The GiveWell Blog

The first case study from our history of philanthropy project

(updated on: ) | by Elie

[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.]

Benjamin Soskis, who has been working for us on our history of philanthropy project, has completed a case study (.docx) of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-Pew Memorial Trust Health Care for the Homeless (HCH) program. We have found this case study very interesting and believe it to be a helpful addition to the literature on the history of philanthropy and its impacts. Dr. Soskis had previously compiled a literature review for this program (.docx).

In brief, the HCH program consisted of the following:

“In December 1983, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), in partnership with Pew Memorial Trusts, spurred by a recognition of how little was being done to address the health care needs of the homeless, issued a call for proposals to … develop means of incorporating the homeless into local outpatient health care systems…. Ultimately, the foundations funded 19 coalitions over the course of four years, spending a total of $25 million…. In June 1987, Congress passed the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act, the first major piece of federal legislation to address homelessness in more than half a century…. That the RWJF-Pew program should be granted a significant degree of causal impact in the incorporation of the program into the McKinney Act is undeniable.” (Case Study, Pg 1)

The full case study is available here (.docx).
The full list of sources is available here (.docx).

Dr. Soskis’s case study provides an example of how philanthropy can influence policy change. He writes:

“Incorporation of the HCH program within the McKinney Act was the result of a convergence of a well-designed demonstration project with a policy window opened by a campaign by homeless advocates begun earlier in the decade. The advocates pushed for the federal government to address the mounting crisis of homelessness and when that campaign came to fruition, the HCH program was available as a policy model. The RWJF-Pew HCH program, therefore, does not merely represent a model of a successful demonstration project, but of a particularly powerful convergence between philanthropic initiative and broader political currents.” (Case Study, Pg 3)

The picture that emerges from the case study seems importantly different from the picture we got from a shorter piece in a list of 100 philanthropic success stories. The shorter case made the project’s impact seem relatively more significant, and our interest in this case was partly due to the fact that we’ve been pointed to it repeatedly as one of philanthropy’s most clear-cut success stories. Dr. Soskis’s study does attribute significant impact to philanthropy, but also paints a more complex picture.

This is the first case study Dr. Soskis has completed. He is currently working on a similar study focused on the role played by philanthropy on the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act. We hope to share that (and other case studies) in the future.

Read the case study of the Health Care for the Homeless program (.docx)

GiveWell annual review for 2013: Details on GiveWell’s money moved and web traffic

(updated on: ) | by Natalie Crispin

This is the final post (of six) we have made focused on our self-evaluation and future plans.

This post lays out highlights from our metrics report for 2013. For more detail, see our full metrics report (PDF).

1. In 2013, GiveWell tracked $17.36 million in money moved to our top charities, and an additional $0.90 million to recommendations made as a part of work on GiveWell Labs. This is a significant increase over past years.

2. GiveDirectly received about 60% of the money moved and our other top charities, Against Malaria Foundation, Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, and Deworm the World Initiative, each received 12-14%. Funding for GiveDirectly was driven in part by $5 million in matching funds from Good Ventures.

3. Growth in money moved was strong for donors giving less than $10,000. Money moved from these donors grew 90% in 2013, from $2.0 to $3.8 million. Unlike in previous years, growth in overall money moved was not driven by the largest donors.

This table excludes Good Ventures and donations for which we don’t have individual information. More in our full metrics report.

4. Money moved by donors giving more than $10,000 fell (by 9%), and fell substantially for those giving more than $50,000 (by 41%). To explain why, we reviewed each $50k+ donor’s situation individually and categorized them based on what we know about their giving decisions in 2013. Overall giving by these donors fell about $1 million. Most of the decrease among these donors was due to donors who decided to wait to give, thinking that giving options could be better in the next few years.

In addition, we asked more donors to support our operational costs and asked donors to support us at a higher level than we had in previous years. Unrestricted funding from individual donors (i.e. excluding foundations), particularly from large donors, grew substantially in 2013 (from $0.58 million to $1.36 million). Unrestricted funding from the $50k+ donors discussed above rose by $152,000.

Overall, we believe the decrease in money moved from large donors is likely to be temporary and is not a reflection of decreased interest in GiveWell. More in our full metrics report.

5. Web traffic continued to grow. Growth in search, direct, Google AdWords, and referral link traffic all contributed to overall growth. Traffic tends to peak in December of each year, circled in the chart below.

6. We surveyed donors who gave $2,000 or more to ask them more about themselves and their giving. The majority of respondents are in their 20s and 30s and work in finance or technology. Like last year, among the most common ways they find GiveWell are through online searches and referral links and through Peter Singer. Personal referral is a growing way in which major donors find GiveWell.

7. As in previous years, the most common response when we asked major donors ‘how has GiveWell changed your giving?’ was ‘I would have given a similar amount to another international charity’ in the absence of GiveWell.

What effect has GiveWell had on your giving?

For donors who responded that GiveWell caused them to reallocate their giving, where would you have given in GiveWell’s absence?

8. GiveWell’s website now processes slightly more than Charity Navigator’s, though it offers far fewer charities as options. (We were unable to measure progress against Guidestar because it changed its processing system in 2013.) This comparison provides evidence that the growth we saw in 2013 is due not to generalized increases in online giving or use of charity evaluators, but rather to GiveWell-specific factors. (Note that the GiveWell figure in this chart includes only what was processed through our website – not all money moved – in order to provide a valid comparison to the others, for which we only have online-giving data.)

GiveWell is hiring

| by Elie

We’re actively hiring because we are capacity constrained. Filling any of the roles below would make a substantial difference to our research.

If you follow GiveWell and want to help us, please share this post with anyone whom you think might be a good fit for the jobs listed below.

  • Research Analyst. Research Analysts are GiveWell’s primary staff and work on all parts of our research process. We hope to add a few entry-level research analysts this year. More
  • Summer Research Analyst. We offer summer positions to students entering their final year in school with the hopes that they will become full-time employees following graduation. More
  • Administrative Assistant. The Administrative Assistant is a 3-day-a-week, part-time job based in our office in San Francisco. The Administrative Assistant helps with duties such as collecting and processing donations made through the mail and proofreading materials before they are made public. More
  • Conversation Notes Writer. Conversation notes are a key part of our research process. Conversation Notes Writers listen to conversations conducted by GiveWell staff and produce summaries. This job is flexible: it can be done from anywhere in the world at any time of day, but we ask for people who can commit at least 10 hours per week. More

Assorted reminders

| by Elie

A few reminders for GiveWell fans and followers:

  • Please let us know if you’ve donated based on our research. We track our impact on donations. If you’ve given directly to one of our top charities (i.e., via their website or via a check sent directly to them) as a result of our recommendation, please let us know so we can include you in our figures.
  • We post summaries from conversations we have as part of our research. Conversations with subject matter experts, staff at potential top charities, and funders are a major part of what we do. We have a process for publishing summaries of all conversations we have (when we have permission to do so). All of our past conversations are on our conversations page. We post each new conversation to our newly published materials list, which you can follow via email, RSS, or online. Examples of recent conversations include speaking with Paul Niehaus, Director at GiveDirectly on challenges GiveDirectly may face as it scales up; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s malaria team on their strategy and timeline for malaria eradication; and Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute on philanthropic opportunities in macroeconomic policy.
  • There are various ways to stay updated on our work:
    • We send out monthly email updates with highlights of our recent work. You can sign up to receive these here.
    • We update this blog ~weekly, and you can follow it via RSS or email.
    • You can also follow our newly published materials list via email, RSS or Twitter.
    • For those who prefer it, you can follow us on Twitter or Facebook.
    • Details on all of these options are available on our stay updated page.
    • We hold periodic, in-person research discussions in our office in San Francisco and in New York City. Please let us know if you live nearby and would be interested in attending one of these events; space is limited but we will try to accommodate you if we can. Transcripts and recordings from previous events are available on our website.
  • We are happy to respond to questions from donors, so please don’t hesitate to contact us with questions. We often communicate directly with potential donors — via phone, email or in person — to discuss questions they have about our work.
  • If there’s anything we could do to serve you better, please let us know. We value feedback from our audience.

General plans for GiveWell as an organization in 2014

(updated on: ) | by Holden

This is the fifth post (of six) we’re planning to make focused on our self-evaluation and future plans.

Previous posts have discussed our 2013 progress on, and 2014 plans for,

This post outlines our plans and thoughts on issues that cut across these two projects, and pertain to GiveWell the organization as a whole.

  • We tentatively envision GiveWell Labs becoming a separate organization, with a separate name, eventually. Our impression is that GiveWell has built a strong and valuable brand around being extremely thorough in its investigations and backing its recommendations with copious evidence. We envision a very different set of strengths and weaknesses for GiveWell Labs: we hope GiveWell Labs will identify high-risk, high-reward giving opportunities, suitable for ambitious major philanthropists, and be notable for its boldness – a goal inconsistent with producing copious evidence for all recommendations, and inconsistent with shying away from issues with high potential for controversy. We believe that the two will likely appeal to very different audiences: GiveWell Labs will be a valuable resource for highly engaged and ambitious givers (or people with a great deal of trust in and alignment with the individuals producing GiveWell Labs recommendations), while our traditional work will be more suitable for individual donors who have less capacity (time, staff) for processing “soft” arguments and more need for high thresholds of evidence.

    For the founders of GiveWell, the most important vision has always been of finding the best giving opportunities possible and being highly transparent about our process for doing so, thus generating better public dialogue around how to give well. This vision is common to our traditional work and GiveWell Labs. Our mission statement reflects this, stating, “GiveWell is a nonprofit dedicated to finding outstanding giving opportunities and publishing the full details of our analysis to help donors decide where to give” (it does not emphasize high standards of evidential support). However, in reflecting on the media coverage we’ve had, we believe it is likely that a bold, high-risk, controversial GiveWell Labs could endanger the “trustworthy, evidence-backed” brand of our traditional work if the two are not clearly separated, and people who support one project financially will not necessarily wish to support the other.

    Ultimately, we feel that separation is reasonably likely to involve separate budgets and separate staffs as well as separate organizations and brands. (This does not mean there will be no overlap: some staff may work part-time for each, for example.)

  • However, we are taking only very minor steps toward this separation in the near term. Over the coming year we will remain one organization and allocate staff flexibly between the two projects. We don’t believe that we have sufficiently developed organizational capacity to manage this sort of split in the near term. We see a lot of value in being able to allocate current staff flexibly, given that the needs of the two projects – and question of where current staff members fit best – are not yet very predictable.
  • We would like to rename GiveWell Labs in order to begin separating its brand from our traditional work and improving our ability to partner with major philanthropists (including Good Ventures) without causing confusion. Currently, we find it hard to communicate that GiveWell and Good Ventures are equal partners working jointly on the agenda of GiveWell Labs. We believe that renaming GiveWell Labs to something more neutral (i.e., without the word “GiveWell”) will make it easier to get this across, and may also make it easier to pitch other major philanthropists on partnering with us on this work. It will also be a first step in the direction of separating the two projects, as discussed above.
  • Fundraising remains a priority. We are currently fundraising for unrestricted support, supporting a team that is allocated flexibly between GiveWell Labs and our more traditional work. The basic framework for fundraising remains the same as what we laid out in our October post on the subject: donations have the advantage of diversifying our funding base and ensuring that we do not rely on a single source for too much of our funding. In addition,
    • We intend to begin asking our major supporters whether they would prefer to support GiveWell Labs or our traditional work; we are not yet committing to use funds according to such preferences, but we think this information is worth collecting, and doing so is another small step in the direction of eventually separating the two projects. If we see very little support tied to a preference for our traditional work, we may de-prioritize traditional work more than we currently plan to.
    • We are likely to start asking individual donors to give a portion of their donation (10-15%) to supporting GiveWell as an organization. This request will be on an opt-in basis. We haven’t previously taken this step because it would have been technically somewhat challenging, and would have had little upside since most of our money moved was coming from major donors that we could speak with individually. However, we now have improved technical capability for this feature, and our money moved from small donors (under $5k) has become substantial (more in our upcoming metrics report). We see little harm in adding this request to our website, but we will reconsider if we see much pushback.
  • In both GiveWell Labs and our traditional work, we plan to prioritize research (i.e., identifying outstanding giving opportunities and building the capacity to do so in the future) over outreach (i.e., trying to increase the number of donors or amount of money directed to our recommendations). As in previous years, we believe that the greatest challenge we face continues to be research, not outreach. Our growth remains strong: web traffic, number of donors, and total donations continued to grow in 2013. We also believe that Good Ventures and some others would give significantly more were we to identify sufficiently promising opportunities. We believe that the quality of our research and the giving opportunities we can recommend will be the most important determinant of our money moved going forward.
  • Another 2013 development was relocating GiveWell from New York to San Francisco. The move has successfully contributed to the strengthening of our relationship with Good Ventures. We have yet to make a concerted outreach effort in the San Francisco area; we will consider doing this once we have made more progress on GiveWell Labs and have specific opportunities to present to potential donors. We have made some preliminary efforts, which we have reinforced our feeling that progress on GiveWell Labs research will be a key factor in our outreach success.
  • We don’t see other major issues (in the “cross-cutting between GiveWell Labs and traditional work” category) that need addressing in 2014. In particular, we believe that our Board of Directors and our general procedures and official records are in good shape.

GiveWell Labs – progress in 2013 and plans for 2014

(updated on: ) | by Holden

[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.]

This is the fourth post (of six) we’re planning to make focused on our self-evaluation and future plans.

Our 2013 plan did not lay out specific goals for GiveWell Labs, other than time allocated (“we expect to be able to raise our allocation to GiveWell Labs, to the point where our staff overall puts more total research time into GiveWell Labs than into our traditional work”). This was by design: as of the beginning of the year we had spent relatively little time on GiveWell Labs, and saw ourselves as still being in a very early exploratory phase. We will have more concrete goals for the coming year, as discussed below.

This post lays out the progress that we did make on GiveWell Labs in 2013, then gives our high-level plan and goals for 2014. Good Ventures has been a crucial partner to us on this work, and “we” refers collectively to GiveWell and Good Ventures throughout the below.

Progress in 2013
Cause selection framework. In May, we wrote at length about our decision to focus on the question, “What are the causes we should make commitments to?” where “cause” was defined as “a particular set of problems, or opportunities, such that the people and organizations working on them are likely to interact with each other, and such that evaluating many of these people and organizations requires knowledge of overlapping subjects.” We laid out a basic framework for evaluating causes, focusing on the questions: “What is the problem?”, “What are possible interventions?” and “Who else is working on it?” (We have since refined, but not fundamentally changed, these key cause-level questions.) This approach and framework were the product of our previous investigations, particularly with regard to active vs. passive funding.

Getting basic context for assessing causes within policy-oriented philanthropy and scientific research funding. These are two areas of philanthropy that are extremely important, but that we’ve previously been very poorly positioned to investigate. As such, we spent several months accumulating basic knowledge, sources and contexts for these fields, and wrote up what we had done and found in seven blog posts:

Shallow- and medium-depth investigations We have 19 shallow investigations and 2 medium-depth investigations, with several more close to publication. Most have been in the category of global catastrophic risks and US policy-relevant issues. For most of the year, our focus was on “learning how to learn,” and we picked issues to investigate partly based on how tractable they seemed to this level of investigation.

Semi-deep dives. In September, we announced plans to investigate some causes more deeply via “learning grants.” We have since done a substantial amount of work on this front, focusing on criminal justice reform and labor mobility, which we will be writing about in the future.

Cross-cutting work.

  • We have continued attempting to get basic familiarity with the work of major foundations, though we have de-emphasized the “co-funding” aspect of this (we are still interested in co-funding within specific areas of interest, but no longer see it as an important ingredient in learning about a particular foundation), and many introductory conversations have been off the record. Our most in-depth conversations over the last year have been with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (see conversations on family planning and climate change), the Pew Charitable Trusts (more forthcoming), Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (though conversations over the past year have been mostly off the record; notes from two conversations are forthcoming).
  • Ben Soskis has continued working on our history of philanthropy project, and is currently finalizing (for publication) a case study on a particular case of claimed philanthropic policy influence. We plan to continue this work, though we are de-emphasizing the related work on “philanthropy journalism” (mentioned in our last update) for the simple reason that we haven’t been able to easily find anyone with the time/inclination to produce substantial content on this front.

A note on staff time. We did not allocate a majority of staff hours to GiveWell Labs, as planned, because (a) hiring exceeded expectations; (b) our work on GiveWell Labs was too exploratory, for the most part, for major participation by more junior employees. However, the specific people we had in mind at the time of setting this goal did allocate a majority of hours to GiveWell Labs.

Plans for 2014
US policy and global catastrophic risks: making serious commitments to causes

There are two types of causes – global catastrophic risks and US policy issues – that we now feel generally familiar with (particularly with the methods of investigation). We also believe it is important for us to pick some causes for serious commitments (multiple years, substantial funding) as soon as feasible, so that we can start to get experienced with the process of building cause-specific capacity and finding substantial numbers of giving opportunities. As such, our top goal for 2014 is a stretch goal (substantial probability we will fail to hit it): making substantial commitments to causes within these two categories. We aren’t sure yet how many causes this will involve; it will depend partly on our ability to find suitable hires. We also haven’t fully formalized the notion of a “substantial commitment to cause X,” but it will likely involve having at least one staff member spending a substantial part of their time on cause X, planning to do so for multiple years, and being ready to commit $5-30 million per year in funding. Given this level of commitment, it is likely that we will not be able to commit to more than 1-3 causes for each broad category (“global catastrophic risks” and “US policy issues” are instances of “broad categories”) in the coming year.

Sub-goals of this goal are:

  • Completing enough shallow- and medium-depth investigations to feel that we’ve looked near-comprehensively at potential focus causes in these two categories, and writing up our reasons for narrowing the field to a smaller set of “contender causes.”
  • Deeply investigating “contender causes” – possibly including some amount of preliminary grantmaking – and prioritizing these “contender causes” relative to each other (and discussing our reasons for such prioritization).
  • Recruiting people to focus primarily or exclusively on finding giving opportunities within the causes we select.

We see this as an extremely challenging goal for the coming year, given our current status in these areas. There is no precision to estimating that one year is roughly sufficient, and the project of prioritizing causes in these categories could easily stretch into 2015. With that said, this prioritization is our top priority for 2014, and we think we have a chance to accomplish it. If we do so, we believe that GiveWell Labs will become a much easier product to understand, discuss and critique, and we will reach the sort of crucial juncture for GiveWell Labs that we reached for our traditional work around the end of 2009: having concrete recommendations that we can promote and defend, leading to much better engagement with and appeal to donors.

Scientific research funding and foreign aid: pacing ourselves to make serious commitments by year-end 2015

We feel that we are at an earlier stage with two other broad categories of philanthropic causes: scientific research funding and foreign aid. In the case of scientific research funding, we have determined that scientific advisors are crucial, and we have recently recruited several such advisors and started working with them on a trial basis. In the case of foreign aid, despite our history of recommending charities that aid the developing world, we have not developed a strong understanding of how to evaluate a broad cause such as “malaria control” or infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa from the perspective of flexible, large-scale philanthropy (as opposed to focusing in specifically on delivery of evidence-backed interventions).

We hope that at the beginning of 2015, we will be able to say about these two areas what we currently say about global catastrophic risks and US policy: that we have a general sense of the landscape of causes and of how to investigate and evaluate causes, and can aim to make serious commitments to causes in these categories within a year. This is also an ambitious goal, especially in light of its being a secondary priority to the above goal.

Other work

We continue to value cross-cutting work such as networking with major foundations, producing history of philanthropy case studies, and other projects that might come up. There are also some other broad categories of causes, aside from the four mentioned above, that we may investigate in an extremely preliminary way. We expect to make progress on these fronts, but prioritize such progress below the above two goals, and have no specific goals on these fronts.