The GiveWell Blog

Accountability in philanthropy

(updated on: ) | by Holden

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

We previously listed our five chief criteria for GiveWell Labs, an arm of our research process that will be open to any giving opportunity, no matter what form and what sector. This post further discusses the third of these criteria: “accountability.”

We’re OK with funding a project that might fail, but it’s very important to us that we be able to recognize, document, publicly discuss, and learn from such a failure if it happens.

This is the area in which we feel most strongly that current philanthropists are coming up short: they’re failing to learn (or at least, to help others learn) from their track records. For a simple example, take the issue of sustainability in developing-world aid.

  • A common goal of a philanthropic program is to see the government – or another funder – take over at some point, leading to lasting impact that doesn’t depend on continued funding.
  • We’ve seen many different approaches to accomplishing this. For example, VillageReach initially paid entirely for its own project, with the hope that the government would switch over to its model once the proof of concept had been established; now that that idea has failed to pan out, VillageReach is asking for more cost-sharing from the government up front as it re-implements its model.
  • Yet there appears to be so little evidence on what sorts of projects have and haven’t achieved sustainability in the past that one paper by prominent scholars argues that the whole idea of sustainability is an “illusion” (an argument endorsed by William Easterly).

Most of the funders we’ve talked to don’t seem to have very clear senses even of their own organizations’ track records (both good and bad). Even if funders are learning internally and informally from their own failures, they aren’t learning from each others’.

We believe that we have an unusual commitment to public and documented discussion of whether our giving ends up accomplishing what we hope. We’ve been releasing regular updates on VillageReach, the organization we directed the most money to in 2010, and we intend to do the same with our current top charities. These updates are specific and honest about both good and bad news (and there has been a fair amount of the latter).

What I learned in my first 6 months at GiveWell

(updated on: ) | by Alexander

I started work at GiveWell six months ago, just a few weeks after graduating from college. I had been following GiveWell pretty intensely for more than a year, since I had gotten back from my own trip to India. During that time, I had become a little obsessed: I had read the entire history of the blog and got really excited each time GiveWell finally posted the audio from the most recent board meeting.

Even as a serious GiveWell fan, though, there were a number of things that I didn’t know about the organization that I should have. These aren’t secrets or titillating stories about office politics, just some things that I’ve learned that I didn’t know before.

The biggest challenge remains “find outstanding giving opportunities” – not “get more eyeballs.” I wasn’t totally ignorant about the difficulty of finding outstanding giving opportunities, but I thought that GiveWell was clearly doing so better than anyone else working publicly, and that accordingly it should focus more on outreach, rather than improving research. As an outsider, I didn’t have a good sense of how much went into the recommendations or all the work that goes into charities that don’t end up receiving recommendations. I didn’t think it was easy, but it seemed like Holden and Elie pretty much had it under control, and that there was lots of low-hanging fruit on the outreach side.

As far as I can tell now, neither of those things are really true.

On the outreach front, GiveWell had already tried or looked into many different strategies, even if they hadn’t blogged about it. And because our users generally aren’t typical donors, a lot of the things that charities normally do to cultivate donors might be actively harmful for us. (But we definitely haven’t thought of everything, so please do let us know or comment if you have ideas for how we could “sell” our research better.)

On the research front, although it isn’t very hard to come up with better recommendations than other charity evaluators, we face two problems I hadn’t fully considered:

  • Room for more funding. Because a number of large funders are scooping up excellent funding opportunities in global health, many good chances to help people are already taken. We need to find charities that are good bets, but not so obviously good that they have all the funding they can productively use.
  • Our competition isn’t other charity rating organizations. This is about the baseline that GiveWell’s recommendations are compared to, rather than the competition for funding opportunities. For a long time, it has seemed natural for people to compare GiveWell to Charity Navigator or Philanthropedia, but as we continue to grow, I think that comparison becomes less and less salient.

    As we raise our ambitions with projects like GiveWell Labs, we will be “competing” not with other charity evaluators but with foundations. Because some foundations are extremely strategic, well-resourced, and focused on the same goal of doing as much good as possible, finding better giving opportunities than they do is a much higher burden.

Both of these problems become harder as GiveWell grows, because we’ll need to create more “room for money moved” and will more naturally be compared to foundations rather than other charity evaluators.

Evaluation of American Red Cross Haiti response

(updated on: ) | by Holden

We’ve been working on an update of our disaster relief report, and came across an American Red Cross evaluation from December 2010 stating:

If you would like to access this report, please get in contact with the ALNAP secretariat.

We emailed the ALNAP secretariat, saying:

I am writing from GiveWell, an independent, non-profit charity evaluator to request access to the ALNAP report “American Red Cross – Haiti” that is listed on the ALNAP website at http://www.alnap.org/node/7131.aspx. Would it be possible to send us a copy of the report?

The secretariat responded that the evaluation cannot be shared externally due to an in-house policy.

Why should this report be confidential over a year after its publication?

(Thanks to Eliza Scheffler for finding this.)

Update: the page linked to in this post regarding the evaluation appears to have been removed (very recently – I am writing this at 11:02am and it was up as of 10:30am). Here is Google’s cache of the site and here is a copy of the Google cache stored on our server (for when the Google cache expires).

Trading off upside vs. track record

(updated on: ) | by Holden

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

We previously listed our five chief criteria for GiveWell Labs (a new arm of our research process that will be open to any giving opportunity, no matter what form and what sector). This post further discusses the first two of these criteria – “upside” and “high likelihood of success” – and the tradeoff between them.