Eric Friedman, a long-time GiveWell supporter, recently authored a book, Reinventing Philanthropy, about effective charitable giving. I read an early draft of the book in the spring of 2012, and especially appreciated Mr. Friedman’s focus on “issue-agnostic giving,” a value we share. For donors looking for more material that’s aligned with our perspective on charitable giving, we recommend checking out Mr. Friedman’s book.
The GiveWell Blog
GiveWell Labs update
[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.]
GiveWell and Good Ventures have made substantial progress since our last update on GiveWell Labs, and we’re now ready to take a major new step: moving beyond “shallow” and “medium-depth” investigations of causes to “deep dives” that are likely to involve grantmaking. This post summarizes our progress so far and plans going forward; a future post will elaborate on our plans for “deep dives.”
- As stated in our last update, we work closely with Good Ventures on this research. Cari Tuna is an active partner with us on these investigations, and we see Good Ventures as the initial target for our recommendations. Both GiveWell and Good Ventures anticipate other philanthropists (including some portion of GiveWell’s existing audience of individual donors) eventually participating in funding the opportunities we identify. Throughout this post, “we” should be taken to refer to both GiveWell and Good Ventures.
- Our main goal is to find the most promising charitable causes; we think of the “cause,” rather than the “charity” or “project,” as the most relevant unit of analysis for us at this point. More at our previous update.
- Much of our goal at this stage could be described as “learning how to learn”: trying out investigative processes, seeing what sort of information they yield, and reflecting on our processes. Because of this, in many cases we’re prioritizing causes based on the extent to which we have a viable plan for investigating them and personnel who are suited to carrying out the plan; we aren’t prioritizing causes based purely on our guesses as to how promising they’ll turn out to be.
- We want to perform several different depths of investigation in parallel, because having a sense for how to investigate a cause deeply could influence how we perform lower-depth investigations. Because we think giving can accelerate our ability to learn (more on this below), we will be making grants in cases that are distinct from fully vetted GiveWell recommendations.*
- Looking so broadly across charitable causes, we are running into a lot of deep judgment calls that we won’t necessarily reach even internal agreement on. Our goal is to find the giving opportunities we believe are best – taking intuitions into account – and we don’t expect to fully formalize our decision making processes (anytime soon). So while we will try to explain why we are making the choices we are, we don’t plan to let development of explicit frameworks hold us up from moving forward on causes that seem worth investigating more deeply.
- Related to the above point: at this point, our shallow- and medium-depth investigations are focused on finding the information that seems to give the best return in terms of “propensity of information to change our views, per hour spent gathering that information.” It isn’t necessarily the case that these investigations will answer every question one would want to answer in order to choose between causes; the goal, rather, is that these investigations make our choices of causes more informed than they would be otherwise.
Lower-depth (“shallow”) investigations. We have now published ten of these, available at https://www.givewell.org/shallow. In each case, we feel that we’ve gained a basic understanding of the problem, the activities that can be undertaken to address it, and the other funders in the space. We plan to continue doing these investigations, and over time the number of them could grow quite large, as there are many different approaches to philanthropy that could fit our definition of a “cause.”
Higher-depth (“medium”) investigations. We have published one of these – a landscape of the open science community – and have two more (on geoengineering and criminal justice reform) that are each very close to completion. In each case, we feel that we’ve gotten a reasonably representative view of who works on the issue, who funds it, and what the contours of the major debates and key questions are.
All such investigations (as with the “shallow” investigations) have been done by our full-time staff. We haven’t succeeded in identifying suitable consultants for them (as we previously hoped to), so our capacity for these investigations remains limited, but we intend to continue doing them (albeit at a slow rate).
History of philanthropy/philanthropy journalism. We have continued working with the consultant referred to in our previous post on this subject (Benjamin Soskis). He has compiled a bibliography of sources potentially relevant to understanding the history of philanthropy, and is now working on deeper case studies on particularly significant claimed philanthropic successes.
In addition, we have started a relatively low-key (for now) search for people who might write informative blogs about philanthropy. We have had preliminary conversations with Ashok Rao (recommended to us by Dylan Matthews), Shaun Raviv, and Mike Miesen about the possibility of our paying them – on a trial basis – to write pieces relevant to the current state of philanthropy, the activities of major players and promising giving opportunities.
Co-funding with major foundations. Good Ventures has partnered with the Gates Foundation on a project to help contain artemisinin resistance in Myanmar and has also had conversations with multiple other foundations about the possibility of co-funding. We will be reflecting on this work in a future update.
Understanding the basics of scientific research and political advocacy. A forthcoming series of blog posts will discuss our progress on this front. In brief,
- We have identified some potentially promising approaches to scientific research, but we are currently focused on recruiting generalist scientific advisors, which we have come to view as a necessary component for finding outstanding giving opportunities in this area.
- We have developed a picture of what to look for in political-advocacy-related giving opportunities, and have started doing shallow- and medium-depth investigations of causes that include (or consist of) political advocacy.
These causes are:
- Labor mobility. We were initially interested in this issue because of research suggesting extraordinarily high potential benefits to loosening global immigration restrictions, as well as the arguments of Center for Global Development scholars (Lant Pritchett and Michael Clemens) that it represents one of the more promising and underexplored paths to reducing global poverty. Our impression is that while there are many groups in the U.S. focused on immigrants’ rights, the set of people and organizations persistently advocating for looser immigration restrictions – particularly on humanitarian grounds – is quite small. The combination of potentially high importance and little in the way of existing infrastructure interests us, although there remain many questions about potential negative effects of loosening immigration restrictions and about whether the sort of impact estimated in the literature is anywhere within the range of what might be feasible.
- Geoengineering research. We were initially interested in this issue because it appears to receive very little attention from funders relative to other climate change responses. (We have since heard about other approaches about which the same might be said, and will likely write about them in the future.) We have completed a medium-depth investigation of geoengineering research (forthcoming) and believe that the field is relatively small. However, the risks of growing the field could be substantial, so we would want to undertake more investigation before making grants in this area.
- Criminal justice reform (medium-depth investigation forthcoming). As we will discuss in our posts on political advocacy, this cause has been highlighted to us as an unusually tractable political cause, in which results at a sub-federal level might be expected within a few years (more at our conversation with Steven Teles). While there are several funders with substantial budgets in this area, there appears to be very little in the way of funding and infrastructure around the sorts of ideas promoted by Mark Kleiman, which we find intriguing.
- Factory farming. We aren’t sure of how one should weigh philanthropy that primarily aims to reduce animal suffering vs. philanthropy that primarily aims to empower (or reduce suffering for) humans. But if we placed relatively high weight on the former, we would be very interested in the cause of reducing animal abuse at factory farms, which seems to both (a) affect far more animals than other causes traditionally associated with animal welfare; (b) have far less funding and nonprofit attention behind it. A medium-depth investigation of this cause is in progress.
- Open science. This cause appears to have more organizations and philanthropic attention than many of the causes above, but still a fairly small amount of philanthropic funding in the scheme of things. We are not as certain about its importance. We find this cause to be a potentially high-value one, but less obviously appealing from both a learning and impact perspective than the above causes.
- Malaria control. We haven’t done a formal shallow- or medium-depth investigation of this cause, but our research on Against Malaria Foundation has raised many possibilities of underfunded aspects of malaria control, such as research on insecticide resistance. Despite the relatively large amount of funding in the area as a whole, we feel that there may be particularly underfunded aspects, and also that even well-funded aspects of malaria control could still have extremely strong marginal returns to more giving (an example of the latter dynamic is LLIN distribution).
- History of philanthropy/philanthropy journalism. We initially approached this as a cross-cause learning opportunity but are now starting to think of it as a “cause”: a type of work that could accomplish a great deal of good (by helping future philanthropists to be more effective), but gets very little funding and attention currently.
In all of the above cases, we have done enough investigation – or are quite close to having done enough investigation – to feel that we’ve gotten a reasonably representative view of who works on the issue, who funds it, and what the contours of the major debates and key questions are. There are other causes for which our investigation is still in preliminary stages, but which may turn out to belong on this list after more investigation.
* Grants will likely be funded by Good Ventures, though there may be cases in which they are funded by GiveWell.
Balancing support from Good Ventures vs. individuals
GiveWell is growing quickly, and we have been wrestling with the question of how we should be seeking to fund our expansion.
We are currently working closely with Good Ventures. Good Ventures is a major foundation, and it is interested enough in our work on strategic cause selection – for its own purposes in choosing causes – that it would potentially (if it were the only way this work could be done) be willing to commit significant funding to it.
At the same time, both we and Good Ventures agree that it would be a bad idea for GiveWell to draw all – or too great a proportion – of its support from Good Ventures.
One reason for this is that it would put GiveWell in an overly precarious position. While our interests are currently aligned, it is important to both parties that we would be able to go our separate ways in the case of a strong enough disagreement. If Good Ventures provided too high a proportion of support to GiveWell, the consequences of a split could become enormous for us, because we wouldn’t have a realistic way of dealing with losing Good Ventures’s support without significant disruption and downsizing. That would, in turn, put us in a position such that it would be very difficult to maintain our independence.
Another reason is that raising substantial support from individuals keeps us accountable to individuals, both in terms of perception and reality. If we did not raise a substantial part of our support from individuals, our incentives would not be aligned with our mission of serving large numbers of donors. We have hopes of serving many more individuals and institutions (such as Good Ventures) in the future; drawing too much of our budget from Good Ventures could make this more difficult by leading to a perception that serving Good Ventures is our main mission.
We’ve struggled with just what our policy on fundraising should be, given these realities. At this point, we’re leaning toward the following approach:
- We should retain a basic picture of “what GiveWell would look like if not for its relationship with Good Ventures” and a budget for such a hypothetical GiveWell.
- We should raise the vast majority (~80% or so) of the budget needed to maintain “the GiveWell that would exist if not for the relationship with Good Ventures” from donors other than Good Ventures.
- Thus, if our relationship with Good Ventures were to terminate, it would create only a moderate-sized/manageable gap, which we would hopefully be able to close (via fundraising) quickly enough to maintain operations at the desired “without Good Ventures” level.
- There will be expenses that we take on, in consultation with Good Ventures, that (a) Good Ventures is willing to fund and (b) don’t belong in the category of “expenses that it would be crucial for GiveWell to be able to maintain continuously in the event of a split with Good Ventures.” These expenses will be covered by specially earmarked grants by Good Ventures.
Separating “core GiveWell operations, which would be crucial to maintain continuously in the event of ending our relationship with Good Ventures” from other expenses will not necessarily be a fully straightforward endeavor. In general, we will seek to keep “core GiveWell operations” to a level that is reasonable in light of our money moved from sources other than Good Ventures (our definition of “reasonable” will be discussed in a future post). Subject to this, we will generally wish to keep generalist GiveWell staff in the “core GiveWell operations” category, since losing such staff would impose extremely high costs on GiveWell as an organization. By contrast, more temporary and specialized research expenses (such as contracting with consultants to advise on particular causes) will go in the other category, meaning that we will be less hesitant to fund them entirely via support from Good Ventures.
We have been through several proposals on how to handle this issue, and would welcome feedback.
Principles and practices of capacity building
I previously wrote about the challenges of capacity building – hiring, training, and managing a team. We thought we would share some of the principles and practices we’ve come to believe are important to this goal, so that others can both learn from/consider them and provide their thoughts. As in the previous post on this topic, “we” primarily means Elie and myself, as it’s only fairly recently that other staff have taken on managerial roles.
An overriding theme is that of putting substantial work into capacity building (training, evaluating, and managing employees) and constantly integrating capacity-building considerations into our everyday work. In every piece of work we do and every assignment we make, we ask whether the way we’re going about it is optimized for long-term capacity building (training and evaluating other staff such that they end up in the best possible roles), and not just for getting the work done as quickly as possible. Maintaining this attitude can be a challenge, since it involves focusing on a longer-term (and hazier) goal than completion of the work at hand, but we believe that it is the right long-run approach to building a team.
- We try to think constantly about whether everyone, including and especially ourselves, is assigned work that’s a good fit. Whenever I start a task, I ask, “Am I the best person to do this task? Can someone else on staff, who has capacity, do it just as well? Why does it have to be me?”
- When we don’t have much sense of what we’re expecting from an assignment, we’re likely to take it on ourselves. By doing the work ourselves, we’re able to get a better picture of how relevant it is and what it consists of, which is necessary if we’re hoping to later assign similar work to more junior staff. (We do have a “Senior Research Analyst” distinction for other staff members that we’re comfortable assigning extremely open-ended work; currently we have one Senior Research Analyst, Alexander Berger.)
- When we’re doing work ourselves, we often explicitly approach the work with a goal of “getting the work to the point where other staff can carry it on” rather than with a goal of “completing the work as efficiently as possible.” This means a lot of reflection and (sometimes) writing about what we’ve been doing, and thinking about what skills and knowledge base it requires. For example, Elie recently completed a shallow investigation of developing-world infrastructure that we explicitly thought of as a way to reflect on how shallow investigations should be done in general; I am currently focused on learning enough about political advocacy and scientific research to create shallow investigation assignments in these areas for other staff. In general, we see much of our GiveWell Labs work as “learning how to do investigations (so that we can build staff capacity for them via hiring and training)” rather than as “simply trying to understand the topics we’re exploring.”
- When we assign work, we usually are optimizing for the goal of “training and evaluating staff” rather than simply “completing the work as efficiently as possible.” Ideally, we want each assignment to help the assigned employee learn, and to help us learn about the employee. We think about how each assignment fits into our picture of the employee’s strengths, weaknesses, areas for improvement, and possible long-term trajectory. Sometimes the primary purpose of an assignment is to evaluate an employee, including “stretch” work that gives the employee an opportunity to show that they can take on more responsibility than they have in the past.
- We try to have a reasonably clear picture of what constitutes “excellent,” “good” and “subpar” work so we can make accurate evaluations. Doing so can be very difficult, and is usually more tractable when we have more experience with a given assignment.
- When we have an assignment that’s particularly easy to evaluate, we’ll sometimes assign it to multiple employees over time for calibration purposes (i.e., getting a read on different employees’ strengths and weaknesses).
- When assigning work that is very different from what an employee has done before, we often follow the work very closely, and we are often prepared to spend more time managing the assignment than it would have taken to complete the assignment ourselves. We seek to thoroughly understand, and give our input into, the employee’s thought process and progress, so that the output is a meaningful representation of what will be produced on future similar assignments. We’ve found that a major determinant of an employee’s fit with GiveWell is their willingness to constantly check in with us and keep us posted on their thought process, so that we can stay on the same page.
- When we gain confidence in an employee’s ability to do a particular kind of work, we step back and reduce our involvement – but we still take periodic opportunities to check in at a greater level of depth. Occasionally Elie or I will “double-do” an employee’s work to see whether we pick up any new insights about how the work is being done and how it could be improved. Most conversations at GiveWell, external and internal, are recorded, and Elie has found it helpful to listen to them when he can.
- We put significant time and reflection into considering employees’ long-term trajectories and try to make assignments consistent with these.
- We spend significant time in discussions with employees, getting on the same page about both strengths and weaknesses of recent assignments and likely long-term trajectories. It’s important that employees know where we stand and have the opportunity to point out when they disagree with us on these matters.
We’d welcome thoughts from others on these principles and practices.
Reminder: Annual rankings refresh
This is just a reminder to donors considering supporting our top charities in the next few months. As we do every year, we’re planning to refresh our top charity rankings before December 1st.
Debating philanthropy
Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen something that we see too rarely: a debate over philanthropy.
Bill Schambra, at the invitation of the Hewlett Foundation (a funder of GiveWell), attacked the idea of “strategic philanthropy” presented in Money Well Spent (a book co-authored by Paul Brest, former Hewlett President). He characterized Money Well Spent as promoting a world in which nonprofits “sit around drinking herbal tea … filling whiteboards with guesses about why people have needs, and how to avert them altogether by getting at their root causes … [putting] more trust in the college degrees earned by the public health director than in our hard-won, practical, face-to-face understanding of our own community.” Critiques of Mr. Schambra’s argument have been posted by Paul Brest, Larry Kramer (the Hewlett Foundation’s current President) and Phil Buchanan (President of the Center for Effective Philanthropy).
Because we so rarely witness philanthropists publicly arguing with each other about how to do good philanthropy, we’re glad to see that Hewlett encouraged Mr. Schambra to put forth a critique and engaged it directly. However, we think there is a major and extremely telling missing element from this debate. The case study being debated is entirely hypothetical, involving an investigation by the “hypothetical Metro Community Foundation” of the reasons for a winter-time surge in demand for food and other necessities.
In our view, this is a sobering (and accurate) reflection on the state of foundation transparency, as well as the state of historical study of philanthropy.
Every day, people have public debates about how we should be governed, what companies we should invest in, and a wide variety of other topics, with a broad set of news and facts to draw on in challenging each other. But when it comes to how we should give, not only are there few debates, but the debates that do occur have very little to work with in terms of substantive information provided by foundations and/or independent investigators. It isn’t that there is no alternative to using hypotheticals (Money Well Spent discusses actual cases as well, and hypotheticals can have advantages in conceptual discussions); but the relative paucity of concrete examples, informative case studies, etc. is striking.
We believe that a change along this dimension would be greatly beneficial for people’s abilities to make good giving decisions, which is why we are investing in both transparency and historical study of philanthropy.