I do not allocate these funds elsewhere, I will give them mid-year after GiveWell has refreshed our room for more funding estimates for recommended charities.

As with last year, I plan to give money from outside my charitable budget for membership in civic organizations, helping out my neighbors, supporting family members’ and friends’ projects, and contributing to my religious community.

Timothy Telleen-Lawton
GiveWell allocation versus personal allocation

I see GiveWell’s allocation as our organization’s best attempt at approximating some combination of “where GiveWell would give if we controlled all donors’ contributions”, “where GiveWell thinks our audience would want to give if they had all the information we have”, and “where GiveWell thinks people should give if they want to follow GiveWell’s systematic (and notably skeptical) approach to evaluating charities”, all of which are generally very similar and sometimes hard to distinguish.

As such, and because I believe that any attempt at ideal allocation will be imprecise, I would expect personal giving allocation of a GiveWell staff member to vary somewhat from the official GiveWell allocation. Specifically, a staffer might have different intuitions or values than the ones that are best represented in the GiveWell allocation, or might even believe that the GiveWell allocation should have been something different. Additionally, a staffer (or any donor to GiveWell’s recommendations) could also try to anticipate other GiveWell donor’s gifts and attempt to give in reaction to those contributions, rather than attempting to give to each organization in proportion to their total ideal breakdown. (See our recent blog post for an elaboration of this dilemma.) I don’t believe GiveWell staff or donors should do this; instead I think it is better for us to give as though other GiveWell donors with broadly similar goals are giving the same way. (See this discussion of Newcomb’s problem for an illustration of one of the primary reasons I believe this.)

My planned allocation

I support GiveWell’s allocation and plan to allocate the bulk of my giving accordingly. My personal allocation for altruism-motivated giving has just two differences:

  1. For similar reasons to Alexander (above), I think it is appropriate for all donors that use GiveWell’s work to allocate 5-10% of their GiveWell-directed giving to GiveWell (unrestricted, for GiveWell operations). If nothing else, this serves as a recognition that the funds required to run GiveWell become somewhat fungible with the funds directed to the charities we recommend, since we turn to our biggest supporters for unrestricted support when we need it (who often reduce the amount they give to our recommended charities by the amount they give to us).
  2. I believe there is a significant chance that our cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) of DMI significantly underestimates their cost-effectiveness because it does not account for one possibly important factor: the fact that DMI and its funders decided to invest several million dollars in an RCT of DMI’s impact, hoping and expecting to find a statistically significant effect. I believe it was appropriate to leave this consideration out of GiveWell’s CEA, but I am also personally willing to put weight on this factor. (For more details, see a forthcoming blog post on this consideration.) As a result, DMI looks more competitive with our top charities and I would like to see them get ~5% of GiveWell directed giving.

Josh Rosenberg
I plan to follow GiveWell’s recommended allocation this year by giving a gift to GiveWell for regranting to top charities at its discretion.

I feel confident giving to GiveWell’s recommended allocation for reasons similar to those laid out in Natalie’s post. The charities that I was most uncertain about donating to were DtWI (because of uncertainty about room for more funding) and SCI (because of communication difficulties and uncertainty about how past funds have been used). However, my concerns about donating to both of these organizations were ultimately outweighed primarily by the very high estimated cost-effectiveness of deworming programs.

Last year, I saved about half of my charitable giving budget because I thought it might have been a year in which the top charities had unusually low estimated cost-effectiveness. (It now seems that this was likely true for the reasons that Natalie alluded to in her “Should I wait to give?” section.) This year, I plan to give the funds that I saved from last year and my full charitable giving budget for this year.

Donation logistics

Giving to GiveWell’s discretionary fund seems to be the easiest way to ensure that my donation will go to the charities where GiveWell thinks additional funds will have the most impact, regardless of how much total money is donated to top charities this year. We plan to post more details about how this fund will allocate resources if one of our recommended charities surpasses its “maximum target for individuals” (as laid out here) in an upcoming blog post. As far as I can tell, there is no downside to giving to GiveWell’s discretionary fund relative to following the allocation through other methods, so I would recommend that donors with similar goals to mine also give to the discretionary fund.

Ben Rachbach
I’m giving my full charitable budget for the year, as well as the proportion of last year’s budget that I saved, to GiveWell’s top charities. I’m giving $1,200 to GiveDirectly, about enough to cover one family’s cash transfer. I see our other top charities as higher risk, higher reward bets, and I want to give enough to GiveDirectly to be pretty sure I did some tangible good with my charitable giving this year. Also, as an outstanding organization implementing a simple and intuitive intervention, GiveDirectly is a model and benchmark that I’d like to hold up to myself and to other people I talk to about my giving.

I’m giving the rest to AMF because I think it is significantly more cost-effective than GiveDirectly. I believe both AMF and SCI have room for more funding (RFMF) beyond the targets we set for them, whereas I don’t believe DtWI has RFMF to scale up deworming programs. (We think AMF could likely use substantially more than our target amount, while DtWI told us it had limited RFMF for deworming scale-up, and I’m also concerned about fungibility with other Evidence Action programs. I’m drawing this analysis mostly from information presented in our top charities blog post.)

I believe that SCI is less cost-effective than most other staff who published cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs). I think SCI is about 3 times as cost-effective as GiveDirectly, most other staff think roughly 5-10 times. Also, compared to what most other staff wrote in their CEAs, I believe that the income gains from deworming are worth more relative to saving lives via bednets (I would trade a 25% income gain for 8 people for saving one life, whereas most staff would trade a 25% gain for about 40 people for saving one life). The former disagreement favors AMF, while the latter favors SCI. I also consider that AMF seems more competent and transparent than SCI, which is not captured in the CEA. When I net all of this out (with the help of some informal calculations on top of my published CEA), AMF seems to come out slightly ahead.

I would like to see SCI get a decent share of donations to top charities this year, and I might also like to see DtWI get a share as well (though I haven’t thought about it carefully). However, unlike many other staff, I don’t feel beholden to give to these charities in the proportions that I’d like to see individual donors collectively give. Instead, of these three charities, I’m giving just to AMF, where I believe my marginal dollar will do the most good. I believe that AMF is a better giving opportunity this year than GiveDirectly was last year, so I feel vindicated in my decision last year to hold some of my giving budget for this year.

Howie Lempel (added 12/30/14)

This year I made my annual donation as well as donating a portion of last year’s gift that I saved for this year because I expected an improvement in the available giving options. I split my giving between an unrestricted donation to GiveWell and a donation to the Against Malaria Foundation. I chose the Against Malaria Foundation largely for reasons described by Ben above. I value cost effectiveness calculations relatively highly and therefore prefer bed nets to cash. I am more sure of the quality of AMF’s implementation than SCI’s. I donated unrestricted to GiveWell for reasons described in last year’s staff giving post.

Jake Marcus
I plan to follow the recommended allocation this year by giving to GiveWell for re-granting (in case any of the top charities hit their maximum).

In making this decision, I read our post on the top charities, walked myself through the logic of the recommended allocation, and had a few conversations with my coworkers about their giving plans. I don’t have any strong disagreements.

Ideally, the effective altruist community would be large enough to close the funding gaps of all our top charities. Then we wouldn’t have to make all these tough trade-offs. Based on GiveWell’s projections, it looks like GiveDirectly will still have a substantial amount of room for more funding at the end of this giving season. Though I don’t see this gap as extraordinary, I’m hoping that it still motivates casual donors to give more than we project them to.

Last year, I saved about half of my charitable giving budget, because I thought my first year working at GiveWell might influence my choice of where to give more than other years and I was optimistic that GiveWell would find better giving opportunities in the near future. This year, I plan to give the portion of my charitable giving budget from last year that I saved and my full charitable giving budget for this year.

Rebecca Raible
I plan on giving all of my “effective charities” donation this year to the allocation that GiveWell has recommended. I will do this by giving to GiveWell’s discretionary fund, for the reasons that Josh mentions above.

Recently, many staff discussions on personal giving have focused on whether or not a donor who agrees with GiveWell’s targets should give according to GiveWell’s recommended allocation. We have discussed how our positions as GiveWell employees may impact the answer to this question, because (1) our posts here may end up influencing other donors, and (2) to the extent that we have personal disagreements with GiveWell’s allocation, we should be asking whether we believe that represents deeper flaws in the process used to determine the allocation.

Currently, I think I should give in the way that I would like other GiveWell donors to give, even if I am not sure that fellow donors will behave the same way. I am not confident in this opinion, and hope that further discussions will clarify my views.

Because I am a relatively new employee at GiveWell, I have limited experience thinking about the trade-offs between our charities. I largely agree with what Natalie wrote above about trusting in the process that is used to arrive at this allocation, and how this process can prevent us from personal biases (or ignorance). I also do not think that my personal values differ greatly from those of GiveWell–values which are reflected in its recommended allocation.

Natalie’s questions above about our allocation cover the main concerns I have: Should we be directing more funds to AMF? Are DtWI’s proposed uses of GiveWell donations cost-effective enough to be worth funding? I also wonder whether we are under-weighing the benefits of GiveDirectly’s possible influence on other charities. Two of our standout charities this year ran RCTs on their own programs. If GiveDirectly’s success even partially causes other organizations to run their own trials (or be more transparent, or improve monitoring), it may be adding more value than we currently account for. Because I am highly uncertain that adjusting for any of these concerns (mine or Natalie’s) beyond the degree to which they are already considered would improve GiveWell’s targets, I am sticking to the current allocation.

Milan Griffes
My giving this year

I have divided my giving this year into three categories:

  1. Donations as gifts
    For the holidays this year, I am using $50 and $100 donations to GiveDirectly as gifts to my family and friends. In some cases, I am giving material gifts in addition to donation-gifts. In aggregate, these donation-gifts make up a substantial portion of my overall giving for the year. GiveDirectly is my charity of choice for donation-gifts because its model is easy to explain and sidesteps many common concerns about charitable giving. I hope that these donation-gifts encourage recipients to think more about effective giving.
  2. Donations to services
    I donate some money to services that I use regularly, such as the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia. I conceive of this giving as payment for services rendered, rather than as an altruistic donation.
  3. Core giving
    As a member of Giving What We Can, I have pledged 10% of my earned income to effective charities. This money is the core of my charitable giving (the donation-gifts mentioned above are not included in the 10%). I am following GiveWell’s suggested allocation with my donation this year, with the exception of donating to ICCIDD and reducing my donation to SCI. I have reservations about SCI’s organizational structure. These reservations, coupled with questions about the evidence base for deworming, weaken the case for SCI in my view. ICCIDD is compelling to me because of the dedication of its staff, the potential impact of salt iodization, and its pressing need for further funding. My cost-effectiveness outputs consistently place ICCIDD’s program within comparable range of SCI’s. In general, I feel confident in all of the organizations we are recommending this year, and would happily give to any of them over a charity we have not investigated.

The giver’s dilemma as a GiveWell employee

As recently noted on this blog, there are multiple issues surrounding donor coordination, mostly regarding the fungibility of donor money and the preservation of donor autonomy. I see two general models for donor behavior:

  1. Giving as if you controlled the entire pot – In this model, donors that subscribe to GiveWell’s value system follow the GiveWell-suggested allocation, without using timing or information gains to their advantage (e.g. donors do not delay their donations in hope of receiving more up-to-date information about the funding situations of charities in question).
  2. Giving as a market – In this model, donors that subscribe to GiveWell’s value system attempt to make the best buy they can make on the margin, taking into account timing and information differences between donors (e.g. donors delay donating in order to receive updates on the funding situations of charities then give accordingly, making the donations of previous donors fungible).

I have not come to a resolution on the giver’s dilemma, and I see merit in both of the above models. This issue is especially salient to me as a GiveWell employee, as I likely have information advantages relative to a generic donor, which would make the second model more attractive.

However, under either of the above models, it makes sense for me to follow GiveWell’s recommended allocation, except where I have substantive disagreement with it (e.g. my decision to give to ICCIDD and reduce my donation to SCI). Under the first model, following the allocation is the default position. Under the second, I occupy a unique market position as a member of GiveWell. Arguably, this unique position enables me to more effectively allocate my personal giving (by understanding organizational room for more funding and donor intent with greater granularity than the average donor). However, the largest impact of my giving may not be the immediate effect of my dollars, but the signal that my allocation sends. Giving in a radically different allocation to GiveWell’s recommendation signals either:

  • a lack of confidence in our process
  • a difference in values or intuition
  • a desire to use a unique position to optimize personal giving, rather than using this position to signal a vote of confidence to other donors

I believe that GiveWell’s process is sound and has produced recommendations worth following. Further, my values and intuition largely align with GiveWell’s recommended allocation, with the exception of SCI. Finally, I believe that the long-term impact of sending a relatively consistent signal as an organization is greater than that of optimizing my personal giving for the year. For these reasons, I am following GiveWell’s recommended allocation closely.

A final caveat is that I am new to working at GiveWell, and new to thinking seriously about charitable giving. I have a low confidence in my understanding of the organizations we consider relative to my co-workers, and I expect my understanding to develop substantially over time. In the meantime, I am reluctant to anchor myself to strongly mainstream or contrarian positions, and feel that I have struck a reasonable balance in this regard with my giving decisions this year.

Tyler Heishman
My wife and I are giving according to GiveWell’s recommended allocation this year (as explained in this blog post) by giving to GiveWell for re-granting. I think that our recommendation reflects the “best bet” for doing the most good with donations today.

By and large, I agree with the rationale for this allocation explained in the blog post. In some cases, I have different intuitions on pieces of our analysis, but I believe that the process we followed is significantly more likely to lead to a good recommendation than my personal intuitions (I agree with Natalie, who elaborates on this; her examples of personal intuitions are reasonably representative of my own). I truly believe that donors who are “looking to give as we would” should follow this allocation; I think it’s an important signal to GiveWell followers to reinforce this confidence via my personal giving decision.

To some extent, other staff members disagree, and I hope to resolve disagreements like these in the future. However, putting this into context, I think most staff disagreement is on the optimal allocation of donations across our top charities rather than the list of top charities. I believe that donating to our top charities at all (rather than other charities) is a significantly more impactful decision. I personally (and I believe GiveWell as an organization) care more about getting the list of top charities right than the optimal allocation. While I’d ideally prefer all of the staff reconcile their independent views until we come to an agreement, practically, I do not think it is very important.

Process for putting together this post:

  • Elie emailed all staff telling them we were planning to run a staff members donations post this year, as we did last year.
  • Staff held 3 meetings to discuss where they were planning to give and why. Meetings were voluntary and attended by some staff but not all. Elie and Holden attended the 3rd meeting but not the first two.
  • Staff who chose to participate sent their drafts to Elie and Holden and copied an internal email list that allowed other staff members to see their submissions.
  • Entries were arranged in order of length of time employed full-time at GiveWell.
  • The draft post was sent out to all staff. At that point staff were able to make final edits.