What is GiveWell Labs?

GiveWell Labs is an arm of our research process that will be open to any giving opportunity, no matter what form and what sector.

The research we've been doing for the last couple of years has been constrained in a couple of key ways:

• GiveWell's traditional process has had pre-declared areas of focus (based on our guesses as to where the most promising charities would be found), and disqualified charities for recommendations on the basis of their being "out of scope" (though we've been gradually broadening our scope).
• GiveWell's traditional process required us to decide which organizations to recommend without being able to say in advance how much money would go to them as a result. This has led to challenges with the question of "room for more funding." We've had to find charities that could essentially use any amount of funding (large or small) productively, and this has drastically narrowed our options.

GiveWell Labs will not be subject to either of these constraints.

Through GiveWell Labs, we will try to identify outstanding giving opportunities (whether they're organizations or specific projects), publish rankings of these giving opportunities (separate from the top charities list we maintain using our existing research process) and try to raise money for these opportunities. Donors have pre-committed a minimum of $1 million to the GiveWell Labs initiative, meaning that we will have at least $1 million to commit to our choice of projects even if we are able to raise nothing else. (We expect to raise more if and when we find great giving opportunities; the $1 million has been committed based on donors' trust in our ability to find such opportunities.)

Our existing work of finding outstanding international aid charities - using a more systematic process - continues. Over the coming year, we expect to spend about 75% of our research time on our existing work of finding outstanding international aid charities, and 25% of our research time on GiveWell Labs. Note that our "standard" process continues to gradually evolve and broaden its scope, and hopefully will come to incorporate insights gained through the work on GiveWell Labs. The distinction between the two may even dissolve over time. But at this time, GiveWell Labs is the arm of our process that is open to any giving opportunity, no matter what form and what sector.

Why GiveWell Labs?

What we're trying to accomplish with this initiative

Our goals are twofold:

Find better giving opportunities. When we laid out our main goals for 2011, #1 was finding more great giving opportunities, and our possible strategies for doing so involved (a) broadening our scope (b) considering project-based funding. With GiveWell Labs, we are doing both simultaneously.

• We've previously come across groups that might have been able to offer great giving opportunities, if we had selected a specific project and provided all the funding necessary to carry it out. However, we couldn't recommend them to individual donors, not knowing whether $1000 or $1 million would come in as a result. Now, we'll plan to go back to these groups, open to anything. If we do end up wanting to raise specific amounts of money, this will be a more complex endeavor than simply publishing a recommendation on our website and saying "Give here," but we now have enough connections to major donors and enough sense of our audience of smaller donors that we think it will be worthwhile to try.
• We've previously come across interesting funding opportunities that didn't fit neatly into the causes we had chosen to focus on. This won't be an issue for GiveWell Labs.
• Examining opportunities with the above qualities (project-based and/or outside the sectors we're experienced in) will be hard to do systematically, and will be by nature a bit experimental. That's why we're allocating only 25% of our research time to GiveWell Labs, with the remainder allocated to carrying out our existing research process (which has some restrictions but is more established and systemized). However, we expect the things we learn through GiveWell Labs to eventually shape the evolution of our more systemized research process.

Position ourselves to advise seven-figure donors.

When analyzing our own impact, we've noted that it comes disproportionately from large donors. (We influence more $100 donors than $10,000 donors, but the ratio is far under 100:1, so the $10,000 donors end up accounting for the lion's share of our money moved.)

This seems logical to us, when considering that GiveWell is a "niche product" - we don't appeal to large interconnected groups of people, but the rare people who do resonate with our work resonate very strongly with it, and give a lot based on it. The logical implication is that our greatest potential for impact may come from very large donors - and we need to be positioned to be useful to these donors.

The research we've done to date - recommending direct-aid charities that can absorb arbitrary amounts of funding - seems best suited to those giving under $1 million per year. When we encounter people who give more, they generally are interested in funding whole projects at once, which gives them options that simply aren't open to our standard research process. That means our current product is a poor fit with the people who may represent our most potentially impactful audience.

We need to address this issue, and GiveWell Labs will allow us to do so. The $1 million in pre-committed funding is coming from large donors who will be able to give more if we find them great opportunities. More importantly, GiveWell Labs will allow us to move closer to having the same universe of options that seven-figure donors have, which will hopefully improve our ability to connect with and influence seven-figure donors.

Pros and cons of issue-agnostic giving

GiveWell Labs is issue-agnostic, i.e., we are not restricting our work to particular areas of philanthropy (such as international aid, climate change, etc.) We will focus on what we consider the most promising areas, but we will be potentially open to anything.

There are clear disadvantages to issue-agnostic giving:

• The more different sorts of projects we allow ourselves to consider, the greater the challenge of sorting through them in a coherent, principled, systematic way. It will be particularly challenging to make sure we are applying principles consistently, rather than giving based on whims.
• There are conceptual advantages to "specializing" in particular sectors over time. Doing so means having the ability to
  • Learn from past successes and failures in an area.
  • Make contacts in an area.
  • Gather evidence about the most promising approaches in an area, particularly informal/qualitative evidence (e.g., site visits).

However, issue-agnostic giving has advantages as well.

• First and foremost is that when you're new to giving, you can't tell where the best opportunities are going to be. Picking a "sector" could be the dominant determinant of how effective your giving will be; taking a guess and sticking with it, therefore, seems very dangerous for a donor seeking to maximize impact. (Note that I've changed my view of the most promising cause as I've learned more about the different causes we've studied.)
• Even when you're not new to giving, the highest-impact sectors can change rapidly and chaotically as new philanthropists come on the scene. Choosing to focus on developing-world-oriented medical research may have been a great idea before the Gates Foundation came along, but I'm guessing that opportunities in this area have fallen drastically since, as the Gates Foundation has attempted to fund the best ones.
• There may be outstanding opportunities that get overlooked by other funders because they don't fit neatly into a particular "sector." I think this is possible in today's environment, simply because issue-agnostic giving is so rare.
• Regarding the above-mentioned advantages of specialization:
  • We are hoping for a relatively "low-touch" approach to funding: we seek people with ideas but not funding, and we seek to provide funding and not other kinds of support. We hope this approach will diminish the need for us to become "experts" in any given sector.
  • We hope to be very communicative with other funders and people with relevant expertise/experience. We won't recommend a funding opportunity without getting as many relevant opinions as we can. If people with different specialties are open and communicative with each other, it mitigates the need for funders to have all the expertise themselves.
  • In practice, we will probably find ourselves focusing on certain sectors - not out of a pre-commitment, but because these sectors appear particularly promising to us. This is especially true in light of the fact that we prefer (as we always have) to fund things we can understand well - our past experience and established knowledge do matter. So being issue-agnostic doesn't actually preclude specializing; it just means that any specialization will happen gradually and out of a desire to maximize impact, rather than being driven by up-front choices of particular sectors.

Bottom line - at this point in our development, we think the advantages of issue-agnostic giving outweigh the disadvantages for us.

Plans for our process and transparency

One of the major challenges of this initiative will be remaining systematic and transparent despite the very broad mandate of GiveWell labs. It's core to GiveWell that the thinking behind our recommendations

• Comes from reasoning and principles that are applied consistently, not from whims.
• Is transparent, i.e., interested people can read up on why we made the decisions we did and judge our thinking for themselves, with as little need as possible to have trust in us.

Process

While we reserve the right to change plans mid-stream, our basic planned process is:

1. Sourcing general ideas. We plan to cast a wide net initially, looking pretty much anywhere we can for general funding ideas - and/or organizations - that might be promising. Key sources will include:
   • Our existing research, particularly our list of the health interventions with outstanding track records and cost-effectiveness.
   • Conversations with anyone who might be a particularly good source of these kinds of ideas - particularly officers at major foundations and academics who do work related to philanthropy - as well as the referrals we get from these people.
   • Going over the work of anyone else who seems to similarly have a goal of identifying top opportunities for doing good. Examples we've found so far: Copenhagen Consensus, Back of the Envelope Guide, and the winners of sector-agnostic competitions for limited funds (Echoing Green, Ashoka, Skoll, etc.)
2. Going from general ideas to specific proposals. We will maintain a ranked list of the most promising ideas from step 1, and for high-ranked ideas, we will attempt to find the people and/or organizations who can make (and, potentially, execute on) specific proposals. At this stage we'll just be looking, in each proposal, for rough ideas of (a) costs; (b) what people/organizations will do the execution; (c) what the basic plan is.
3. Detailed investigation of proposals. We will maintain a ranked list of the most promising proposals from step 2, and for the most promising ones, we will conduct in-depth investigations similar to those we've always conducted for promising charities. These will include in-depth conversations with the relevant people/organizations; conversations with others in their space, particularly those who have funded them or chosen not to fund them; site visits when applicable; and requesting technical reports, budgets, and other materials when applicable.
4. Recommending and funding proposals. We will attempt to get any outstanding submissions from step 3 funded. We will have $1 million to spend at our discretion if we can raise no other funds, but we expect to be able to raise more if we succeed in finding great giving opportunities.

At this point we are most interested in funding others' ideas, and have a preference for cases where the implementing organization is the same as the organization that hatched the idea and strategy. We have the impression that much philanthropy works differently, as foundation staff design their own strategies and treat grantees to some extent as "contractors" for carrying it out; this model does not currently appeal to us, but we plan on further investigating the history of philanthropy (particularly success stories) to see whether there is more promise in this approach than we'd guess.

Transparency

With a project as broad and open-ended as GiveWell Labs, we expect to make a lot of guesses and judgment calls regarding promising areas/ideas/projects, and we expect to use heuristics and take shortcuts in narrowing the field. We don't commit to detailed reviews of every idea or every proposal, or to the use of objective formulas to decide between them. (The same applies, and always has applied, to our existing research on top charities.)

However, a core value of ours is that interested parties - no matter who they are - ought to be able to understand as much as possible of (a) which options we considered; (b) why we chose the ones we chose. To this end, we plan on publishing:

• Extensive discussion of the values and beliefs that are relevant to which sorts of sources we use and which areas we focus on investigating. This discussion will take place via future blog posts. We hope that anyone who reads these posts will understand why we look at the areas and sources we do, and if we aren't accomplishing this we hope our readers will comment to let us know.
• A list of the sources we use to generate ideas (step 1), along with detailed notes from particularly noteworthy conversations. Our goal here is to cast the net wide, so if you know of promising sources of ideas that fit with the values/principles we're expressing and you don't see us using them, we encourage you to comment.
• Discussion of the general beliefs (and relevant facts) that lead us to discard certain ideas from step #1 while moving forward to step #2 on other ideas, again via the blog.
• A full list of the proposals we consider (step #2), along with notes from discussing these proposals.
• Discussion of the general beliefs (and relevant facts) that guide our choice of particular proposals (step #2) to move to the "deep investigation" phase (step #2), again via the blog.
• Full details of the materials we collect via deep investigation (step #3) and our notes on the strengths and weaknesses of each giving option that makes it to this stage.

We will withhold information when necessary to respect confidentiality agreements. However, we will make our best effort to obtain clearance for - and share - all important/relevant information. This is the same policy we've used in charity investigations, and while some information remains confidential, we've still published the vast majority of the information we have (enough so that our views generally don't need to be taken on trust).

Preserving GiveWell's core values

GiveWell Labs is different in substantial ways from our existing research (which continues). However, we feel that we will be able to preserve the most important aspects of GiveWell:

• A focus on finding the best giving opportunities in terms of positive impact, rather than in terms of telling compelling stories or making donors feel good.
• Recommendations that are transparent enough to allow outsiders to draw their own conclusions and give meaningful feedback.

If we can preserve these things while working in a more open-ended way, we'll be able to find better giving opportunities and to demonstrate our principles' broad applicability. This means there will be fewer reasons than ever for other large givers to be keeping their own processes opaque.

Our criteria

The main things we're looking for in a giving opportunity are:

1. Upside: we'd prefer to fund projects that have the potential to go extremely well. Projects aiming to demonstrate a model that can be scaled up, generate new scientific knowledge that can be used by many others, or put a program in place that eventually becomes self-sustaining independent of philanthropic support all have "upside." Simply aiming to deliver insecticide-treated nets using established delivery methods does not have much "upside" (though it may score well on many of these other criteria).
2. High likelihood of success: we'd prefer to fund projects that are very likely to do a respectable amount of good per dollar. The "evidence base" of a project - i.e., the set of past well-understood events that can be used to put its likelihood of success in context - is key here. Obviously this criterion will often be in tension with the "upside" criterion; the ideal for us is a project that has both, i.e., a project that's both very likely to do some good and has some possibility of doing enormous amounts of good (we think that giving to VillageReach in 2010 fit into this category).
3. 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. We thus have a strong preference to fund projects with specific and meaningful deliverables that will give us a strong sense of whether things are going as hoped (as well as permission to publish updates on these deliverables).

   We are relatively new to giving and plan to be doing a lot more of it in the future, so making sure that early projects are learning opportunities is crucial.

4. People we're confident in. We prefer to fund projects where we are impressed by and confident in the people involved. However, our take on how to evaluate people seems to be different from that of some other funders; we'll elaborate in a future post.
5. Room for more funding. We prefer to fund projects that would not happen without our funding. This means that we aren't actually looking for the "best ways to spend philanthropic funds"; we're looking for the "best ways to spend philanthropic funds that aren't already on the agendas of other funders."

We don't have an explicit formula for weighing the above criteria above against each other. Broadly speaking, we'd prefer to fund an opportunity that is strong on all of the following: (a) at least one of #1 and #2; (b) at least one of #3 and #4; (c) #5. (Note that we do not feel the approach of estimating 'expected good accomplished' for each project, and simply ranking by this metric, is a good way to maximize actual expected good accomplished; for more, see the body and comments of a recent post on expected-value calculations.)

One more consideration is leverage: we prefer projects where our funding mobilizes more funding from other givers as well, thus multiplying the impact of our funds in some sense. However, we think this is far less important than the criteria listed above. We'd rather fund a great project all on our own, and leave other funders to spend on their own projects, than get a 5:1 or 100:1 funding match from others on a project that is weak on the above criteria.

Priority Causes

We are not at all confident that these causes represent the most promising ones; we see our list of priority causes as a starting point for learning. By publishing our reasoning, along with all data we've used, we hope to elicit feedback at this early stage; in the course of investigating our priority causes, we expect to learn more about these causes and about the best way to choose causes in general. And we have prioritized our causes partly based on the potential for learning, not just based on how promising we would guess that they are. Also note that these causes do not represent restrictions - we will consider outstanding giving opportunities in any category - but rather areas of focus for investigation.

We currently believe that no established philanthropist engages in strategic cause selection - the practice of listing all the causes one might work on, and choosing them based on a combination of "potential impact" and "underinvestment by other philanthropists." (This is not to say that no established philanthropist picks good causes - we believe many have picked excellent causes, perhaps through more implicit "strategy" - it is just to say that we know of no established philanthropist applying the sort of explicit strategic selection we envision.) So we believe we are in uncharted territory; thus, we expect to hit a fair amount of dead ends and to do a lot of revision and learning, but we also hope that strategic cause selection will eventually become a valuable tool for having maximal impact with one's giving.

Summary of our priority causes (details follow):

• Global health and nutrition is an area we know well and believe has many good giving opportunities. It is our current top priority. We seek to find more opportunities for donors along the lines of our top charities; we also seek to learn from existing foundations about the best higher-risk projects they are unable to fund.
• Funding scientific research is a good conceptual fit for philanthropy, accounts for many of philanthropy's most impressive success stories, and may provide bang-for-the-buck as good as or better than global health and nutrition.
• Meta-research is our term for trying to improve the systematic incentives that academic researchers face, to bring them more in line with producing maximally useful work. We believe there is substantial room for improvement in this alignment, and that this cause is therefore promising as a high-leverage way to get the benefits of funding research; current philanthropic attention to this cause appears very low.
• Averting and preparing for global catastrophic risks (GCRs) including climate change is a good conceptual fit for philanthropy and may provide bang-for-the-buck as good as or better than global health and nutrition. Today's philanthropy appears to invest moderately in climate change, but very little in other GCRs.

We also briefly discuss popular causes that we aren't currently prioritizing.

Global health and nutrition

Based on our past work seeking outstanding charities, we feel that global health and nutrition is the strongest area within the category of "directly helping the disadvantaged." It's also an area that we know fairly well (again, because of our past work), so we expect to be able to find strong giving opportunities more quickly here than in areas we're less familiar with. Because of this, global health and nutrition is our top priority for GiveWell Labs.

Our plans:

• As discussed at our 2011 research outline, we are investigating the idea of restricted funding to large organizations in order to fund proven, cost-effective interventions that we can't fund otherwise. Our goal here would be to, in a sense, "create new top charities" - create funding vehicles that allow individual donors to deliver proven, cost-effective health and nutrition interventions. (One could think of this project as trying to create an "AMF for vaccines, nutrition, or other promising intervention.")
• We are also interested in higher-risk, higher-upside projects within this area. We are aware of some major foundations that pursue these sorts of opportunities and have more investigative capacity and relevant background than we do. So our ideal would be to leverage these foundations' investigative work, by working with them to identify the best giving opportunities that they have sourced but cannot fully fund. We are currently looking into the possibility of doing this. If it proves unworkable, we may seek other ways to investigate high-risk, high-upside opportunities in this area.

Funding scientific research

As discussed previously, we believe many of the most impressive "success stories" in the history of philanthropy are in the category of funding research, particularly biomedical research. We also find research funding to be a good conceptual fit for philanthropy, as well as something that could plausibly get better "bang for the buck" than global health and nutrition interventions (since it involves creating global public goods - once developed, a new insight can be applied on a global scale and potentially for a long time).

In philanthropy currently, it appears that biomedical research is a moderately popular area, while natural sciences are less popular but still have some philanthropic presence. Of course, much of the funding for (early-stage) research comes via government and/or university money, but we hypothesize that philanthropy may be able to play a special role in supplementing these systems, by specifically aiming to support the kind of work that the traditional academic system and government funders cannot or will not. (We believe that there may be ways in which the traditional system falls short of maximum value-added, as discussed in the next section.) When we look at the activities of current philanthropic players (see our notes on the biomedical research activities of the top 100 foundations), it seems possible to us that relatively few of these players are specifically looking to supplement or improve on the government and university systems (by contrast, we believe that many efforts within U.S. education and global health seek to improve on and contrast with government programs in these areas).

So we see funding research as a potentially high-impact area, and we're especially interested in the possibility of opportunities that the government/university systems systematically underfund. In addition, funding research is fundamentally different from the sort of direct-aid-oriented work we've focused on in the past, and we feel that investigating it will be an important learning experience.

Our next steps will be to

• Seek out conversations with the major foundations that fund scientific research
• Ask researchers about under-invested-in opportunities, while conducting "meta-research" conversations (see next section)

Meta-research

In the course of our research on outstanding charities, we've come to the working conclusion that academic research - at least on topics relevant to us - is falling far short of its maximum value-added to society, largely due to problematic incentives. We laid out some of our views last year in Suggestions for the Social Sciences; we also think that GiveWell Board member Tim Ogden's recent SSIR piece is worth reading on this topic.

In brief, we believe that (a) academic incentives do not appear fully aligned with what would be most useful (for example, replicating studies is highly useful but does not appear to be popular in academia); (b) academics rarely engage in practices - such as preregistration, and sharing of data and code - that could make their research easier for outsiders to evaluate and use in decisionmaking; (c) too much academic research is restricted to pay-access to journals, rather than being in a format and place that would allow maximum accessibility. Based on informal conversations, we believe these issues are present across academia generally, not just in the areas we've examined, though we intend to investigate more.

We have seen some philanthropy focused on (c). Two of the 82 foundations we've examined have program areas that we've categorized as "scholarship and open access"; the Wellcome Trust in the UK is also pushing for open access. However, we're not aware of any foundation making a concerted push to improve (a) and (b), aligning academic incentives with what would be most useful to society.

As discussed in the previous section, we think of research as a highly promising and important area for philanthropy, based both on history and on the conceptual possibility of impact-per-dollar-spent. If problematic incentives are causing academic research to systematically fall short of its maximum potential value-added to society, investments in meta-research could have highly leveraged impact. That's sufficient to think that this cause has some potential; the fact that it appears to be largely absent from today's large-scale philanthropy increases its appeal.

We will write more in the future about our plans for investigating meta-research, which overlap strongly with our plans for investigating direct funding of research (the previous section). We are aiming to speak to a broad range of academics about whether, and how, the work being done in their fields - and the general practices of their field - diverge from what would add maximum value to society.

Global catastrophic risks (GCRs), including climate change

Foundations work to address a variety of threats - such as climate change, nuclear weapons proliferation, and bioterrorism - that could conceivably lead to major global catastrophes.

We see this work as an excellent conceptual fit for philanthropy, because the potential catastrophes are so far-reaching that it is hard to articulate any other actor that has good incentives to invest sufficiently in preparing for and averting them. (Governments do have some incentives to avert catastrophic risks, but catastrophic risk preparation has no natural "interest groups" to lobby for it, and it is easy to imagine that governments may not invest sufficiently or efficiently.) As with research, we find it plausible that opportunities in this area could have good "bang for the buck" relative to international aid, simply because they seek to avert such large catastrophes.

In philanthropy currently, working on climate change is moderately popular, but work on other risks is extremely rare. Out of 82 foundations we examined, two work on nuclear non-proliferation and one works on biological threats; none work on other potential threats.

One concern about this area is that gauging the success or failure of projects seems extremely difficult to do, even in a proximate way, because projects are so focused on low-probability events.

We are currently reviewing the literature on climate change and will be posting more in the future. We are also advising Nick Beckstead and a few volunteers from Giving What We Can as they collect information on the organizations working on GCRs other than climate change.

A note on policy advocacy

A long-term goal of ours is to learn more about policy advocacy, which is a general philanthropic tactic (an option for funding in almost any cause) that we know very little about. For the near future, we do not plan on recommending any policy advocacy funding; we plan on allocating small amounts of time to conversations with people in the space to learn more about how it works in general.

Popular causes we don't plan to prioritize

Our survey of the current state of philanthropy highlighted the following as particularly popular causes that aren't listed above. We will be writing more about them; for now, we provide very brief thoughts and relevant links to some work we've done in the past.

• U.S./developed-world education: we perceive this as perhaps the most popular cause in philanthropy today. Many major foundations and philanthropists are working on it, and have worked on it in the past, yet progress seems slow on achieving - and rolling out - evidence-backed ways to improve educational outcomes. For more, see our report on U.S. charities.
• U.S. poverty alleviation (including health care): we see a lot of philanthropy focused in these areas today, yet we believe the bang-for-the-buck is poor relative to international aid. For more, see our report on U.S. charities, Your Dollar Goes Further Overseas, Poor in the U.S. = rich, and Hunger Here vs. Hunger There.
• Arts and culture. We don't see GiveWell as having much potential value-added in this area. (We'll be elaborating in a future post.)
• Animal welfare; environmental conservation (not including climate change-related work). Current GiveWell staff are primarily interested in humanitarian giving, and we don't see these areas as being directly enough connected to humanitarian values to merit a high priority. At one point we advised a volunteer who did some work investigating animal welfare charities, and we may later discuss this work.
• Funding social entrepreneurs and social enterprise. We do not find this area promising; we will be writing about it more in the future. Also see Acumen Fund and Social Enterprise Investment and When Donations and Profits Meet, Beware.
• Developing-world aid outside of health and nutrition. From what we've seen so far, health and nutrition are the most promising areas within developing-world aid. However, we remain open on this point, and are certainly more interested in this area than in the other areas listed in this section. We're particularly interested in learning more about the "transparency/accountability/democracy" sector, which is moderately popular among today's foundations and which we currently know very little about. Also see our writeups on microfinance, developing-world economic empowerment, disaster relief, agriculture, and education (as well as our summary of why we prefer global health and nutrition).