GiveWell's research model is designed to find the best charities, not just the well-intentioned or "reputable" ones. This distinguishes us from other charity evaluators, and leads to a fundamentally different approach.
Verifying a charity's legal status, structure, and accounting can be done using public information and standard formulas; but it doesn't help you figure out who's best at helping people. Rather than generating standard metrics for every charity from UNICEF to Wikipedia, we work with one cause and region at a time, studying the context, the relevant research, and - most importantly - the charities.
This is a far more intensive and expensive approach, but we believe it is the only way to get good results - not just good efforts.
The Clear Fund
The Clear Fund, a federally recognized tax-exempt public charity, is the grantmaking arm of GiveWell. Like a United Way, it pools donations from individuals and gives larger grants. Unlike a United Way, it is devoted to complete transparency in every aspect of its grantmaking; its primary purpose is to generate publicly accessible information, to help everyone - not just our supporters - accomplish as much good as possible with their donations.
As our review pages show, understanding a charity's programs and results generally requires a great deal of back-and-forth, and often requires fundraisers' time as well as ours. In order to collect truly substantial information from charities, we sometimes provide the incentive of possible grants (in addition to the private donations that come in as a result of our recommendations).
Research Process
Our basic process for researching a cause is:
- Identify charities within the cause. See this page for the full details of how we found charities, and which charities we contacted thus far.
- Review charities' materials, identifying the charities most likely to be able to demonstrate proven, effective, scalable methods of helping people. See this page for more information on the process we used.
- Study the strongest charities in depth and rank-order them. This work is far past the point of being able to use a standard formula or set of criteria; each cause is different. For more information on the strongest charities we've reviewed, see our page of top rated charities.
- Write up our reasoning, with complete transparency. Transparency means you can see why we say everything we say - whether our source is a charity's application materials, an independent study, or just an intuition. We believe that trying to take intuition, judgment calls, and the human element out of giving is futile; we make use of all these things, but make it clear when we're doing so.
- Get feedback from the outside world, and continue to learn. We believe that "Where should I give?" is one of the hardest questions there is, and there's no single field of knowledge or expertise that can take it on completely. Instead, we seek to put our thoughts in public as a starting point, and get as many perspectives from the outside as we can. If you have thoughts on our analysis, please don't hesitate to contact us.