Frequently Asked Questions

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Table of Contents

General

What is GiveWell's mission?

GiveWell’s mission is to find outstanding giving opportunities and publish the full details of our analysis to help donors decide where to give. (More about GiveWell)

How does GiveWell conduct research and what are its findings?

Our focus is on finding great charities. To do this, we:

  1. Focus on areas that we feel offer donors outstanding opportunities to do good. To date, we have focused primarily on international aid, and, in particular, global health (more on why we focus on these areas).
  2. Consider a large number of organizations and rely on heuristics, or meaningful shortcuts, to distinguish between organizations and identify ones that we think will ultimately qualify for our recommendations.
  3. Conduct conduct in-depth evaluations on organizations we believe are strong contenders for our recommendation, including interviews with staff, reviews of publicly-available and internal documents about the charity's work and plans, and site visits to the charity's programs.

For more information, please see:

Who is behind this project? What qualifies you to do this work?

We are an independent non-profit started by a group of donors who wanted to accomplish as much good as possible with their donations and found that there wasn't a strong source of information available on how to do this. Since 2007, we have worked full-time to research the issues and charities that we write about our on website and blog. Thousands of hours of research have gone into our recommendations.

For more information, please see:

What is GiveWell's impact? How do you evaluate yourself?

Broadly, the value of GiveWell is a product of the following:

  1. How much money we influence, directly or indirectly, with our research.
  2. How much value our research adds (i.e., how much more effective a donation is when informed by our research).
  3. The extent to which we're able to create higher-quality dialogue around giving, and spread the acceptance and use of our core values (particularly impact-focused giving and transparency in giving decisions).

(1) is relatively straightforward to measure. We track donations to our recommended charities through a variety of methods, including the donation links on our site and by asking donors to submit our donation report when they give through another channel. We report the results quarterly on our blog and on our impact page.

Measuring (2) coincides with the goal of our research: determining what the charities we examine can be expected to accomplish, and how they compare to each other. There is often a great deal of uncertainty in comparing top charities to "average" charities, precisely because a lack of measurement is characteristic of "average" charities; but just looking at differences in our top candidates can give a sense of how widely strategies diverge and how much can be gained by more informed decisions.

(3) is the hardest to measure, because the spread of ideas is complex and wide-ranging; so although we can track changes in dialogue, attributing them to our specific activities is difficult.

These metrics are complex and cannot be precisely quantified. However, as with evaluating our applicants, we believe we can evaluate ourselves using a combination of empirical data, analysis, and judgment calls, and that we should do so as transparently as possible. We post annual self-reviews of our progress as well as external assessments of the quality of our research.

How does GiveWell pay its own salaries and operating costs?

GiveWell is a non-profit that is supported by a set of core donors who believe strongly in our mission and pay our operating costs. For details on our revenues and expenses, see our financial statements.

Rigorous evaluation to measure impact is expensive. Should charities really spend money evaluating their impact or on participating in GiveWell's process (instead of spending that money on helping people)?

We believe, based on the research we've done, that an excellent charity can be several times more effective than an average one, and that many charities may not be helping people in any significant way at all. In this context, spending time and money on evaluating charities - rather than just funding them - seems justified.

We encourage you to read our reports and determine whether the differences between charities that we've identified are large enough to justify the costs to charities of evaluating their programs and GiveWell's operational costs.

Why don't you report on charity scandals or corrupt charities?

Thoroughly evaluating even a single charity is an enormous amount of work, and we want to use our limited time and resources optimally. With that in mind, we believe that identifying the best charities is far more important than identifying the worst.

By identifying the best charities, we can direct donations to them, and thereby create incentives for charities to continually improve at getting and demonstrating strong results. We believe that reporting on scandals could not accomplish the same thing, and is not as badly needed.

Do you worry that evaluating charities - weaknesses along with strengths - will turn people off from giving in general?

We generally don't think this is a major concern. Some people recognize the complexity and difficulty of what charities do, and would feel more confident in their giving if they could see the truth; others naively expect perfection, and would feel less confident in their giving if they saw facts that contradict marketing materials. We would guess that our website is likely to be used by the former and ignored by the latter, resulting in more giving rather than less.

What is your relationship to other organizations with the name GiveWell?

There is a charity watchdog organization in Australia called Givewell. We are not related to this organization.

How can I apply for a job at GiveWell?

See our jobs page.

What should I do if I can't find the answer to my question?

Please feel free to email us your question at info@givewell.org.

For charities

See our guide to GiveWell for charities.