Guide to GiveWell
From GiveWell
| The content below is out-of-date, and is not actively maintained. |
| We have not taken it down because it can serve as useful information on the history and approach of our project, when taken in context, but all up-to-date content can be found on the main GiveWell Site at www.givewell.net. Any views expressed on particular nonprofit organizations do not represent our current views and positions. |
Contents |
Our mission
We started as a group of friends, unaffiliated with any nonprofit organization, but interested in donating to the best ones. We believe that giving intelligently and efficiently is at least as important as giving generously. Nonprofit organizations vary wildly in terms of their broad goals, the strategies they use to accomplish those goals, and the effectiveness of those strategies. But unlike for-profit corporations, nonprofit organizations too often attract investment exclusively through emotional appeals, without giving the full picture of why their activities can be expected to produce results. We aim to change that, by providing a single place where you can see all the information we have about the world’s best nonprofit organizations—-and all the reasons to believe (or doubt) that they are using your dollars and time to accomplish the most good possible.
We think that's the relevant information about who we are, but we did disclose more about our specific backgrounds on our blog (see this post).
This website
We built this website last fall, as a way of sharing what we've found. In the process, we've discovered that doing this well requires the time and resources of a full-time project, and we've concluded that the benefits of such a project (in terms of the potential to help donors find the best ways of helping people, and in terms of the potential to create global dialogue on how to improve the world) are too great to leave on the table. As such, we have formed a plan to form the Clear Fund, the world's first transparent grantmaker.
All text below pertains to the existing reviews on our site; for more information on how we plan to execute our larger-scale project, see our business plan.
Our current content
We want to be a resource for all givers, so we try to separate philosophy (which broad goals are the best) from strategy (what are the most effective ways to accomplish a goal). As of now, we've focused on the causes that the GiveWell staffers are most passionate about: emerging-world malaria and diarrheal diseases, microfinance, inner-city community programs, and disaster relief. Our Cause pages survey each of these broad goals, summarizing the size of each problem, the issues involved, and the various strategies being pursued to solve it. Each Cause page includes a summary of--and link to--organizations we've thoroughly checked out. For individual organizations, we have in-depth Review pages in which we evaluate and rate their likely effectiveness within their cause. To the extent we haven't covered the causes you care about most, we welcome you to help change that.
We hope you'll use this website to inform your giving, whether by following our recommendations or by using them as jumping-off points for your own investigations. We also hope you'll tell us what you know about good nonprofits that we're missing (and we know we're missing a lot). We envision a world in which giving is done less on a whim and more from deliberate attempts to find the best organizations--and therefore translates more directly into accomplishing good.
Differences with other charity evaluators
There are already many organizations out there attempting to distinguish good nonprofit organizations from bad ones. They fall broadly into two categories:
Watchdogs, such as GuideStar and Charity Navigator, provide basic information on an extremely broad range of organizations. They see their role as weeding out the most fiscally irresponsible and fraudulent organizations, and letting you do the rest. For example, GuideStar lets you check 501(c)(3) status and view the tax form for any U.S. nonprofit organization, and Charity Navigator parses the tax form (for a smaller set of organizations) in order to rate a nonprofit’s financial efficiency based on things like what proportion of its revenue goes toward overhead and fundraising. What these watchdogs don’t do is determine which organizations have the most effective strategies, the best track records of producing results, the most innovative ideas, etc. Charity Navigator will tell you whether a nonprofit is defrauding you by spending all its money on fundraising; it won’t tell you how much of the nonprofit’s money goes to each strategy it employs, and what reasons there are to think each strategy accomplishes what it’s supposed to accomplish.
Foundations, such as the Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, investigate fewer charities more deeply, because they are deciding where to give major gifts. Foundations vary in their methods, but all are trying to do the most possible good per dollar, and must therefore get a detailed picture of what each nonprofit they look at is doing. What these foundations don’t do, at least currently, is present the details of what they’ve found for all the world to see. A foundation is charged with choosing where to give its own money, not with helping others choose where to give theirs.
GiveWell seeks to examine nonprofits as carefully as a foundation would—-after all, the staff members are giving their own money to the best ones—-while making all of its research completely documented and completely transparent, so that others can follow it, comment on it, and draw their own conclusions.
Format of the website
The website is built from the MediaWiki application that you may have seen in open-collaboration projects such as Wikipedia. This application was designed to create websites that many people can contribute to, which works well for us because we want everyone to be able to comment on and add to the knowledge base we're building. For each page on this website, the tabs above allow you to discuss the page, view the "wiki code" (a simple formatting language) that was used to generate the page, and see the history of changes to the page. The links at the upper right allow you to quickly create a username to identify you in discussions and other contributions.
Unlike Wikipedia, we do not allow all users to edit all pages. For our reviews (and awards such as "Best in Class"), we look over all the evidence we have and use our own judgment in assessing overall quality; we don't want people interfering with that based on limited information or personal agendas. However, we encourage you to use the discussion pages to share your thoughts. You can also create a new page (one way to do this is to search for the page you want to create in the box at the left), and if we think a particular page is well done and fits in with the rest of our website, we will link to it.
Guide to a Review page
The overriding question of a Review page is: "Is this nonprofit the best place to give your money?" Framing our information through this question helps ensure that we present what we've found in the most concise, relevant way. You can find all the source materials for a review in the "Sources" section at the bottom, to draw your own conclusions.
To us, a good organization is one that:
- has a good goal;
- has chosen sensible strategies to accomplish that goal;
- spends its money on those strategies rather than inefficient overhead or fundraising (or outright fraud);
- has the ability to accomplish more as it gets more money, meaning that your dollar has an impact;
- has a process in place for monitoring and evaluating whether its activities are having the intended effect;
- has evidence showing that its activities are indeed having the intended effect.
Our reviews are organized around this list.
Mission
This section describes the broad goal of an organization, i.e., what about the world it is trying to improve. There will often be overlap between this section and the overview of the cause associated with the organization, but organizations within a general cause can still vary quite a bit in philosophy, particularly in whom they're trying to help. The "Mission" section usually contains a detailed "Who benefits and how" subsection, intended to give you as clear a picture as possible of what life is like for a person before and after they benefit from the organization's activities.
We do not give a rating for an organization's mission. The purpose of this section is to help you determine how well its philosophy fits with your own.
Ratings
The next few sections get at the effectiveness of an organization in accomplishing its mission. While there is often no definitive way to establish who is most effective, we find it a much less subjective question than the question of which missions are most worthwhile. The reviewer rates each organization on each of the following categories; you'll find the ratings at the top of the review.
Strategies and Activities
We try to be very specific about what an organization is spending its money on. We list each of the activities that get a significant amount of the organization's resources (when possible, we specify how much of the budget goes to each), and for each we try to paint a picture of how much accomplishment can be expected for each dollar spent.
A 5/5 in this category is reserved for organizations that are truly using innovative, cost-effective methods to achieve their goals, and allocating the lion's share of their resources to the most effective ones. Organizations whose strategies are fairly typical for their cause receive 3/5, and organizations that spend most of their money on strategies that don't seem cost-effective or effective at all receive 1/5.
Fiscal responsibility
Great ideas and strategies do an organization no good if it's irresponsibly wasting its money. The sad truth is that many nonprofit organizations exist more to fund themselves than to do great things. This section provides a link to an organization's tax form and gives our impressions, from scanning it and from talking to representatives, of whether the organization is spending as much of its money as it can on its mission.
To earn a 5/5, an organization must pursue not only efficiency but transparency. True fiscal responsibility means being organized enough to know where every dollar is going, and responsible enough to have no problems disclosing it to anyone who asks. The government requires that charities distinguish between program expenses, fundraising expenses, and overhead. We ask for a higher level of detail: we want to know how much money is going to each activity the organization pursues, in each geographic region. Organizations that are unable to provide this kind of detail, but seem from their tax form and representatives to be basically responsible, receive 3/5; 1/5 and 2/5 go to organizations who seem badly disorganized or whose motives we question.
Relevance of your dollar
This section tries to pinpoint what an organization needs in order to do more for the world. Some organizations are ready to put every extra dollar they get to good use; some face other bottlenecks such as local contacts, infrastructure, etc., which means your contribution will most likely end up in an endowment or a salary.
A 5/5 in this category means we believe that every dollar you give, up to a reasonable amount, will result in more of the organization's most effective activities. A good example is Nothing But Nets, which buys insecticide-treated bednets (for containing the spread of malaria) and gives them to existing measles prevention campaigns. All of the necessary distribution infrastructure is already in place, and they aren't providing as many bednets as would be ideal; literally, it appears that they will provide an extra bednet for every $10 you give. A 1/5 in this category generally will go to an organization whose most effective activities appear to have hit bottlenecks.
Self-evaluation process
A for-profit corporation ultimately has a good measure its own effectiveness: the bottom line. By contrast, a nonprofit organization that makes no explicit effort to monitor its own activities will never know whether they're working. Some types of social good are harder to measure than others, but for almost any cause, it is possible--and important--to have a process in place for getting at least some idea of how much good is being done. We recognize that self-evaluation can be very costly, using resources that could be used for more program activities. But our own experiences in the for-profit sector have convinced us that it is just not safe to rely on one's logic and reasoning (and good intentions), without ever checking them against reality.
A 5/5 in this category is reserved for organizations that have developed and implemented a self-evaluation process that is both comprehensive and consistently applied, such that the organizations collect as much relevant information as they reasonably can. Organizations that rely on anecdotes when they could be systemizing their self-evaluation will not receive more than a 3/5. Unfortunately, many organizations do not even have anecdotes on record, and have no evidence of their own effectiveness or plan to collect it; accordingly, they receive 1/5.
Evidence of effectiveness
This section addresses the comprehensiveness and persuasiveness of the evidence that the organization is accomplishing what it intends to. Usually, an organization with no good self-evaluation process will also have no evidence of effectiveness, but this is not always the case: we are more than willing to consider independent research, whether by academics or other organizations, that implies the effectiveness of an organization's activities.
A 5/5 in this category means we've seen data pointing strongly and directly to the effectiveness of the organization's activities. A 3/5 means we've seen enough to think it more likely than not that the activities are working.
Unanswered questions
We try to be as comprehensive as we can be in collecting information, but often nonprofits take a long time to find what we ask for, and in any case there is always more to find out. This section makes explicit what we're still wondering about, and we encourage you to help us fill in the blanks.
Sources
We try to include all the materials that went into our review, roughly in order of importance. Our footnotes refer to this section, so they are not sequential (i.e., numbers may repeat, and the first footnote isn't necessarily #1). If you end up looking at this section by clicking on a footnote, you can get back to where you were using the "back" button on your browser.
Guide to a Cause page
A Cause page is devoted to a particular problem that a significant part of the nonprofit sector is trying to address. The page starts with an overview of how big the problem is, whom it affects and how, and what can be done about it. Like the Mission section of a Review page, this overview aims mostly to help you assess the fit between your philosophical goals and a class of nonprofit organizations.
Evaluating different strategies
Our Cause pages itemize the major strategies that nonprofit organizations within the cause use, and gives a brief summary of what which ones we believe (based on research where possible, and our judgment where not) are most promising and cost-effective.
Organizational summaries
For each organization, we give a brief description of its mission and our take on the organization. We also give the size of its most recent budget, for a quick sense of whether it's a small, medium, or large organization; we give quick links to its website, donation page, and tax form; and we link to the more detailed Review page for that organization.
Sources
We try to include all the materials we used in describing the cause and evaluating the various strategies, roughly in order of importance. Our footnotes refer to this section, so they are not sequential (i.e., numbers may repeat, and the first footnote isn't necessarily #1).
How you can help
At this point, our greatest need is for more information on the world's best nonprofits, regardless of mission. We make no claim to be experts in the nonprofit sector; we are simply trying to collect and evaluate information as well as we can.
At the top of every page on this site, you'll find a "Discuss this page" tab. Feel free to add to discussion pages (you can do so by clicking the "+" tab at the top of them), and to list any thoughts you have on information we're missing, whether on causes or on particular organizations. We prefer that you create a login (using the links in the upper right hand corner) so we have some idea who you are, but we'll take feedback in whatever form it comes, even if it's anonymous.
If you would like to review a particular organization--or an entire cause--feel free to create your own page by entering the page name ("Review: ___" for a Review page, "Cause: ___" for a Cause page) in the search box to the right. Currently, you can't edit pages--only create them--so use the "Show preview" button liberally when creating the page, and when you're done with it, let us know. If we like a page, we'll link to it and give you the ability to edit it. We may also offer you website-wide editing privileges. We reserve the right to modify anything you create on this website.
