This is the fifth post (of five) focused on our self-evaluation and future plans.

A previous post outlined our top-level priorities for 2011. The most important priority is finding more top charities. This post lists our potential tactics for finding top charities; we are particularly interested in feedback on this topic.

These tactics are listed in order from “closest to our existing methodology; most likely to succeed” to “furthest departure from our existing methodology; most likely to take a lot of time before we can identify outstanding organizations.”

Tactic 1: deep investigations of charities with distinction.

We have a list of charities that have some form of distinction. This includes

• All grantees of the Skoll Foundation, Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, Mulago Foundation, Jasmine Social Investments, Peery Foundation, and Voxtra. (We have spoken with representatives of several of these organizations and feel that we broadly have similar values; the others have been recommended by those we’ve spoken with.)
• Organizations that have been recommended by or have significant partnerships with Poverty Action Lab or Innovations for Poverty Action Lab.
• Organizations we’ve encountered through past searches or referrals that seem promising to us for any other reason (generally because they exhibit an unusual commitment to transparency or focus on low-burden-of-proof programs).

We haven’t found sufficient information on these charities’ websites to recommend them, and based on past experience, this makes us pessimistic. However, we have begun the process of prioritizing how promising the different charities are; we will be contacting the most promising ones, interviewing staff, and thinking about the minimum information we would need to confidently recommend them. More so than in the past, we can now point to significant impact of our recommendations on donations, so we expect better access to these charities than in the past.

Tactic 2: investigating “low burden of proof” sub-causes in international aid

In the past, we’ve looked for direct evidence of charities’ impact on improving lives. As we’ve gotten more context and experience with international aid, however, a couple of causes have stood out to us as particularly recommended/promising, to the point where we may be able to be confident in a charity without the sort of impact assessment we’ve sought in the past.

• Orphans and vulnerable children: some charities provide homes, shelters, and other basic services for children who otherwise might be homeless, sleeping on the street, or even taken in by those who exploit them. By speaking with the right people, we may gain an understanding of where and when there are needs for these sorts of organizations to expand, resulting in more children having safe homes/shelters who would not otherwise.
• Water: if we found a charity that was demonstrably improving access to clean water, in a way that (a) benefited communities with very poor previous access to water (b) lasted over time (we are very concerned about wells being put in and falling into disrepair), we might recommend such an organization without direct evidence of improved health outcomes.

Tactic 3: investigating other promising causes

As mentioned previously, we’re experimenting with a method for quickly getting a high-level picture of a charitable cause and how likely it seems that we could find top charities in this area. By investigating particularly promising causes, such as disease research funding and catastrophic risk mitigation (including but not limited to global warming), we might be able to find more outstanding opportunities for donors.

We will certainly be pursuing this tactic, but feel it is less likely to generate top charities in 2011 than the tactics above.

Tactic 4: project funding.

We have always aimed to find great organizations and recommend unrestricted donations to them, rather than funding particular projects. This is partly because we think traditional donation restricting is unreliable; partly because we think project-based funding adds harmful complications (particularly the fact that the donor’s and charity’s goals aren’t fully aligned); and partly because, in the past, we have had so little sense of how much money (if any) our top-rated charities could expect to raise.

But if we can’t find more charities that focus – at the overall organizational level – on proven, cost-effective, scalable programs, we will open the doors to large organizations offering promising projects, and potentially recommend that donors give to these organizations with specific designations (“Use this donation for project X”).

If we go down this path, it will become essential to have concrete expectations for what will be implemented – and what will be measured and reported – at different levels of funding. (Projects also ought to be based, to the maximum extent possible, on programs that have worked in the past.) The fact that we now have a track record of moving money to top-rated charities makes this option more feasible than it was before.

We’d like to avoid project-based funding, and even if we do implement it, we’ll be keeping an eye out for organizations that we can recommend for unrestricted funding. The latter will always take precedence.

We think this tactic is promising in the long run, but unlikely to generate “gold medal” opportunities in the short run because of the difficulties we’ve had (and expect to have) communicating with grantwriters.

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

In previous posts, we discussed the progress we’ve made, where we stand, and how we can improve in core areas. This post focuses on the latter, and lays out our top-level strategic choices for the next year.

Broadly, we see the key aspects of GiveWell – the areas in which we can improve – as

• Research vetting: subjecting our existing research to strong, critical scrutiny from people with substantial relevant experience and credentials.
• Research maintenance and systemization: keeping our research up-to-date and high-quality, while training junior staff to maintain it.
• Research expansion: actively seeking more charities to recommend.
• Marketing: increasing our “customers” reached and money moved.
• Fundraising/operating: maintaining the organization.

(These are broadly similar to last year’s areas for improvement.)

Our top priorities for this year are:

1. Research expansion. As discussed previously, we have an urgent need to find more top charities so that we can productively move more money. It would be a major problem for GiveWell if we essentially had more demand for our research (i.e., donors interested in following our recommendations) than supply (i.e., charities able to absorb this funding effectively).We aim to find at least $3 million in room for more money moved, i.e., gold-medal charities that can collectively absorb at least $3 million very effectively. Finding more top charities could be very challenging and require large allocations of time from both junior and senior staff.
2. Fundraising – as discussed in the overview of our financial situation, we have expanded our staff while seeing a couple of large sources of revenue fall off. Raising more money in 2011 will be necessary in order to maintain our operations at optimal size.We aim to raise our annual revenue from around $200,000 to around $400,000 (if we do not make it all the way to $400,000 we will cut some staff going into 2012, as outlined in our overview of our financial situation). I (Holden Karnofsky) will be taking primary responsibility for this task, and expect it to take a fair amount of time.

Other key priorities are:

1. Research maintenance and systemization – all our research will need to be updated this year (as it is every year). We expect this work to be done primarily by junior staff.
2. Research vetting – we believe there is substantial room for improvement in our testimonials and external reviews of our research. We expect to make improvements with relatively little investment of our time, since our process for getting testimonials and reviews is already in place.
3. Marketing – we expect to pursue most of the ideas we listed previously for expanding our reach, with moderate time cost.
4. High-level research of new causes – we’re experimenting with a method for getting a high-level picture of a charitable cause, without getting to the most time-consuming step of evaluating specific charities. The idea is to take a given cause – for example, global warming mitigation – and get a basic sense of what information is available, what cost-effectiveness estimates say about what can be accomplished for how much, what the key questions are for organizations, and how likely it seems that we could find top charities in this area. We hope to do high-level research on a few particularly promising causes, laying the groundwork to find more top charities in the future.