We spent a lot of time last month dealing with headaches around tax deductions and processing fees. We thought we’d share our experiences with these headaches, and how they get in the way of donors’ abilities to give as effectively as possible. We’re thinking about how to better deal with these issues in 2012.
The GiveWell Blog
Update on GiveWell’s money moved and web traffic in 2011
GiveWell had strong growth in 2011 and our recommended charities received more than $5 million as a result of our research.
Last-minute donations
Of the money moved to our top charities through our website in 2010, 25% was on December 31st alone. We know that lots of people will be looking to make last-minute donations.
If you only have five minutes but you want to take advantage of the thousands of hours of work we put into finding the best giving opportunities, consider giving to our top charities. They have strong track records, accomplish a lot of good per dollar spent, and have good concrete plans for how to use additional donations.
A couple of things to keep in mind:
- After you give, spread the word. This is the perfect time to remind people (via Facebook sharing, tweeting, etc.) to give before the year ends. And people making last-minute gifts are likely to be receptive to suggestions.
- If you have any questions, we’re here to help. We should be available by phone for most of the day, and responding to email when we’re not. (See our contact page). Our research FAQ may also be a good resource.
Mega-charities
We haven’t written much about mega-charities: extremely large international charities (budgets of $250+ million per year) carrying out a very wide range of activities, and commonly recognized as household names. We’re thinking of groups like UNICEF, Oxfam, Mercy Corps, Catholic Relief Services, Save the Children, World Vision, and CARE.
The main reason we haven’t written much about these groups is that we still know very little about them. They tend to publish a great deal of web content aimed at fundraising, but very little of interest for impact-oriented donors. On the occasions when we’ve engaged with these groups, we’ve come away with the feeling that they engage in a wide variety of activities, and we can’t get a concrete sense of (a) the specifics of the activities; (b) the organization-wide track record; (c) likely uses of additional funding. (We wrote in 2007 about our inability to put together bird’s-eye views of their activities).
Below are general impressions from our limited information on, and interactions with, these groups. Note that in preparing this post, we examined the websites of the 7 organizations named in the first paragraph, looking for whatever information we could find on specific projects (as opposed to broad characterizations of activities), results (technical writeups, not narratives), and financial information (any budget breakdown by project or program type, or revenue source – we tabulated our findings in this spreadsheet).
The risks of giving
Elie recently highlighted his doubts about our top charities, and a commenter responded:
Of course one ultimately never knows how much good a charity or any given donation will do. Bednets might end up saving the life of child who grows up to be the next Nelson Mandela – or the next Saddam Hussein. Everything we do is a gamble, but I’d like to make the best ones I can. These two charities look like good gambles.
I agree completely, but I’m still glad Elie emphasized these risks. Because in one specific way, supporting our top charities is riskier than supporting any other charity: if something goes wrong with one of our top charities, it will come out promptly and publicly.
Guest post from Cari Tuna
Cari Tuna is a member of GiveWell’s board of directors and president of Good Ventures, a foundation in the San Francisco Bay Area which she created with her partner Dustin Moskovitz earlier this year. Previously, Cari was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal.
Today, I’m writing to share that Good Ventures is donating $500,000 to the Against Malaria Foundation and $250,000 to the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative–GiveWell’s #1 and #2 charity recommendations this giving season, respectively. Over the coming months, Good Ventures also plans to donate to the six nonprofits that GiveWell recently named “standout organizations”: GiveDirectly, Innovations for Poverty Action, KIPP Houston, Nyaya Health, Pratham and the Small Enterprise Foundation.
I first learned about GiveWell about a year ago while preparing to transition from reporting to working in philanthropy full time. I read about the organization in Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save and, around the same time, met co-founder Holden Karnofsky through a mutual friend. Right away, I was struck by the rigor of GiveWell’s research, its commitment to transparency and the volume of thoughtful commentary about the nonprofit sector it already had produced in just three years.
In April 2011, I joined GiveWell’s board. Since then, I’ve been increasingly impressed by the co-founders’ dedication to their work, humility about what they know and what they don’t, and ability to adapt the GiveWell model as they learn.
As a new foundation, Good Ventures’ top priorities are 1) to learn how to do as much good as possible with the resources at our disposal and 2) to become a great resource for other people who care about improving our world. We plan to make a number of carefully selected grants over the coming years in order to learn about promising solutions to the world’s most formidable problems. Over time, we hope our work contributes to significant, sustained reductions in poverty and improvements in quality of life for disadvantaged people around the world.
To that end, we see huge potential in encouraging greater effectiveness and transparency across the social sector, in particular by helping to foster a culture in which individual donors demand evidence of impact from the nonprofits they support.
One simple idea–that all donors should be at least as thoughtful about our philanthropic investments as we are about our financial investments–has transformed the way I think about giving. If you’re reading GiveWell’s blog, this probably isn’t news to you. But it might be news to your friends, parents, siblings, children or coworkers. So this giving season, please spread the word, and let’s transform the culture around giving, one heart and mind at a time.
Note: While Good Ventures does not accept unsolicited requests for funding, we do consider all of GiveWell’s recommended charities–and not just its #1 recommendation–for substantial grants.