The GiveWell Blog

Animal welfare charities

(updated on: ) | by Holden

Added 7/15/21: This blog post reflects the personal views of GiveWell’s co-founder in 2010; it does not represent GiveWell’s organizational view on animal welfare as a cause area. For more on why we don’t currently focus on animal welfare, see here.

We’ve gotten some questions about whether we plan to research charities working on animal welfare, so I wanted to share my thoughts on the cause.

  • It’s easy for me to believe that animals often are treated horribly, and live in horrible conditions, relative to people (even people living under the international poverty line). I believe this applies both to animals in factory farms (one resource on this topic is The Way We Eat, co-authored by Peter Singer, (disclosure: Prof. Singer has actively promoted GiveWell)) and to stray animals, particularly in the developing world (such as those I saw throughout my recent stay in India).
  • It is unclear to me whether charities are good at improving conditions for these animals. Much of what animal-welfare charities seem to focus on is political advocacy, which introduces a substantial set of complications.
  • However, it seems likely to me that there are at least some groups that radically improve the condition of strays, such that if one valued the lives of animals equally to those of humans – or even in the same ballpark – these groups might be competitive with our best charities in terms of what you accomplish for your donation.
  • I do value the lives of animals somewhat. I am very disturbed by what I’ve heard of their treatment in factory farms, and I’m interested in “ethical eating,” i.e., adjustments to eating habits that could create less incentive for this treatment.
  • I do not value the lives of animals equally to those of humans – not even close. I couldn’t bring myself to give money to animal welfare charities that could be spent on global health instead, given what I understand as the realistic range of cost-effectiveness for the two.
  • I recognize that there is a tension between the two points above. One could argue that if I spend more money – or even more time – on my food so that I can eat more ethically, this money or time could have been redirected to helping people in the developing world, and that it’s therefore inconsistent to be interested in “ethical eating” but not animal welfare charity. This argument might be correct, though I believe it is not, and may lay out my thoughts more thoroughly at a later point.

Those are my personal thoughts. For most of GiveWell’s history, the only full-time staff have been myself and Elie Hassenfeld, and Elie values the lives of animals far less than I do. We strongly prefer to research causes that we’re personally interested in, because it’s harder to ask a charity the right questions if you can’t really get behind what it does – so we haven’t given serious consideration to animal welfare charities.

However, we now have an employee who cares more about animal welfare, enough (in our judgment) to potentially do good work researching animal welfare charities. We aren’t yet ready to commit to researching this cause – we need to draw up our plan for next year, which we will be doing soon – but a report on animal welfare charities is a possibility in the next year, and very likely to happen eventually if GiveWell stays in existence.

It’s also possible that we will (eventually) produce content on “ethical eating,” which may be a way (aside from charity) that individuals can spend more money in order to accomplish good. Whether this content fits with our core mission is debatable; it won’t be happening under the GiveWell name in the short term.

Guest post from Jason Fehr

(updated on: ) | by Guest

This is a guest post from Jason Fehr about how he decided what charity to support for his most recent donation. We requested this post along the lines of earlier posts by Ian Turner and Dario Amodei.

Before proceeding, I’d like to thank Dario Amodei and Ian Turner for their excellent guest posts earlier this year regarding their own decision making. I stumbled upon GiveWell in early 2010, as part of a lifelong search for the optimal way to benefit humanity. I’ve been so impressed with the rigor of their logic and the quality of their research that I’ve decided to make GiveWell my primary resource to guide all my charitable giving. Rather than simply rehash what has already been eloquently stated by the staff and friends of GiveWell, I’d like to take a step back and explain a bit of the philosophy that led me to my current state of mind regarding charity.

Whenever I pose the fundamental question of what general life objectives one should have, i.e. what metric to use to determine whether a life has been well lived, I always come back to the same two basic goals: first, to enjoy one’s own life to the fullest, and second, to improve the human condition as much as possible given one’s means and talents. This may seem trite to the subset of people likely to be reading this post, but I think it’s worth stating up front. Some people are motivated by money, fame, power, etc., but I’m writing the rest of this post under the assumption that the “goal” here is to try to use the time and resources we have to make a positive impact on the world.

How do you measure how much good an individual has done? This can be very difficult when you’re dealing with intangibles and vastly differing commodities: how do you compare the impact of Mozart with that of Einstein? Which provides more good: an art gallery or a soup kitchen? So, I decided that impact can be broken down into two categories: elimination of negatives (reduction in death/suffering), and introduction of positives (providing entertainment, emotional fulfillment, etc.). I thought that the first was far easier to measure, less ambiguous, and more universal: only a small sliver of the population might appreciate a beautiful work of art, but I think it’s safe to say just about everyone would prefer not to die or lose their loved ones prematurely, or to feel great pain. For these reasons, I decided to make the elimination of death and suffering the focus of my efforts.

I settled on a straightforward equation by which I would measure my impact: how many people will live healthy, normal lives because I was here who would have suffered or died had I not been here? For most people, this number is probably zero. This is not a criticism; it’s hard to find opportunities to save a life within the realm of most professions. Most people will never encounter a situation where they alone are in a position to save a drowning person or pull someone from a burning building. Additionally, I don’t count a life having been saved if the person who would have replaced you would have done the same thing. For example, I don’t consider a paramedic to be saving several lives a day just because the victims would have died without help. Had that paramedic decided to become a brush salesman instead of a paramedic, a different paramedic would have taken that job and driven the ambulance that day.

So, I consider a life saved/suffering averted only if you achieved something that would not have been achieved had you been replaced by the average person in that position. Using the paramedic example above, let’s say a victim has been shot in the face, and the average paramedic would not have been able to get him to the hospital alive. But, luckily for our victim, today an especially skilled paramedic is on duty; this paramedic has skills that the average paramedic does not, which allows him to get our victim to the hospital safely for definitive treatment. By my calculus, this paramedic has just saved a life.

I work as an anesthesiologist, and I (like most physicians I’m sure) am constantly learning and self-evaluating to ensure I am always providing optimal care for the patients. However, in any profession, there will always be individuals who are more skilled than others. I keep a mental tally of the patients that (in my estimation) are alive and well who would have suffered unnecessarily or died had I been replaced by a less well-trained anesthesiologist. In the three and a half years since I began practice, I think my number is up to about eight, or around one every six months. This mentality also constantly motivates me to be the best practitioner I can be; if I’m not doing a better job than the guy who would have replaced me had I not been there, I need to push myself to be better!

Now turning to giving, I tried to apply the same moral calculus to the world of philanthropy: if I can make a small difference by doing my job well (better than the person I might be replacing), I can make a huge difference by providing something via charity that otherwise wouldn’t have been provided at all. In other words, I think people can make a much bigger difference through careful charitable contributions than they ever can in their everyday lives, virtually no matter what their professions may be.

I wanted to be as sure as possible that any gift I made was being used optimally to improve the human condition. For the reasons I stated earlier, I’ve always tended to gravitate towards charities that aim to reduce suffering and death. Although I didn’t have the means to make a substantial donation until recently, I had been trying for years to determine how to optimally give money to make as great a difference as possible. It seemed that there simply was no consensus of expert opinion; I remember an article in Slate from 2006 in which they asked various writers and academics to whom they would donate a million dollars if they had the chance (there was very little overlap in their answers.)

Since I have a medical background as well as some experience working in the third world, I came to suspect that the lowest hanging fruits would most likely be in nations with the fewest resources. Examples seemed too numerous to count; in school I heard lectures by physicians who had worked in India or Africa, where children would die of diarrhea for want of a simple electrolyte solution, where hospitals would reuse needles since they didn’t have enough disposables, where children were still dying of measles and other vaccine-preventable illnesses (it doesn’t get much more preventable than measles!) It seemed that even a few dollars put into the right hands in the right way could save a life.

When I was young, I was convinced that Africa remained poor because the first world just didn’t care about them. Over the past several years, however, after reading (among others) popular books by economists William Easterly and Paul Collier, I’ve learned that tremendous resources have already been invested in third world development, frequently with little or nothing to show for it. While Easterly has a very cynical viewpoint (he essentially believes that foreign aid has never facilitated third world development), Collier feels that it’s more a matter of certain interventions being effective and others ineffective. I still have an unfinished email in my Gmail account from a year ago that I was composing to Collier asking him where he thought my charity dollars would do the most good. Before I had the chance to send it, I stumbled upon GiveWell.

I promised myself long ago that I would never give to charity just to assuage feelings of guilt or to help convince myself that I wasn’t being selfish walking past homeless people to buy $4 cups of coffee. I had looked into several possibilities prior to finding GiveWell (the Gates Foundation, Africare, disaster relief) but simply wasn’t satisfied with these choices for a number of reasons. In fact, it seemed to me that virtually every cause had a chorus of detractors claiming that the cause was doing more harm than good. I decided to wait and research this further before giving; I actually made no donations at all until 2010 when I found GiveWell.

I actually found GiveWell by accident while searching for more research by the economists I mentioned earlier. As I read through GiveWell the first time, I realized that I had found kindred spirits in philanthropy: the staff of GiveWell started with all the same frustrations that I had felt over the years, but they had found some success in seeking out the answers. I was very excited to read through GiveWell’s philosophy and mission; it seemed that, finally, someone was saying exactly what needed to be said. I looked through their research with my usual skeptical eye, trying to find some fatal flaw in reasoning and analysis. As I read further, I found that every issue that needed to be addressed had already been addressed and evaluated thoroughly.

At this point, I found the analysis on VillageReach, currently GiveWell’s #1 recommended charity. It seemed VillageReach’s approach was having a well-documented impact that was extraordinarily cost-effective. For the first time in my life, I felt comfortable enough with an organization to make regular substantial donations. I have continued to do so over the past year on a monthly basis (I elected to make a recurring monthly donation rather than a single annual donation; this approach allows myself greater flexibility in case new data were to suddenly become available that would cause me to change charities.)

In my own mind, I add the lives saved as a result of my support of Villagereach to my personal total. Although I agree completely with GiveWell that attempting to quantify the cost per life saved requires many assumptions and is at best a rough estimate, I find it exciting to think about the sheer numbers one person can save with precisely the right donation. I’ve started with regular donations of $1000/month. Using GiveWell’s estimate of $545 per life saved by VillageReach, this would be one child death averted every two weeks solely attributable to my contribution (remember, as a comparison, I would estimate that I am “saving” at best one person every six months through my work!) Although it’s impossible to ever have a guarantee in the world of charity, this is the most confident I have ever been. I intend to continue to use GiveWell to guide my giving, and I thank the GiveWell staff for providing me with the tools I need to make an informed choice.

All my life, I had been looking for “the answer”, the low-hanging fruit: if we have so many capable, talented individuals with the means and desire to improve the human condition, why does progress seem so slow in so many sectors throughout the world? I do believe that the answer may simply be misallocation of resources, often despite the best of intentions. What if we could redirect all charitable efforts towards the interventions that actually work, and stop wasting resources on the ineffective ones? What if we could change the culture of the nonprofit sector from one of competition for fundraising to one of competition for the most effective solutions? This, to me, may be the start of a revolution in the world of charity, the start of a movement that changes everything. I, for one, am thrilled to be a part of it.

The best charity that no one has heard of: Response roundup

(updated on: ) | by Holden

Two weeks ago, we issued a challenge for people to help our top-rated charity, VillageReach, tell its story in a more compelling way. We got a lot of responses, many of them very thoughtful and interesting. Here’s a summary.

Making it personal (and tangible)

Many of the suggestions revolved around telling tangible, personal stories of individuals, something that there isn’t much of in VillageReach’s current website content. As Carrie (who emailed in) said, “Individual givers want to save kids and moms and dads with faces and names; and hear their stories in not just facts, but feelings.”

Katya Andresen of Network for Good suggests telling the story of a health worker:

if UPS can build a brand around its brown-clad delivery folks, surely VillageReach can spin some amazing tales about the brave people driving trucks into the middle of nowhere with life-saving vaccines on board. Go out and interview everyone who moves supplies around Mozambique and ask them what it’s like to be behind the wheel of hope. That’s a story I want to hear – and a cause I want to fund.

Commenter Susan Schindehette makes a similar proposal, with specific ideas for how to create a compelling video. Excerpt:

Find one of these workers who’s from humble beginnings herself, get her a Flipcam and have her shoot away. See the world through her eyes, from her own hardscrabble home, through her journey for Village Reach, and then end the story with a little baby in her lap who’s going to live because of the medical supplies she just delivered. Voiceover: “I know what it means to be sick with no medicine. And it’s a good thing to make sure that won’t happen to her.”

Commenter Robert Mundy also supports this idea, writing, “I want to hear from the people that make VillageReach possible.”

Commenter Carrick prefers to hear from the beneficiaries of improved health systems (i.e., the people whose lives/family members’ lives were saved), rather than the workers. Carrick critiques the story currently on VillageReach Focus, writing:

the VillageReach website contains a story about a woman they serve, and although her circumstances certainly sound terrible, they’re not described in a compelling way—nor does it describe the tremendous benefit VillageReach has to her life. If anything, it suggests that VillageReach isn’t doing enough for her, since she still has to walk two hours to get to the health center. Personally, I would tell the story of someone who suffered and struggled, and then finally found VillageReach, which saved them or their child’s life.

On the tangibility front, Katya wonders if VillageReach’s emphasis on tracking could help:

Because VillageReach is about logistics, what if you used that as a huge advantage? You can put a map up and show, in near real time – what supplies are being moved where thanks to donor support.

Keeping it simple

Several critiqued the complexity and difficulty of VillageReach’s current web content. Jeff Brooks of Future Fundraising Now writes:

The website resolutely refuses to speak the language of ordinary people. It’s squarely aimed at experts and insiders … VillageReach is like a smart, geeky, promising adolescent; they are apparently not interested in connecting with people outside their circle …

Complexity may be necessary to accomplish program goals, but it kills fundraising. Simplify! …

If the “smart giving” movement is going to be any more than a euphemism for the “stupid marketing” movement, nonprofits like VillageReach are going to have to grow up, go beyond themselves, swallow their pride, and enter the world of real-life donors.

Commenters Robert Mundy and Alice agree that the current website comes off as technical and jargony. So does emailer Carrie:

Cold chain supply? rMIS? openLMIS? Great system names, but they leave a black hole in the reader’s mind. Descriptive names would have more appeal and create understanding. Your corporate donors on the other hand may be fascinated by the buzz words. Save it for them in – speeches or special collateral outreach.

On the topic of simplicity, I was particularly intrigued by Duane Kuroda’s claim:

Impact and results by a charity satisfy something I call the minimum logic requirement – that minimum about of proof where a donation is not a bad idea, and the charity has more or less equal footing for donation $. Then, the emotional aspect can kick in. If a donor has to choose from charity A or B after the logical stats have been evaluated, then the one with the biggest emotional response has the best chance.

Obviously, I don’t see myself – or most GiveWell donors – as following this pattern. But it may be true that the vast majority of donors do, and this would pose a substantial challenge to the “smart giving” movement.

Putting the emphasis on donors & fundraising

Brigid Slipka feels that the website is not aggressive enough in soliciting donations:

ASK. ASK. ASK. Go through website page by page and every time you are making a case for what VillageReach achieves, end it with an ask. Be specific: “Be a part of our success story by giving a donation today” and link directly to donation page. After a while, you can use Google Analytics to see which donation links are clicked on the most. Keep those and remove the others.

She makes a large number of specific suggestions throughout the website, which we recommend that anyone interested in the details of this case check out.

Sean Stannard-Stockton writes:

My suggestion for Village Reach, and for any nonprofit struggling to raise money in support of effective programs, is to realize that donors want to become a part of your story. As consumers, people buy products which help them be the person they want to be. I believe that donors want to do the same thing. We donate as a way to “self-actualize”, to most fully become the person we believe we are.

If the smart giving movement wants a world full of robust nonprofits, we need to recognize that sales and marketing is just as critical of a business function as program development and delivery.

How important is it to improve the messaging?

Commenters Alexander and McKay question the premise of our challenge, asking whether VillageReach really wants to be targeting the masses and saying that relationships – including with larger funders – may be more key to VillageReach’s fundraising than how it tells its story.

On the flip side, commenter Susan Schindehette on our blog and commenter Bo on Katya’s blog express conviction that there is a strong, emotionally compelling story here if it can be told right. Susan writes:

Village Reach says that it trains “health system personnel to become logistics specialists, delivering medical supplies to all the hard-to-reach villages so that health workers working in remote health centers are no longer responsible for making the long journeys to collect their own supplies.” HELLO!!? That’s what, in the business, we call a “story”!

Bottom line

We really appreciate all the feedback, although it’s going to be up to VillageReach whether and how it ultimately wants to change its storytelling.

Overall, I think these responses are an interesting illustration of the challenges faced by the “smart giving” movement. We want to help donors give to projects that are more impactful, and more in need of funds, than where they give now. Yet for the vast majority of donors, the most compelling pitches are likely to revolve around the tangible, the specific and the simple – all of which describe the opposite of a good impact evaluation.

To my mind, that’s a substantial tension, and a good reason for those interested in “smart giving” to think of themselves – at least for the foreseeable future – as targeting a niche market, not the general population.

Giving season update

(updated on: ) | by Elie

We’re about halfway through December, which is historically when the vast majority of donations go through our website. Here’s a quick update on where things stand.

So far this year, we’ve seen significantly more money (over 3x as much) go to our recommended charities, directly through the GiveWell website, compared to last year.


The second chart above excludes December, as this month has generally completely dwarfed the others in terms of donations made through our website. The following chart shows daily donations made in December, during which the trend has continued.

Note that all charts above exclude all offline donations / donations made through other sites attributed to GiveWell; they are only capturing donations that were made directly via the GiveWell website. We’ll be giving a full overview of our estimated “money moved” when we release our annual self-evaluation in a few months.

Our web traffic is also up this year, driven primarily by an increase in organic (i.e., non-AdWords) search traffic.

We’re seeing strong growth that isn’t attributable to any particular one-off event, so we’re optimistic about future growth.

The best charity that no one has heard of: How would you tell its story?

(updated on: ) | by Holden

We’ve spent years looking for the most outstanding organizations we can find – organizations with demonstrable, cost-effective, powerful impacts on people’s lives. As of now, out of hundreds examined with a systematic process, we’ve found one that we think is particularly outstanding. It isn’t just outstanding by our criteria – it’s also strong on a lot of the aspects we purposefully de-emphasize but others value, such as the chance to make a large-scale and sustainable contribution well beyond its budget (more). There’s only one problem: it’s in the sector of health system logistics.

It’s been observed before that fundraising seems to work best when you can connect a person’s gift to a tangible, emotional impact. Heifer International can tell you about the “cow you’re giving for Christmas” and how it (ideally) will affect its recipient’s life. Grameen Foundation has anecdotes (example) of women who’ve used a loan as a catalyst to pull themselves out of poverty. DonorsChoose can even arrange for you to get thank-you notes from the students you’ve bought supplies for.

VillageReach’s activities include

  • Training health system personnel to become logistics specialists, delivering medical supplies to all the hard-to-reach villages so that health workers working in remote health centers are no longer responsible for making the long journeys to collect their own supplies.
  • Developing logistics management information system software to enable more accurate collection and reporting of health data in remote communities.
  • Creating a social business to bring propane from south Mozambique to north Mozambique so that refrigerators in health centers can be more reliably powered, and can keep vaccines cold.

How do you tell that story?

One possible response is “Don’t.” In a world full of good causes, why worry about delivery systems, information management and propane in Mozambique, when we can focus on charities with more tangible, “sellable” work?

Yet we feel this response would be tantamount to defeat for the “smart giving” movement. VillageReach embodies the strengths this movement looks for – strengths that are all too hard to find most of the time. After all, if you’re bringing in tens of millions using a decades-old story, why bother with evaluation and accountability for the work happening today? What good is real impact if it isn’t rewarded with funding?

We want to see VillageReach turn its great program into a great pitch, but we’re no good at storytelling. So we’re asking for help.

If you are good at helping charities tell their stories, and you support the ideals of the “smart giving” movement, we’d like your thoughts on how VillageReach can better sell its work.

Give your advice via blog post, or blog comment, or email to us. If you make your own blog post, please make sure to notify us via email or by linking to your post in a comment here.

We’ll round up the best submissions in a future post.

Some basic materials to work off of:

Thanks to Katya Andresen for inspiring the title of this post

Joint release on finding the best charities, not just avoiding the worst

| by Holden

Last year, we and many other groups came together in a joint press release on the “worst way to pick a charity.”. We argued that the simple, “one-size-fits-all” metric of the overhead ratio is a red herring, and that deeper analysis is needed to make sure your gift accomplishes good.

But many donors don’t have time for deeper – or any – analysis. To help them, this year three organizations – GiveWell, Philanthropedia and Root Cause – have come together with a list of 6 recommended charities.

Each of our organizations has recommended two charities, using our distinctive methodologies. Note that we haven’t vetted each others’ recommendations and do not necessarily endorse each others’ endorsements – but we think it’s important to show donors (even donors with very little time) what sorts of options they have, publicly and centrally.

As our release states, and as we’ve written before many times in the past (most recent discussion here), we think that there is currently far too much emphasis on avoiding bad charities, with the implication being that it’s fine to give to whatever charity asks most loudly once you’ve determined that they aren’t literally stealing your money. We want to change the subject from “How can donors avoid the very worst charities?” to “How can they seek out the very best?” This joint list of recommended charities is a step in that direction.

Full release – including the six charity recommendations – here