Aggregator

Though GiveWell donors typically indicate how they would like their donations to be designated—e.g., for the support of one or more specific recommended charities, or for granting at GiveWell’s discretion—we occasionally receive donations without any designation information. It is important to us that donors understand our process for handling these donations: as a general rule, we treat all undesignated donations as unrestricted gifts, which means they will most likely be used to fund GiveWell’s operating expenses.

In this post, we will:

1. Discuss undesignated donations more in-depth and outline our rationale for treating them as unrestricted gifts.
2. Explain how our thinking on processing these types of donations has evolved over time to better meet our donations processing goals—to make it easy for donors to communicate their designation preferences, be transparent about where donations are allocated, and keep our administrative costs low.
3. Provide information on how to make sure that, as a donor, your designation preferences are communicated to us.

If you have any questions about the designation of a future or past donation to GiveWell, please email us at donations@givewell.org.

What is an undesignated donation?

GiveWell grants most of the donations we receive to our top and standout charities. Donors usually indicate which organizations they prefer to support with their donation—we refer to this as a designation. On our donation forms, donors can choose one or more recommended charities, grants to recommended charities for granting at our discretion, or unrestricted (which we will likely use for GiveWell’s operating expenses).

Donors giving online through our website must select one or more designation options when making a donation. However, we occasionally receive donations through other payment methods—e.g., checks, wire transfers, securities donations, or donations through employer giving platforms such as Benevity—that do not include any designation information.

Our current process and how our thinking has evolved

As a general practice, when a donor does not communicate a designation to us, we treat their donation as unrestricted funding. If the donor has provided us with an email or physical address, we send them an email or letter and ask if they would prefer to have their donation designated differently.

Our initial process when receiving undesignated donations was to designate them according to the donor’s past giving history (when applicable). For example, if a donor had previously given in support of Against Malaria Foundation and Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, we would designate their subsequent donations accordingly.

However, in practice, we learned that the process of determining a donor’s pattern of giving is often time-consuming and prone to error. Donors may support a variety of charities with donations in varying amounts, and since our recommendation for what charities to support changes over time, it is reasonable to expect that donors’ preferences for where to allocate their gifts would also change from how they’ve given in the past. Due to the subjective nature of this process, we found it required a significant amount of time and resources to be spent on donations processing and auditing.

Another option for undesignated donations that we considered was allocating these gifts to our discretionary fund for recommended charities. We believed that donors might expect undesignated donations to go toward GiveWell’s most up-to-date recommended allocation. We have not systematically surveyed donors, but our impression from speaking with donors in the past is that some donors expected undesignated donations to support our recommended charities (at our discretion), while others preferred that we decide whether to allocate their donation to our operations or to our recommended charities.

A desire for a more standardized and transparent process led us to our current approach. Allocating gifts without clear designations towards unrestricted funds simplifies our donations and accounting processes, which in turn lowers the administrative cost of these processes. It also provides donors with more agency to choose another designation, if they wish—we are less likely to grant out unrestricted gifts to one or more of our recommended charities before donors have a chance to follow up on our no-designation email or letter and request a different designation.

How to communicate or modify a designation

To ensure that your donation to GiveWell is designated according to your preference, please be sure to email us back at donations@givewell.org if you receive an email or letter from us that indicates your donation did not include a specific designation.

To ensure that your designation preferences are communicated to us at the time when we receive your donation:

• Be sure to fill out and enclose this form with each check you send. It is also helpful to add a note about the designation on the check itself. (If you are a recurring check donor and find it burdensome to fill out the check form with each donation, you may communicate your designation preferences for future donations via email at donations@givewell.org. Some online banking platforms will also allow you to add a memo to a recurring check payment that will appear on each check.)
• If giving by bank transfer, please fill out this form before donating and indicate your designation preference.
• If donating securities, please fill out this form before donating and indicate your designation preference.
• If donating through an employer giving platform such as Benevity, be sure to select the charity or charities you would like to support, or indicate this in the comment section along with your donation.
• If you are donating through a donor-advised fund (managed by, e.g., Vanguard or Schwab Charitable), please be sure to include your designation in the paperwork you submit to recommend a grant to GiveWell. You may also communicate your designation to us via email at donations@givewell.org. Note that we treat donations from donor-advised funds that are designated “Where it is needed most” as unrestricted funding.
• When submitting paperwork for a matching donation from your employer, be sure to specify how you would like the match to be designated. We treat all employer matches without a clear designation as unrestricted funding.

Donors are always welcome to email us at donations@givewell.org with any questions about the designation process or to communicate a designation for their future donations.

The post Our approach to processing undesignated donations appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Though GiveWell donors typically indicate how they would like their donations to be designated—e.g., for the support of one or more specific recommended charities, or for granting at GiveWell’s discretion—we occasionally receive donations without any designation information. It is important to us that donors understand our process for handling these donations: as a general rule, we treat all undesignated donations as unrestricted gifts, which means they will most likely be used to fund GiveWell’s operating expenses.

In this post, we will:

1. Discuss undesignated donations more in-depth and outline our rationale for treating them as unrestricted gifts.
2. Explain how our thinking on processing these types of donations has evolved over time to better meet our donations processing goals—to make it easy for donors to communicate their designation preferences, be transparent about where donations are allocated, and keep our administrative costs low.
3. Provide information on how to make sure that, as a donor, your designation preferences are communicated to us.

If you have any questions about the designation of a future or past donation to GiveWell, please email us at donations@givewell.org.

What is an undesignated donation?

GiveWell grants most of the donations we receive to our top and standout charities. Donors usually indicate which organizations they prefer to support with their donation—we refer to this as a designation. On our donation forms, donors can choose one or more recommended charities, grants to recommended charities for granting at our discretion, or unrestricted (which we will likely use for GiveWell’s operating expenses).

Donors giving online through our website must select one or more designation options when making a donation. However, we occasionally receive donations through other payment methods—e.g., checks, wire transfers, securities donations, or donations through employer giving platforms such as Benevity—that do not include any designation information.

Our current process and how our thinking has evolved

As a general practice, when a donor does not communicate a designation to us, we treat their donation as unrestricted funding. If the donor has provided us with an email or physical address, we send them an email or letter and ask if they would prefer to have their donation designated differently.

Our initial process when receiving undesignated donations was to designate them according to the donor’s past giving history (when applicable). For example, if a donor had previously given in support of Against Malaria Foundation and Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, we would designate their subsequent donations accordingly.

However, in practice, we learned that the process of determining a donor’s pattern of giving is often time-consuming and prone to error. Donors may support a variety of charities with donations in varying amounts, and since our recommendation for what charities to support changes over time, it is reasonable to expect that donors’ preferences for where to allocate their gifts would also change from how they’ve given in the past. Due to the subjective nature of this process, we found it required a significant amount of time and resources to be spent on donations processing and auditing.

Another option for undesignated donations that we considered was allocating these gifts to our discretionary fund for recommended charities. We believed that donors might expect undesignated donations to go toward GiveWell’s most up-to-date recommended allocation. We have not systematically surveyed donors, but our impression from speaking with donors in the past is that some donors expected undesignated donations to support our recommended charities (at our discretion), while others preferred that we decide whether to allocate their donation to our operations or to our recommended charities.

A desire for a more standardized and transparent process led us to our current approach. Allocating gifts without clear designations towards unrestricted funds simplifies our donations and accounting processes, which in turn lowers the administrative cost of these processes. It also provides donors with more agency to choose another designation, if they wish—we are less likely to grant out unrestricted gifts to one or more of our recommended charities before donors have a chance to follow up on our no-designation email or letter and request a different designation.

How to communicate or modify a designation

To ensure that your donation to GiveWell is designated according to your preference, please be sure to email us back at donations@givewell.org if you receive an email or letter from us that indicates your donation did not include a specific designation.

To ensure that your designation preferences are communicated to us at the time when we receive your donation:

• Be sure to fill out and enclose this form with each check you send. It is also helpful to add a note about the designation on the check itself. (If you are a recurring check donor and find it burdensome to fill out the check form with each donation, you may communicate your designation preferences for future donations via email at donations@givewell.org. Some online banking platforms will also allow you to add a memo to a recurring check payment that will appear on each check.)
• If giving by bank transfer, please fill out this form before donating and indicate your designation preference.
• If donating securities, please fill out this form before donating and indicate your designation preference.
• If donating through an employer giving platform such as Benevity, be sure to select the charity or charities you would like to support, or indicate this in the comment section along with your donation.
• If you are donating through a donor-advised fund (managed by, e.g., Vanguard or Schwab Charitable), please be sure to include your designation in the paperwork you submit to recommend a grant to GiveWell. You may also communicate your designation to us via email at donations@givewell.org. Note that we treat donations from donor-advised funds that are designated “Where it is needed most” as unrestricted funding.
• When submitting paperwork for a matching donation from your employer, be sure to specify how you would like the match to be designated. We treat all employer matches without a clear designation as unrestricted funding.

Donors are always welcome to email us at donations@givewell.org with any questions about the designation process or to communicate a designation for their future donations.

The post Our approach to processing undesignated donations appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

This post will provide a brief overview of GiveWell’s progress in a number of areas so far this year. In summary,

1. Research: We are making progress on reaching charities that might be a good fit for a GiveWell recommendation and asking them to apply. We are also moving forward with GiveWell’s intervention prioritization goals.
2. Operations: The separation of GiveWell and the Open Philanthropy Project was a major organizational priority in the first half of the year and was finalized on June 1. We’ve also increased the specialization on the operations team and outsourced some of GiveWell’s operations work.
3. Outreach: Outreach is now a major organizational priority. We hope to develop a strategy for significantly increasing money moved to our recommended charities by September.

We hope you will let us know if you have any questions about our work this year in the comments.

Research

Our work on research now falls into two primary categories: Traditional top charities work, consisting of research into promising programs and evaluations of charities implementing them as potential GiveWell top charities, and GiveWell Incubation Grants, our work to grow the pipeline of potential top charities and improve our understanding of our current recommended charities.

Top charities

• Encouraging charities to apply for a GiveWell recommendation.

  In recent years, we were surprised by how few charities reached out to GiveWell to apply for a recommendation. We guessed that some part of this may be driven by (a) a lack of understanding of GiveWell’s research priorities and which organizations we might be interested in recommending, and (b) a lack of understanding or misconceptions about GiveWell’s charity review process or the value added of a GiveWell recommendation in increasing a charity’s funding.

  We took two steps to address this problem in 2017. First, GiveWell Research Analyst Chelsea Tabart is now serving as GiveWell’s “charity liaison.” In this role, Chelsea connects with groups that may be a good fit for a GiveWell recommendation to learn more about their work and to encourage them to apply if a fit seems promising, and to explain GiveWell’s review process and value added. Second, we published a blog post on why we think more charities should consider applying for a GiveWell recommendation. We are now considering a number of charities as potential top-charity contenders and attribute this in part to taking the steps described above.

• Intervention prioritization.

  A major goal this year is to assess a large number of interventions as potential GiveWell priority programs. This “intervention prioritization” work involves surveying the literature for a variety of interventions to identify the most cost-effective and evidence-backed programs.

  We have made good progress on intervention research in 2017. (We plan to write about our progress in more detail in a future post.) We completed 50 quick evidence assessments in the first half of the year and published interim intervention reports on:

  • Sayana Press
  • Distribution of eyeglasses in developing countries
  • Antiretroviral therapy to treat HIV/AIDS
  • Interventions to promote handwashing
  • SMS reminders for vaccination.

  We also published an intervention report on surgery to repair obstetric fistula.

GiveWell Incubation Grants

We continue to expand our work on GiveWell’s Incubation Grants program:

• Partnership with IDinsight. We continued our partnership with IDinsight. IDinsight is working on a number of projects with GiveWell, including cost-effectiveness and monitoring assessments of surgery charities (cataract and fistula), running a randomized controlled trial of New Incentives’ pilot program to provide incentives for immunizations, and helping one of our top charities, the Against Malaria Foundation, improve its monitoring.
• Considering new top charities via GiveWell Incubation Grants. We’re considering some GiveWell Incubation Grant recipient charities as potential 2017 top charities. We’ve published blog posts on Zusha! and No Lean Season as contenders for a recommendation at the end of the year.

Recruiting

We hired Caitlin McGugan as a Senior Fellow and James Snowden started working with us as a research consultant. We hope they will increase GiveWell’s output of intervention reports. We also have one summer research analyst, Scott Weathers, working with us.

Operations

The separation of GiveWell and the Open Philanthropy Project was a major priority for GiveWell’s operations team in the first half of 2017. The separation was finalized on June 1.

The operations team continues to increase in specialization (historically, GiveWell operations work has been done by generalists on staff). We hired Maryana Pinchuk to serve as a Donations Manager and Erin Wolff as a Donations Relations Assistant; a search for a Controller to manage our finance and accounting is underway. We have also started to work with new vendors to outsource some operations work, which we hope will increase our available staff capacity and improve the quality of our operations.

Outreach

Outreach is now a major organizational priority for GiveWell. In the past, we focused very little on efforts to reach new potential donors with GiveWell’s work. Now, we think outreach is more of a limiting factor than research—the high-value funding gaps we’ve identified exceed the amount of donations we expect to direct to those gaps.

We have developed a list of ideas for how to significantly increase the money GiveWell directs to our recommended charities, and are planning to work on the most promising ideas over the next few months. For example, we think there may be relatively low-intensity steps to take in areas like podcast advertising; in February, we advertised on a small number of podcasts and plan to do so again based on the cost of running advertisements and the additional donations to top charities we tracked as a direct result of those ads.

We are also trying to hire another Research Analyst, Outreach Focus to expand our capacity to communicate with donors and other individuals who rely on GiveWell’s research.

The post Mid-year update on GiveWell’s progress appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

This post will provide a brief overview of GiveWell’s progress in a number of areas so far this year. In summary,

1. Research: We are making progress on reaching charities that might be a good fit for a GiveWell recommendation and asking them to apply. We are also moving forward with GiveWell’s intervention prioritization goals.
2. Operations: The separation of GiveWell and the Open Philanthropy Project was a major organizational priority in the first half of the year and was finalized on June 1. We’ve also increased the specialization on the operations team and outsourced some of GiveWell’s operations work.
3. Outreach: Outreach is now a major organizational priority. We hope to develop a strategy for significantly increasing money moved to our recommended charities by September.

We hope you will let us know if you have any questions about our work this year in the comments.

Research

Our work on research now falls into two primary categories: Traditional top charities work, consisting of research into promising programs and evaluations of charities implementing them as potential GiveWell top charities, and GiveWell Incubation Grants, our work to grow the pipeline of potential top charities and improve our understanding of our current recommended charities.

Top charities

• Encouraging charities to apply for a GiveWell recommendation.

  In recent years, we were surprised by how few charities reached out to GiveWell to apply for a recommendation. We guessed that some part of this may be driven by (a) a lack of understanding of GiveWell’s research priorities and which organizations we might be interested in recommending, and (b) a lack of understanding or misconceptions about GiveWell’s charity review process or the value added of a GiveWell recommendation in increasing a charity’s funding.

  We took two steps to address this problem in 2017. First, GiveWell Research Analyst Chelsea Tabart is now serving as GiveWell’s “charity liaison.” In this role, Chelsea connects with groups that may be a good fit for a GiveWell recommendation to learn more about their work and to encourage them to apply if a fit seems promising, and to explain GiveWell’s review process and value added. Second, we published a blog post on why we think more charities should consider applying for a GiveWell recommendation. We are now considering a number of charities as potential top-charity contenders and attribute this in part to taking the steps described above.

• Intervention prioritization.

  A major goal this year is to assess a large number of interventions as potential GiveWell priority programs. This “intervention prioritization” work involves surveying the literature for a variety of interventions to identify the most cost-effective and evidence-backed programs.

  We have made good progress on intervention research in 2017. (We plan to write about our progress in more detail in a future post.) We completed 50 quick evidence assessments in the first half of the year and published interim intervention reports on:

  • Sayana Press
  • Distribution of eyeglasses in developing countries
  • Antiretroviral therapy to treat HIV/AIDS
  • Interventions to promote handwashing
  • SMS reminders for vaccination.

  We also published an intervention report on surgery to repair obstetric fistula.

GiveWell Incubation Grants

We continue to expand our work on GiveWell’s Incubation Grants program:

• Partnership with IDinsight. We continued our partnership with IDinsight. IDinsight is working on a number of projects with GiveWell, including cost-effectiveness and monitoring assessments of surgery charities (cataract and fistula), running a randomized controlled trial of New Incentives’ pilot program to provide incentives for immunizations, and helping one of our top charities, the Against Malaria Foundation, improve its monitoring.
• Considering new top charities via GiveWell Incubation Grants. We’re considering some GiveWell Incubation Grant recipient charities as potential 2017 top charities. We’ve published blog posts on Zusha! and No Lean Season as contenders for a recommendation at the end of the year.

Recruiting

We hired Caitlin McGugan as a Senior Fellow and James Snowden started working with us as a research consultant. We hope they will increase GiveWell’s output of intervention reports. We also have one summer research analyst, Scott Weathers, working with us.

Operations

The separation of GiveWell and the Open Philanthropy Project was a major priority for GiveWell’s operations team in the first half of 2017. The separation was finalized on June 1.

The operations team continues to increase in specialization (historically, GiveWell operations work has been done by generalists on staff). We hired Maryana Pinchuk to serve as a Donations Manager and Erin Wolff as a Donations Relations Assistant; a search for a Controller to manage our finance and accounting is underway. We have also started to work with new vendors to outsource some operations work, which we hope will increase our available staff capacity and improve the quality of our operations.

Outreach

Outreach is now a major organizational priority for GiveWell. In the past, we focused very little on efforts to reach new potential donors with GiveWell’s work. Now, we think outreach is more of a limiting factor than research—the high-value funding gaps we’ve identified exceed the amount of donations we expect to direct to those gaps.

We have developed a list of ideas for how to significantly increase the money GiveWell directs to our recommended charities, and are planning to work on the most promising ideas over the next few months. For example, we think there may be relatively low-intensity steps to take in areas like podcast advertising; in February, we advertised on a small number of podcasts and plan to do so again based on the cost of running advertisements and the additional donations to top charities we tracked as a direct result of those ads.

We are also trying to hire another Research Analyst, Outreach Focus to expand our capacity to communicate with donors and other individuals who rely on GiveWell’s research.

The post Mid-year update on GiveWell’s progress appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

This post will provide a brief overview of GiveWell’s progress in a number of areas so far this year. In summary,

1. Research: We are making progress on reaching charities that might be a good fit for a GiveWell recommendation and asking them to apply. We are also moving forward with GiveWell’s intervention prioritization goals.
2. Operations: The separation of GiveWell and the Open Philanthropy Project was a major organizational priority in the first half of the year and was finalized on June 1. We’ve also increased the specialization on the operations team and outsourced some of GiveWell’s operations work.
3. Outreach: Outreach is now a major organizational priority. We hope to develop a strategy for significantly increasing money moved to our recommended charities by September.

We hope you will let us know if you have any questions about our work this year in the comments.

Research

Our work on research now falls into two primary categories: Traditional top charities work, consisting of research into promising programs and evaluations of charities implementing them as potential GiveWell top charities, and GiveWell Incubation Grants, our work to grow the pipeline of potential top charities and improve our understanding of our current recommended charities.

Top charities

• Encouraging charities to apply for a GiveWell recommendation.

  In recent years, we were surprised by how few charities reached out to GiveWell to apply for a recommendation. We guessed that some part of this may be driven by (a) a lack of understanding of GiveWell’s research priorities and which organizations we might be interested in recommending, and (b) a lack of understanding or misconceptions about GiveWell’s charity review process or the value added of a GiveWell recommendation in increasing a charity’s funding.

  We took two steps to address this problem in 2017. First, GiveWell Research Analyst Chelsea Tabart is now serving as GiveWell’s “charity liaison.” In this role, Chelsea connects with groups that may be a good fit for a GiveWell recommendation to learn more about their work and to encourage them to apply if a fit seems promising, and to explain GiveWell’s review process and value added. Second, we published a blog post on why we think more charities should consider applying for a GiveWell recommendation. We are now considering a number of charities as potential top-charity contenders and attribute this in part to taking the steps described above.

• Intervention prioritization.

  A major goal this year is to assess a large number of interventions as potential GiveWell priority programs. This “intervention prioritization” work involves surveying the literature for a variety of interventions to identify the most cost-effective and evidence-backed programs.

  We have made good progress on intervention research in 2017. (We plan to write about our progress in more detail in a future post.) We completed 50 quick evidence assessments in the first half of the year and published interim intervention reports on:

  • Sayana Press
  • Distribution of eyeglasses in developing countries
  • Antiretroviral therapy to treat HIV/AIDS
  • Interventions to promote handwashing
  • SMS reminders for vaccination.

  We also published an intervention report on surgery to repair obstetric fistula.

GiveWell Incubation Grants

We continue to expand our work on GiveWell’s Incubation Grants program:

• Partnership with IDinsight. We continued our partnership with IDinsight. IDinsight is working on a number of projects with GiveWell, including cost-effectiveness and monitoring assessments of surgery charities (cataract and fistula), running a randomized controlled trial of New Incentives’ pilot program to provide incentives for immunizations, and helping one of our top charities, the Against Malaria Foundation, improve its monitoring.
• Considering new top charities via GiveWell Incubation Grants. We’re considering some GiveWell Incubation Grant recipient charities as potential 2017 top charities. We’ve published blog posts on Zusha! and No Lean Season as contenders for a recommendation at the end of the year.

Recruiting

We hired Caitlin McGugan as a Senior Fellow and James Snowden started working with us as a research consultant. We hope they will increase GiveWell’s output of intervention reports. We also have one summer research analyst, Scott Weathers, working with us.

Operations

The separation of GiveWell and the Open Philanthropy Project was a major priority for GiveWell’s operations team in the first half of 2017. The separation was finalized on June 1.

The operations team continues to increase in specialization (historically, GiveWell operations work has been done by generalists on staff). We hired Maryana Pinchuk to serve as a Donations Manager and Erin Wolff as a Donations Relations Assistant; a search for a Controller to manage our finance and accounting is underway. We have also started to work with new vendors to outsource some operations work, which we hope will increase our available staff capacity and improve the quality of our operations.

Outreach

Outreach is now a major organizational priority for GiveWell. In the past, we focused very little on efforts to reach new potential donors with GiveWell’s work. Now, we think outreach is more of a limiting factor than research—the high-value funding gaps we’ve identified exceed the amount of donations we expect to direct to those gaps.

We have developed a list of ideas for how to significantly increase the money GiveWell directs to our recommended charities, and are planning to work on the most promising ideas over the next few months. For example, we think there may be relatively low-intensity steps to take in areas like podcast advertising; in February, we advertised on a small number of podcasts and plan to do so again based on the cost of running advertisements and the additional donations to top charities we tracked as a direct result of those ads.

We are also trying to hire another Research Analyst, Outreach Focus to expand our capacity to communicate with donors and other individuals who rely on GiveWell’s research.

The post Mid-year update on GiveWell’s progress appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

We've long been interested in fistula surgery as a potential GiveWell priority program. However, as with other surgery charities, we have struggled to identify an organization that meets GiveWell's criteria. Now, we're working with a group called IDinsight and are excited that we may be able to consider a fistula surgery organization as a potential GiveWell top charity.

Our longstanding interest in interventions to treat fistula can be attributed in part to the popular narrative presented about fistula--the condition, which is often associated with social ostracization--appears to cause a significant amount of suffering, and seems to be treatable. We're not sure how representative the popular narrative is, but as donors, it has contributed to our continued interest in better understanding this intervention, along with the feeling that surgery charities in general may offer low-cost, life-changing impacts.

Summary

This post will discuss:

• Fistula management, including surgery, as an intervention.
• Our open questions and uncertainty around fistula management programs, particularly their costs.
• Our plans to partner with IDinsight to help answer some of our questions about fistula management.

Read More

The post Deciding whether to recommend fistula management charities appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

We’ve long been interested in fistula surgery as a potential GiveWell priority program. However, as with other surgery charities, we have struggled to identify an organization that meets GiveWell’s criteria. Now, we’re working with a group called IDinsight and are excited that we may be able to consider a fistula surgery organization as a potential GiveWell top charity.

Our longstanding interest in interventions to treat fistula can be attributed in part to the popular narrative presented about fistula. The condition, which is often associated with social ostracization, appears to cause a significant amount of suffering, and seems to be treatable. We’re not sure how representative the popular narrative is, but as donors, it has contributed to our continued interest in better understanding this intervention, along with the feeling that surgery charities in general may offer low-cost, life-changing impacts.

Summary

This post will discuss:

• Fistula management, including surgery, as an intervention.
• Our open questions and uncertainty around fistula management programs, particularly their costs.
• Our plans to partner with IDinsight to help answer some of our questions about fistula management.

Surgery charities and GiveWell

We recently published a blog post describing our work to better understand charities that implement cataract surgery programs and to assess whether they might be a fit for a GiveWell top-charity recommendation. As we discussed in that post, surgical interventions in general seem to intuitively appeal to donors due to their potential to offer inexpensive, large impacts on quality of life. However, our uncertainty about surgery charities’ room for more funding and monitoring information has generally led GiveWell to deprioritize research on charities implementing these programs in the past.

Now, as part of GiveWell’s Incubation Grants program to grow the pipeline of potential future top charities and improve our understanding of our current top charities, we’re researching organizations that work on cataract surgery and fistula surgery as potential future top charities.

This post focuses on the latter. Although both interventions are surgical, fistula surgery is distinct in a number of ways from cataract surgery and other interventions GiveWell recommends. Fistula surgery may be a major, invasive procedure. In addition, the largest negative effects of fistula may be psychological, economic, and social, rather than physical.

Fistula management as an intervention

An obstetric fistula, or gynecologic fistula, is an abnormal opening between the vagina and the bladder or rectum. Obstetric fistula is often caused by prolonged obstructed labor, where pressure from the fetus on the mother’s pelvic bone cuts off blood flow to soft tissues, which then die, leading to a hole through which urine or feces may leak through the vagina. Fistula can have physical, economic, and psychological consequences, including social isolation.

Fistula may be treated with surgery to close or partially close the opening. (In some cases, small fistulas may not require surgical treatment; in other cases, the damage may be too extensive for surgical repair.) Job counseling and life skills training aimed at social reintegration may also be part of fistula treatment. “Fistula management” describes all of these interventions, including surgery.

Our very rough cost-effectiveness estimate for fistula surgery is $1,400 per successful surgery performed. The severity of suffering, combined with the cost per surgery, may mean that fistula surgery is in the same range of cost-effectiveness as GiveWell’s current priority programs.

Our open questions

We recently published an intervention report on the evidence for surgery to repair obstetric fistula. We have a number of remaining questions that we’d like to answer before making a recommendation of an organization implementing a fistula management program. Key aspects of this intervention that we’d like to better understand include:

Outreach and cost-effectiveness

It may be challenging to identify and diagnose potential fistula cases. Fistula most often occurs in women who are located in very geographically remote areas or who are too poor to access health systems for delivery care in the event of prolonged obstructed labor. Women located in very remote areas may be hard to reach in general; women with obstetric fistula may be very hard to reach in particular, because they may be more likely to be socially disconnected or unreachable through regular community health systems.

In addition, fistula may not be well known, post-birth complications may be stigmatized, or the symptoms may not be recognized. It may be shameful for women to discuss fistula symptoms; for that reason, we’re unsure whether information about incontinence would be provided to a researcher or surveyor. Even in cases where symptoms are shared, they can be caused by other urological issues, complicating diagnosis of fistula.

We’d like to better understand what the most cost-effective methods of outreach to women with fistula are. We understand that outreach activities have included media outreach; training health workers, nurses, midwives, and doctors in fistula identification to strengthen referrals to treatment; and having women who have had treatment for fistula help identify and encourage women with fistula in their communities to seek medical care. We’re not sure what approach to outreach is most cost-effective.

How cost-effective are fistula management programs?

We’re unsure how the above outreach contributes to the overall cost per patient of fistula treatment. In addition to outreach activities, our impression is that fistula surgery programs often involve training surgeons and the purchase of equipment. We remain very unsure about the costs and benefits of these activities.

Fistula management programs may also involve a number of non-surgical interventions for patients. Some fistula centers offer rehabilitation activities for patients, such as counseling or job training. We’re not sure how common these types of rehabilitation are or what other types of support might entail, or how effective they are at improving social or economic outcomes; this could have a large impact on our overall estimate of fistula management charities’ cost-effectiveness.

What is a ‘successful’ surgery, and what proportion of surgeries are successful?

Obstetric fistulas vary in their size and suitability for surgical repair. For women who do receive surgical treatment, a “successful surgery” may not lead to continence. We’re unsure what proportion of operations successfully close fistulas due to a lack of available data in this space.

Among women whose surgeries do result in continence, we’re unsure of the extent to which that leads to positive social, economic, and psychological outcomes in turn. A major open question is whether operations that succeed in closing a fistula will address any possible social impacts of fistula.

In addition, the prolonged obstructed labor that caused the fistula could also lead to other health complications, such as infertility, scarring, and neurological damage. Repair of the fistula would generally not address these other issues, which could also have social and economic as well as physical consequences.

We are thus very interested in monitoring a) the success of surgery in repairing fistulas and b) the social and economic outcomes for women who receive fistula surgery with or without non-surgical interventions such as counseling. We have not looked closely at the studies that have been done on post-surgical outcomes, although our impression is that most studies in this space have been small. As the economic and social consequences of fistula may be among the greatest burdens of those who have fistula, we are particularly interested in understanding the impact surgery has on those outcomes.

Our plans with IDinsight

GiveWell partnered with IDinsight, an international NGO that focuses on providing clients with information to increase their social impact, as part of our work on GiveWell Incubation Grants. The “GiveWell embedded team” at IDinsight is working with us on a project to better understand the potential of fistula management organizations to become GiveWell top charities.

IDinsight plans to begin this work by focusing on the cost-effectiveness of fistula management, including surgery, as an intervention. It plans to work closely with Fistula Foundation, an organization that funds fistula treatment in Asia and Africa, to understand its costs per surgery for one country to help inform GiveWell’s assessment of the cost-effectiveness of fistula management programs in general. (Even though information from a single country will have limitations in its applicability elsewhere, we think starting at this scale is the right first step.)

If this intervention appears cost-effective—competitive with our current priority programs—following this initial phase of work, then IDinsight will likely work with GiveWell to identify one or more fistula management charities with which to develop and implement a high-quality monitoring system. With additional, high-quality monitoring information, we may better be able to understand whether a fistula management charity should be included in GiveWell’s list of top charities.

We expect this work to take several years, due to the amount of time required to set up and gather data from a new monitoring system, and do not expect this to impact GiveWell’s charity recommendations in 2017.

The post Deciding whether to recommend fistula management charities appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

We’ve long been interested in fistula surgery as a potential GiveWell priority program. However, as with other surgery charities, we have struggled to identify an organization that meets GiveWell’s criteria. Now, we’re working with a group called IDinsight and are excited that we may be able to consider a fistula surgery organization as a potential GiveWell top charity.

Our longstanding interest in interventions to treat fistula can be attributed in part to the popular narrative presented about fistula. The condition, which is often associated with social ostracization, appears to cause a significant amount of suffering, and seems to be treatable. We’re not sure how representative the popular narrative is, but as donors, it has contributed to our continued interest in better understanding this intervention, along with the feeling that surgery charities in general may offer low-cost, life-changing impacts.

Summary

This post will discuss:

• Fistula management, including surgery, as an intervention.
• Our open questions and uncertainty around fistula management programs, particularly their costs.
• Our plans to partner with IDinsight to help answer some of our questions about fistula management.

Surgery charities and GiveWell

We recently published a blog post describing our work to better understand charities that implement cataract surgery programs and to assess whether they might be a fit for a GiveWell top-charity recommendation. As we discussed in that post, surgical interventions in general seem to intuitively appeal to donors due to their potential to offer inexpensive, large impacts on quality of life. However, our uncertainty about surgery charities’ room for more funding and monitoring information has generally led GiveWell to deprioritize research on charities implementing these programs in the past.

Now, as part of GiveWell’s Incubation Grants program to grow the pipeline of potential future top charities and improve our understanding of our current top charities, we’re researching organizations that work on cataract surgery and fistula surgery as potential future top charities.

This post focuses on the latter. Although both interventions are surgical, fistula surgery is distinct in a number of ways from cataract surgery and other interventions GiveWell recommends. Fistula surgery may be a major, invasive procedure. In addition, the largest negative effects of fistula may be psychological, economic, and social, rather than physical.

Fistula management as an intervention

An obstetric fistula, or gynecologic fistula, is an abnormal opening between the vagina and the bladder or rectum. Obstetric fistula is often caused by prolonged obstructed labor, where pressure from the fetus on the mother’s pelvic bone cuts off blood flow to soft tissues, which then die, leading to a hole through which urine or feces may leak through the vagina. Fistula can have physical, economic, and psychological consequences, including social isolation.

Fistula may be treated with surgery to close or partially close the opening. (In some cases, small fistulas may not require surgical treatment; in other cases, the damage may be too extensive for surgical repair.) Job counseling and life skills training aimed at social reintegration may also be part of fistula treatment. “Fistula management” describes all of these interventions, including surgery.

Our very rough cost-effectiveness estimate for fistula surgery is $1,400 per successful surgery performed. The severity of suffering, combined with the cost per surgery, may mean that fistula surgery is in the same range of cost-effectiveness as GiveWell’s current priority programs.

Our open questions

We recently published an intervention report on the evidence for surgery to repair obstetric fistula. We have a number of remaining questions that we’d like to answer before making a recommendation of an organization implementing a fistula management program. Key aspects of this intervention that we’d like to better understand include:

Outreach and cost-effectiveness

It may be challenging to identify and diagnose potential fistula cases. Fistula most often occurs in women who are located in very geographically remote areas or who are too poor to access health systems for delivery care in the event of prolonged obstructed labor. Women located in very remote areas may be hard to reach in general; women with obstetric fistula may be very hard to reach in particular, because they may be more likely to be socially disconnected or unreachable through regular community health systems.

In addition, fistula may not be well known, post-birth complications may be stigmatized, or the symptoms may not be recognized. It may be shameful for women to discuss fistula symptoms; for that reason, we’re unsure whether information about incontinence would be provided to a researcher or surveyor. Even in cases where symptoms are shared, they can be caused by other urological issues, complicating diagnosis of fistula.

We’d like to better understand what the most cost-effective methods of outreach to women with fistula are. We understand that outreach activities have included media outreach; training health workers, nurses, midwives, and doctors in fistula identification to strengthen referrals to treatment; and having women who have had treatment for fistula help identify and encourage women with fistula in their communities to seek medical care. We’re not sure what approach to outreach is most cost-effective.

How cost-effective are fistula management programs?

We’re unsure how the above outreach contributes to the overall cost per patient of fistula treatment. In addition to outreach activities, our impression is that fistula surgery programs often involve training surgeons and the purchase of equipment. We remain very unsure about the costs and benefits of these activities.

Fistula management programs may also involve a number of non-surgical interventions for patients. Some fistula centers offer rehabilitation activities for patients, such as counseling or job training. We’re not sure how common these types of rehabilitation are or what other types of support might entail, or how effective they are at improving social or economic outcomes; this could have a large impact on our overall estimate of fistula management charities’ cost-effectiveness.

What is a ‘successful’ surgery, and what proportion of surgeries are successful?

Obstetric fistulas vary in their size and suitability for surgical repair. For women who do receive surgical treatment, a “successful surgery” may not lead to continence. We’re unsure what proportion of operations successfully close fistulas due to a lack of available data in this space.

Among women whose surgeries do result in continence, we’re unsure of the extent to which that leads to positive social, economic, and psychological outcomes in turn. A major open question is whether operations that succeed in closing a fistula will address any possible social impacts of fistula.

In addition, the prolonged obstructed labor that caused the fistula could also lead to other health complications, such as infertility, scarring, and neurological damage. Repair of the fistula would generally not address these other issues, which could also have social and economic as well as physical consequences.

We are thus very interested in monitoring a) the success of surgery in repairing fistulas and b) the social and economic outcomes for women who receive fistula surgery with or without non-surgical interventions such as counseling. We have not looked closely at the studies that have been done on post-surgical outcomes, although our impression is that most studies in this space have been small. As the economic and social consequences of fistula may be among the greatest burdens of those who have fistula, we are particularly interested in understanding the impact surgery has on those outcomes.

Our plans with IDinsight

GiveWell partnered with IDinsight, an international NGO that focuses on providing clients with information to increase their social impact, as part of our work on GiveWell Incubation Grants. The “GiveWell embedded team” at IDinsight is working with us on a project to better understand the potential of fistula management organizations to become GiveWell top charities.

IDinsight plans to begin this work by focusing on the cost-effectiveness of fistula management, including surgery, as an intervention. It plans to work closely with Fistula Foundation, an organization that funds fistula treatment in Asia and Africa, to understand its costs per surgery for one country to help inform GiveWell’s assessment of the cost-effectiveness of fistula management programs in general. (Even though information from a single country will have limitations in its applicability elsewhere, we think starting at this scale is the right first step.)

If this intervention appears cost-effective—competitive with our current priority programs—following this initial phase of work, then IDinsight will likely work with GiveWell to identify one or more fistula management charities with which to develop and implement a high-quality monitoring system. With additional, high-quality monitoring information, we may better be able to understand whether a fistula management charity should be included in GiveWell’s list of top charities.

We expect this work to take several years, due to the amount of time required to set up and gather data from a new monitoring system, and do not expect this to impact GiveWell’s charity recommendations in 2017.

The post Deciding whether to recommend fistula management charities appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

We’re sometimes asked whether we think GiveWell’s top charities are the “best,” in some absolute sense of the word, or whether we’d ever advise that a donor give to an opportunity outside of our recommendations. This post aims to clarify how GiveWell thinks about different giving options and their suitability for different types of donors.

We believe that GiveWell’s top charities offer donors an outstanding opportunity to do a lot of good and are the best option for most donors. However, some donors—those with a very high degree of trust in a particular individual or organization to make this decision, donors with lots of time (in excess of 50 hours per year, and likely more) to consider their giving decision, or donors whose values point strongly toward a particular cause outside of the ones GiveWell covers—may find opportunities to have a greater impact per dollar than GiveWell’s top charities. Note that we think these characteristics are likely to be necessary, but not sufficient, for finding these types of opportunities; we still expect good giving to be hard, and spending, for example, 50 hours per year on research isn’t necessarily going to yield better opportunities.

In this post, we describe relevant considerations for donors in greater detail.

Giving to GiveWell’s top charities

GiveWell was founded to serve donors with limited amounts of time to make giving decisions. GiveWell’s co-founders, Elie Hassenfeld and Holden Karnofsky, were in this situation when they started GiveWell as a side project in 2006. They found that determining where to give effectively was a full-time project and quit their jobs to start GiveWell in 2007.

GiveWell’s top charity recommendations serve all donors. We rely on evidence and detail our rationale for making a recommendation publicly, so donors can vet our work; a strength of our recommendations is their falsifiability. We believe our top charity recommendations serve donors who want to give as effectively as possible and have only limited time to determine where to donate, and (prior to GiveWell) no trusted person or entity to outsource their thinking to, particularly well. Our criteria and recommendations were designed with this type of donor in mind:

• Our top charities are largely uncontroversial and relatively straightforward ways to do a lot of good—for example, by providing direct aid such as insecticide-treated nets to prevent malaria and cash transfers to very poor households. There is room for debate on the evidence behind these interventions and their cost-effectiveness, but the basic case for them—and the fact that they are likely to do more good than harm—is subject to little debate, so a donor can feel fairly confident in these basics without needing to do their own research.
• GiveWell publishes the full details of our charity analyses so that donors can review and vet our work, and so that donors with very limited time can trust that any major problems would likely be caught by others (with more time).
• Because we lay out the entire case for the charities online, donors can spot-check any particular part of it to get a sense of whether we’re thinking reasonably about the issues that seem most salient to them.
• Our top charities have room for more funding. In other words, we believe additional marginal donations to these organizations enable them to do more good.

Our guess is that most donors that use GiveWell fit this profile (want to give as effectively as possible and have only limited time to determine where to donate, and no other trusted person or entity to outsource their thinking to).

Below, we discuss alternative donor profiles:

(1) Donors with limited time and a high amount of trust in a person or organization to inform their giving decisions

This group of donors has limited time to spend on making a giving decision and has an organization or person (other than GiveWell or GiveWell staff) they personally trust to make or inform this decision. In this case, they may defer to that person or organization’s recommendations.

(2) Donors with lots of time

Donors with a lot of time to spend on giving decisions (50+ hours per year) may be able to find opportunities that GiveWell hasn’t. For example, a donor might know someone who is starting a charity and feel, based on their research, that supporting their project at an early stage might be a particularly leveraged way to do good. A donor with lots of time may also be very familiar with a particular cause and feel highly confident in a particular organization and its need for funding. These donors may want to compare alternative opportunities to GiveWell’s top charities. They may also want to actively vet GiveWell’s recommendations as part of their research process.

Donors with lots of time may also wish to apply a different strategy to their giving. GiveWell largely recommends charities where sufficient evidence exists to make a fairly robust estimate of the expected value of a donation. Donors with much more time to spend (maybe even significantly more than 50 hours per year) thinking about where to give may want to take a “hits-based giving” approach—having a high tolerance for philanthropic risk, so long as the overall expected value is sufficiently high. This is the approach the Open Philanthropy Project, which was incubated at GiveWell, has taken, and we believe doing this well requires a lot of work, as the Open Philanthropy Project discussed in a blog post last year (emphasis original):

Aim for deep understanding of the key issues, literatures, organizations, and people around a cause, either by putting in a great deal of work or by forming a high-trust relationship with someone else who can. If we [the Open Philanthropy Project] support projects that seem exciting and high-impact based on superficial understanding, we’re at high risk of being redundant with other funders. If we support projects that seem superficially exciting and high-impact, but aren’t being supported by others, then we risk being systematically biased toward projects that others have chosen not to support for good reasons. By contrast, we generally aim to support projects based on the excitement of trusted people who are at a world-class level of being well-informed, well-connected, and thoughtful in relevant ways.

Achieving this is challenging. It means finding people who are (or can be) maximally well-informed about issues we’ll never have the time to engage with fully, and finding ways to form high-trust relationships with them. As with many other philanthropists, our basic framework for doing this is to choose focus areas and hire staff around those focus areas. In some cases, rather than hiring someone to specialize in a particular cause, we try to ensure that we have a generalist who puts a great deal of time and thought into an area. Either way, our staff aim to become well-networked and form their own high-trust relationships with the best-informed people in the field.

I [Open Philanthropy Project Executive Director Holden Karnofsky] believe that the payoff of all of this work is the ability to identify ideas that are exciting for reasons that require unusual amounts of thought and knowledge to truly appreciate.

(3) Donors with values that differ from GiveWell staff

Donors who hold different values than the majority of GiveWell staff, or who place more weight on a particular cause outside of the causes covered by GiveWell, may find other giving opportunities to be more attractive for reasons beyond the time/trust framework articulated earlier in this post. For example, individuals who place a very high value on farm animal welfare may wish to give a large proportion of their donation, if not all of their donation, to organizations working in that cause.

We’re happy to speak with you about giving decisions.

If you’re not sure which considerations apply to you, please reach out. We’re always happy to talk through giving decisions.

The post Are GiveWell’s top charities the best option for every donor? appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

We’re sometimes asked whether we think GiveWell’s top charities are the “best,” in some absolute sense of the word, or whether we’d ever advise that a donor give to an opportunity outside of our recommendations. This post aims to clarify how GiveWell thinks about different giving options and their suitability for different types of donors.

We believe that GiveWell’s top charities offer donors an outstanding opportunity to do a lot of good and are the best option for most donors. However, some donors—those with a very high degree of trust in a particular individual or organization to make this decision, donors with lots of time (in excess of 50 hours per year, and likely more) to consider their giving decision, or donors whose values point strongly toward a particular cause outside of the ones GiveWell covers—may find opportunities to have a greater impact per dollar than GiveWell’s top charities. Note that we think these characteristics are likely to be necessary, but not sufficient, for finding these types of opportunities; we still expect good giving to be hard, and spending, for example, 50 hours per year on research isn’t necessarily going to yield better opportunities.

In this post, we describe relevant considerations for donors in greater detail.

Giving to GiveWell’s top charities

GiveWell was founded to serve donors with limited amounts of time to make giving decisions. GiveWell’s co-founders, Elie Hassenfeld and Holden Karnofsky, were in this situation when they started GiveWell as a side project in 2006. They found that determining where to give effectively was a full-time project and quit their jobs to start GiveWell in 2007.

GiveWell’s top charity recommendations serve all donors. We rely on evidence and detail our rationale for making a recommendation publicly, so donors can vet our work; a strength of our recommendations is their falsifiability. We believe our top charity recommendations serve donors who want to give as effectively as possible and have only limited time to determine where to donate, and (prior to GiveWell) no trusted person or entity to outsource their thinking to, particularly well. Our criteria and recommendations were designed with this type of donor in mind:

• Our top charities are largely uncontroversial and relatively straightforward ways to do a lot of good—for example, by providing direct aid such as insecticide-treated nets to prevent malaria and cash transfers to very poor households. There is room for debate on the evidence behind these interventions and their cost-effectiveness, but the basic case for them—and the fact that they are likely to do more good than harm—is subject to little debate, so a donor can feel fairly confident in these basics without needing to do their own research.
• GiveWell publishes the full details of our charity analyses so that donors can review and vet our work, and so that donors with very limited time can trust that any major problems would likely be caught by others (with more time).
• Because we lay out the entire case for the charities online, donors can spot-check any particular part of it to get a sense of whether we’re thinking reasonably about the issues that seem most salient to them.
• Our top charities have room for more funding. In other words, we believe additional marginal donations to these organizations enable them to do more good.

Our guess is that most donors that use GiveWell fit this profile (want to give as effectively as possible and have only limited time to determine where to donate, and no other trusted person or entity to outsource their thinking to).

Below, we discuss alternative donor profiles:

(1) Donors with limited time and a high amount of trust in a person or organization to inform their giving decisions

This group of donors has limited time to spend on making a giving decision and has an organization or person (other than GiveWell or GiveWell staff) they personally trust to make or inform this decision. In this case, they may defer to that person or organization’s recommendations.

(2) Donors with lots of time

Donors with a lot of time to spend on giving decisions (50+ hours per year) may be able to find opportunities that GiveWell hasn’t. For example, a donor might know someone who is starting a charity and feel, based on their research, that supporting their project at an early stage might be a particularly leveraged way to do good. A donor with lots of time may also be very familiar with a particular cause and feel highly confident in a particular organization and its need for funding. These donors may want to compare alternative opportunities to GiveWell’s top charities. They may also want to actively vet GiveWell’s recommendations as part of their research process.

Donors with lots of time may also wish to apply a different strategy to their giving. GiveWell largely recommends charities where sufficient evidence exists to make a fairly robust estimate of the expected value of a donation. Donors with much more time to spend (maybe even significantly more than 50 hours per year) thinking about where to give may want to take a “hits-based giving” approach—having a high tolerance for philanthropic risk, so long as the overall expected value is sufficiently high. This is the approach the Open Philanthropy Project, which was incubated at GiveWell, has taken, and we believe doing this well requires a lot of work, as the Open Philanthropy Project discussed in a blog post last year (emphasis original):

Aim for deep understanding of the key issues, literatures, organizations, and people around a cause, either by putting in a great deal of work or by forming a high-trust relationship with someone else who can. If we [the Open Philanthropy Project] support projects that seem exciting and high-impact based on superficial understanding, we’re at high risk of being redundant with other funders. If we support projects that seem superficially exciting and high-impact, but aren’t being supported by others, then we risk being systematically biased toward projects that others have chosen not to support for good reasons. By contrast, we generally aim to support projects based on the excitement of trusted people who are at a world-class level of being well-informed, well-connected, and thoughtful in relevant ways.

Achieving this is challenging. It means finding people who are (or can be) maximally well-informed about issues we’ll never have the time to engage with fully, and finding ways to form high-trust relationships with them. As with many other philanthropists, our basic framework for doing this is to choose focus areas and hire staff around those focus areas. In some cases, rather than hiring someone to specialize in a particular cause, we try to ensure that we have a generalist who puts a great deal of time and thought into an area. Either way, our staff aim to become well-networked and form their own high-trust relationships with the best-informed people in the field.

I [Open Philanthropy Project Executive Director Holden Karnofsky] believe that the payoff of all of this work is the ability to identify ideas that are exciting for reasons that require unusual amounts of thought and knowledge to truly appreciate.

(3) Donors with values that differ from GiveWell staff

Donors who hold different values than the majority of GiveWell staff, or who place more weight on a particular cause outside of the causes covered by GiveWell, may find other giving opportunities to be more attractive for reasons beyond the time/trust framework articulated earlier in this post. For example, individuals who place a very high value on farm animal welfare may wish to give a large proportion of their donation, if not all of their donation, to organizations working in that cause.

We’re happy to speak with you about giving decisions.

If you’re not sure which considerations apply to you, please reach out. We’re always happy to talk through giving decisions.

The post Are GiveWell’s top charities the best option for every donor? appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

We're sometimes asked whether we think GiveWell's top charities are the "best," in some absolute sense of the word, or whether we'd ever advise that a donor give to an opportunity outside of our recommendations. This post aims to clarify how GiveWell thinks about different giving options and their suitability for different types of donors.

We believe that GiveWell's top charities offer donors an outstanding opportunity to do a lot of good and are the best option for most donors. However, some donors—those with a very high degree of trust in a particular individual or organization to make this decision, donors with lots of time (in excess of 50 hours per year, and likely more) to consider their giving decision, or donors whose values point strongly toward a particular cause outside of the ones GiveWell covers—may find opportunities to have a greater impact per dollar than GiveWell’s top charities. Note that we think these characteristics are likely to be necessary, but not sufficient, for finding these types of opportunities; we still expect good giving to be hard, and spending, for example, 50 hours per year on research isn’t necessarily going to yield better opportunities.

In this post, we describe relevant considerations for donors in greater detail.

Read More

The post Are GiveWell’s top charities the best option for every donor? appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

We're sometimes asked whether we think GiveWell's top charities are the "best," in some absolute sense of the word, or whether we'd ever advise that a donor give to an opportunity outside of our recommendations. This post aims to clarify how GiveWell thinks about different giving options and their suitability for different types of donors.

We believe that GiveWell's top charities offer donors an outstanding opportunity to do a lot of good and are the best option for most donors. However, some donors—those with a very high degree of trust in a particular individual or organization to make this decision, donors with lots of time (in excess of 50 hours per year, and likely more) to consider their giving decision, or donors whose values point strongly toward a particular cause outside of the ones GiveWell covers—may find opportunities to have a greater impact per dollar than GiveWell’s top charities. Note that we think these characteristics are likely to be necessary, but not sufficient, for finding these types of opportunities; we still expect good giving to be hard, and spending, for example, 50 hours per year on research isn’t necessarily going to yield better opportunities.

In this post, we describe relevant considerations for donors in greater detail.

Read More

The post Are GiveWell’s top charities the best option for every donor? appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

We’re sometimes asked whether we think GiveWell’s top charities are the “best,” in some absolute sense of the word, or whether we’d ever advise that a donor give to an opportunity outside of our recommendations. This post aims to clarify how GiveWell thinks about different giving options and their suitability for different types of donors.

We believe that GiveWell’s top charities offer donors an outstanding opportunity to do a lot of good and are the best option for most donors. However, some donors—those with a very high degree of trust in a particular individual or organization to make this decision, donors with lots of time (in excess of 50 hours per year, and likely more) to consider their giving decision, or donors whose values point strongly toward a particular cause outside of the ones GiveWell covers—may find opportunities to have a greater impact per dollar than GiveWell’s top charities. Note that we think these characteristics are likely to be necessary, but not sufficient, for finding these types of opportunities; we still expect good giving to be hard, and spending, for example, 50 hours per year on research isn’t necessarily going to yield better opportunities.

In this post, we describe relevant considerations for donors in greater detail.

Giving to GiveWell’s top charities

GiveWell was founded to serve donors with limited amounts of time to make giving decisions. GiveWell’s co-founders, Elie Hassenfeld and Holden Karnofsky, were in this situation when they started GiveWell as a side project in 2006. They found that determining where to give effectively was a full-time project and quit their jobs to start GiveWell in 2007.

GiveWell’s top charity recommendations serve all donors. We rely on evidence and detail our rationale for making a recommendation publicly, so donors can vet our work; a strength of our recommendations is their falsifiability. We believe our top charity recommendations serve donors who want to give as effectively as possible and have only limited time to determine where to donate, and (prior to GiveWell) no trusted person or entity to outsource their thinking to, particularly well. Our criteria and recommendations were designed with this type of donor in mind:

• Our top charities are largely uncontroversial and relatively straightforward ways to do a lot of good—for example, by providing direct aid such as insecticide-treated nets to prevent malaria and cash transfers to very poor households. There is room for debate on the evidence behind these interventions and their cost-effectiveness, but the basic case for them—and the fact that they are likely to do more good than harm—is subject to little debate, so a donor can feel fairly confident in these basics without needing to do their own research.
• GiveWell publishes the full details of our charity analyses so that donors can review and vet our work, and so that donors with very limited time can trust that any major problems would likely be caught by others (with more time).
• Because we lay out the entire case for the charities online, donors can spot-check any particular part of it to get a sense of whether we’re thinking reasonably about the issues that seem most salient to them.
• Our top charities have room for more funding. In other words, we believe additional marginal donations to these organizations enable them to do more good.

Our guess is that most donors that use GiveWell fit this profile (want to give as effectively as possible and have only limited time to determine where to donate, and no other trusted person or entity to outsource their thinking to).

Below, we discuss alternative donor profiles:

(1) Donors with limited time and a high amount of trust in a person or organization to inform their giving decisions

This group of donors has limited time to spend on making a giving decision and has an organization or person (other than GiveWell or GiveWell staff) they personally trust to make or inform this decision. In this case, they may defer to that person or organization’s recommendations.

(2) Donors with lots of time

Donors with a lot of time to spend on giving decisions (50+ hours per year) may be able to find opportunities that GiveWell hasn’t. For example, a donor might know someone who is starting a charity and feel, based on their research, that supporting their project at an early stage might be a particularly leveraged way to do good. A donor with lots of time may also be very familiar with a particular cause and feel highly confident in a particular organization and its need for funding. These donors may want to compare alternative opportunities to GiveWell’s top charities. They may also want to actively vet GiveWell’s recommendations as part of their research process.

Donors with lots of time may also wish to apply a different strategy to their giving. GiveWell largely recommends charities where sufficient evidence exists to make a fairly robust estimate of the expected value of a donation. Donors with much more time to spend (maybe even significantly more than 50 hours per year) thinking about where to give may want to take a “hits-based giving” approach—having a high tolerance for philanthropic risk, so long as the overall expected value is sufficiently high. This is the approach the Open Philanthropy Project, which was incubated at GiveWell, has taken, and we believe doing this well requires a lot of work, as the Open Philanthropy Project discussed in a blog post last year (emphasis original):

Aim for deep understanding of the key issues, literatures, organizations, and people around a cause, either by putting in a great deal of work or by forming a high-trust relationship with someone else who can. If we [the Open Philanthropy Project] support projects that seem exciting and high-impact based on superficial understanding, we’re at high risk of being redundant with other funders. If we support projects that seem superficially exciting and high-impact, but aren’t being supported by others, then we risk being systematically biased toward projects that others have chosen not to support for good reasons. By contrast, we generally aim to support projects based on the excitement of trusted people who are at a world-class level of being well-informed, well-connected, and thoughtful in relevant ways.

Achieving this is challenging. It means finding people who are (or can be) maximally well-informed about issues we’ll never have the time to engage with fully, and finding ways to form high-trust relationships with them. As with many other philanthropists, our basic framework for doing this is to choose focus areas and hire staff around those focus areas. In some cases, rather than hiring someone to specialize in a particular cause, we try to ensure that we have a generalist who puts a great deal of time and thought into an area. Either way, our staff aim to become well-networked and form their own high-trust relationships with the best-informed people in the field.

I [Open Philanthropy Project Executive Director Holden Karnofsky] believe that the payoff of all of this work is the ability to identify ideas that are exciting for reasons that require unusual amounts of thought and knowledge to truly appreciate.

(3) Donors with values that differ from GiveWell staff

Donors who hold different values than the majority of GiveWell staff, or who place more weight on a particular cause outside of the causes covered by GiveWell, may find other giving opportunities to be more attractive for reasons beyond the time/trust framework articulated earlier in this post. For example, individuals who place a very high value on farm animal welfare may wish to give a large proportion of their donation, if not all of their donation, to organizations working in that cause.

We’re happy to speak with you about giving decisions.

If you’re not sure which considerations apply to you, please reach out. We’re always happy to talk through giving decisions.

The post Are GiveWell’s top charities the best option for every donor? appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

We’re sometimes asked whether we think GiveWell’s top charities are the “best,” in some absolute sense of the word, or whether we’d ever advise that a donor give to an opportunity outside of our recommendations. This post aims to clarify how GiveWell thinks about different giving options and their suitability for different types of donors.

We believe that GiveWell’s top charities offer donors an outstanding opportunity to do a lot of good and are the best option for most donors. However, some donors—those with a very high degree of trust in a particular individual or organization to make this decision, donors with lots of time (in excess of 50 hours per year, and likely more) to consider their giving decision, or donors whose values point strongly toward a particular cause outside of the ones GiveWell covers—may find opportunities to have a greater impact per dollar than GiveWell’s top charities. Note that we think these characteristics are likely to be necessary, but not sufficient, for finding these types of opportunities; we still expect good giving to be hard, and spending, for example, 50 hours per year on research isn’t necessarily going to yield better opportunities.

In this post, we describe relevant considerations for donors in greater detail.

Giving to GiveWell’s top charities

GiveWell was founded to serve donors with limited amounts of time to make giving decisions. GiveWell’s co-founders, Elie Hassenfeld and Holden Karnofsky, were in this situation when they started GiveWell as a side project in 2006. They found that determining where to give effectively was a full-time project and quit their jobs to start GiveWell in 2007.

GiveWell’s top charity recommendations serve all donors. We rely on evidence and detail our rationale for making a recommendation publicly, so donors can vet our work; a strength of our recommendations is their falsifiability. We believe our top charity recommendations serve donors who want to give as effectively as possible and have only limited time to determine where to donate, and (prior to GiveWell) no trusted person or entity to outsource their thinking to, particularly well. Our criteria and recommendations were designed with this type of donor in mind:

• Our top charities are largely uncontroversial and relatively straightforward ways to do a lot of good—for example, by providing direct aid such as insecticide-treated nets to prevent malaria and cash transfers to very poor households. There is room for debate on the evidence behind these interventions and their cost-effectiveness, but the basic case for them—and the fact that they are likely to do more good than harm—is subject to little debate, so a donor can feel fairly confident in these basics without needing to do their own research.
• GiveWell publishes the full details of our charity analyses so that donors can review and vet our work, and so that donors with very limited time can trust that any major problems would likely be caught by others (with more time).
• Because we lay out the entire case for the charities online, donors can spot-check any particular part of it to get a sense of whether we’re thinking reasonably about the issues that seem most salient to them.
• Our top charities have room for more funding. In other words, we believe additional marginal donations to these organizations enable them to do more good.

Our guess is that most donors that use GiveWell fit this profile (want to give as effectively as possible and have only limited time to determine where to donate, and no other trusted person or entity to outsource their thinking to).

Below, we discuss alternative donor profiles:

(1) Donors with limited time and a high amount of trust in a person or organization to inform their giving decisions

This group of donors has limited time to spend on making a giving decision and has an organization or person (other than GiveWell or GiveWell staff) they personally trust to make or inform this decision. In this case, they may defer to that person or organization’s recommendations.

(2) Donors with lots of time

Donors with a lot of time to spend on giving decisions (50+ hours per year) may be able to find opportunities that GiveWell hasn’t. For example, a donor might know someone who is starting a charity and feel, based on their research, that supporting their project at an early stage might be a particularly leveraged way to do good. A donor with lots of time may also be very familiar with a particular cause and feel highly confident in a particular organization and its need for funding. These donors may want to compare alternative opportunities to GiveWell’s top charities. They may also want to actively vet GiveWell’s recommendations as part of their research process.

Donors with lots of time may also wish to apply a different strategy to their giving. GiveWell largely recommends charities where sufficient evidence exists to make a fairly robust estimate of the expected value of a donation. Donors with much more time to spend (maybe even significantly more than 50 hours per year) thinking about where to give may want to take a “hits-based giving” approach—having a high tolerance for philanthropic risk, so long as the overall expected value is sufficiently high. This is the approach the Open Philanthropy Project, which was incubated at GiveWell, has taken, and we believe doing this well requires a lot of work, as the Open Philanthropy Project discussed in a blog post last year (emphasis original):

Aim for deep understanding of the key issues, literatures, organizations, and people around a cause, either by putting in a great deal of work or by forming a high-trust relationship with someone else who can. If we [the Open Philanthropy Project] support projects that seem exciting and high-impact based on superficial understanding, we’re at high risk of being redundant with other funders. If we support projects that seem superficially exciting and high-impact, but aren’t being supported by others, then we risk being systematically biased toward projects that others have chosen not to support for good reasons. By contrast, we generally aim to support projects based on the excitement of trusted people who are at a world-class level of being well-informed, well-connected, and thoughtful in relevant ways.

Achieving this is challenging. It means finding people who are (or can be) maximally well-informed about issues we’ll never have the time to engage with fully, and finding ways to form high-trust relationships with them. As with many other philanthropists, our basic framework for doing this is to choose focus areas and hire staff around those focus areas. In some cases, rather than hiring someone to specialize in a particular cause, we try to ensure that we have a generalist who puts a great deal of time and thought into an area. Either way, our staff aim to become well-networked and form their own high-trust relationships with the best-informed people in the field.

I [Open Philanthropy Project Executive Director Holden Karnofsky] believe that the payoff of all of this work is the ability to identify ideas that are exciting for reasons that require unusual amounts of thought and knowledge to truly appreciate.

(3) Donors with values that differ from GiveWell staff

Donors who hold different values than the majority of GiveWell staff, or who place more weight on a particular cause outside of the causes covered by GiveWell, may find other giving opportunities to be more attractive for reasons beyond the time/trust framework articulated earlier in this post. For example, individuals who place a very high value on farm animal welfare may wish to give a large proportion of their donation, if not all of their donation, to organizations working in that cause.

We’re happy to speak with you about giving decisions.

If you’re not sure which considerations apply to you, please reach out. We’re always happy to talk through giving decisions.

The post Are GiveWell’s top charities the best option for every donor? appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Our goal with hosting quarterly open threads is to give blog readers an opportunity to publicly raise comments or questions about GiveWell or related topics (in the comments section below). As always, you’re also welcome to email us at info@givewell.org or to request a call with GiveWell staff if you have feedback or questions you’d prefer to discuss privately. We’ll try to respond promptly to questions or comments.

You can view our March 2017 open thread here.

The post June 2017 open thread appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Our goal with hosting quarterly open threads is to give blog readers an opportunity to publicly raise comments or questions about GiveWell or related topics (in the comments section below). As always, you’re also welcome to email us at info@givewell.org or to request a call with GiveWell staff if you have feedback or questions you’d prefer to discuss privately. We’ll try to respond promptly to questions or comments.

You can view our March 2017 open thread here.

The post June 2017 open thread appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

We're often asked why GiveWell doesn't recommend any organizations that focus on providing surgeries. This post will describe:

• Work we did previously to try to find surgery charities to recommend. In brief, our inability to identify organizations with room for more funding and high-quality monitoring data prevented us from recommending surgery charities in general.
• Our current (rough, preliminary) view that cataract surgery's cost-effectiveness may be competitive with that of our priority programs, and some of the major open questions we have about our estimate.
• Organizations implementing cataract surgery programs that we've spoken with. They run a variety of programs, and our impression is that they do not yet have the type of high-quality monitoring information we're interested in.
• Our plans to move forward with IDinsight to improve our understanding of cataract surgery as an intervention.

Read More

The post Update on our views on cataract surgery appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

This post will highlight GiveWell's work with IDinsight, part of our Incubation Grants program to help grow the pipeline of potential future top charities and improve the quality of GiveWell's recommendations. We previously highlighted the work of No Lean Season and Zusha!, Incubation Grant recipients and potential 2017 GiveWell top charities. Unlike these organizations, we don't expect IDinsight to itself become a top charity. Instead, we hope it will help GiveWell support the development of more top charities and increase our understanding of the organizations we recommend.

IDinsight is an international NGO that aims to help its clients develop and use rigorous evidence to improve social impact. GiveWell is partnering with IDinsight to support organizations' development of monitoring and evaluation information of the type we're interested in. This is the first partnership of this kind for GiveWell.

Read More

The post Why GiveWell is partnering with IDinsight appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

This is the third of four posts that form our annual review and plan for the following year. This post reviews and evaluates GiveWell’s progress last year as an organization and sketches out some high level goals for the current year. The first two posts covered GiveWell’s progress and plans on research. The last post in the series will look at metrics on our influence on donations in 2016.

First, a point of clarification. GiveWell as a legal entity currently employs both (a) staff whose work is described on givewell.org (finding outstanding evidence-backed, cost-effective programs) and (b) staff who work on the Open Philanthropy Project. We expect Open Philanthropy to become a separate organization this year (more below), pending board approval. The scope of this post is limited to (a) – the parts of the organization that will not become part of Open Philanthropy. Open Philanthropy has written about its progress and plans in this post.

Below, we first note three high-level points about where GiveWell is as an organization today. We then reflect on four questions that are important for thinking about our performance as an organization:

• Do we have sufficient staff capacity?
• Does our impact justify our operating expenses?
• Does GiveWell have a positive and accurate public image?
• Are we in a stable financial position?

Major organizational developments

Separation of the Open Philanthropy Project

We had aimed to complete the transition of Open Philanthropy staff to a new entity by the end of 2016 and did not accomplish this goal, though we are now effectively operating as two separate teams. We now expect, pending board approval, to complete the legal split by mid-2017. After the split, there will continue to be some shared staff between the organizations (GiveWell staff will track the time they spend on work for Open Philanthropy and GiveWell will bill Open Philanthropy for the time). We will continue to share office space.

GiveWell as an entity currently employs 35 staff members. After the split, we anticipate that GiveWell will continue to employ 15-20 of the current employees and that Elie Hassenfeld will remain as Executive Director of GiveWell. Holden Karnofsky, Co-Founder of GiveWell, currently spends very little time on GiveWell and will work full time for Open Philanthropy.

Outreach is now more of a limiting factor than research

We’ve gone from feeling that we had more funding available than we had good giving opportunities to a situation where we believe that strong giving opportunities have surpassed available funding. We estimate that we left over $100 million worth of very strong opportunities (top charity execution level 1 or 2 gaps, excluding GiveDirectly) unfilled last year.

This is due to increased research output (we added three new top charities and two new standouts) in 2016, an expectation of increased research output in the future (from our standard process and Incubation Grants), and decreased expectations of funding from Good Ventures. In a change from the previous year, Open Philanthropy’s tentative guess is currently that the “last dollar” it will give (from the pool of currently available capital) has higher expected value than gifts to GiveWell’s top charities today, leading it to recommend that Good Ventures cap its giving to GiveWell’s top charities at $50 million in 2016.

We expect to put more emphasis on expanding our outreach to potential donors interested in following our recommendations in 2017 than we have in past years. We are at early stages of thinking through what that might involve.

Organizational maturity

GiveWell will be 10 years old this year and we feel that we’ve reached a relatively stable place in our development. We are now making a major effort to strengthen our organizational infrastructure through filling specialized roles, particularly in operations (finance, donations management, technology, etc.); formalizing policies and procedures; and creating contingency plans for replacing senior staff.

Four key questions

Below we pose and respond to four questions about how we are doing as an organization.

Do we have sufficient staff capacity?

Operations: To date we have not had sufficient capacity for operations and have been slower to make improvements to our systems than we would have liked. In the last year, we have begun to make major changes to GiveWell’s operations team to try to correct for this. Sarah Ward was named Director of Operations, a new role, and we are pursuing a strategy of (a) hiring specialized firms to handle more of the HR and IT work that generalist staff have done in the past; (b) replacing our external accountants and auditors with firms that specialize in non-profits; and (c) moving current staff into and hiring for specialized roles, such as a donations manager, donor relations assistant, controller, and office manager. Our number of generalist operations staff has decreased; we expect to continue to have a need for a small number of generalist staff to manage relationships with external firms and fill gaps between specialist domains.

Our current operations team includes a Director of Operations, two operations generalists (who work on the website, accounting, recruiting, personnel management, donation processing, and IT), an Office Manager, an Administrative Assistant, a Donations Manager, a Donations Assistant, and a Donor Relations Assistant. We are hiring for an Operations and Legal Program Manager and expect to hire for additional roles in the coming months. After the expected spinoff of Open Philanthropy into a separate organization, the office manager, administrative assistant and one of the operations generalists will divide their time between the two organizations and Sarah will manage operations for both organizations temporarily; Open Philanthropy will begin building a separate operations team this year.

Research: Seven staff work on GiveWell’s research full time or close to full time. Elie Hassenfeld, GiveWell’s Executive Director, spends about half his time on GiveWell research. Elie spends the other half of his time on a combination of the Open Philanthropy project (about 20% of his time currently) and overseeing outreach, recruiting, and operations for GiveWell.

Josh Rosenberg and I have taken over much of the research work that Elie and Holden, co-founders of GiveWell, used to do, including all updates on current top charities, reviewing top charity contenders, managing research staff, and some intervention assessments. Holden now spends almost no time on GiveWell research.

We feel that we have sufficient capacity to follow up with our current top charities, consider promising contenders for top charity recommendations, and make decisions about Incubation Grants. We do not yet have sufficient capacity for reviewing the evidence for and modeling cost-effectiveness of interventions. We aim to make at least one hire for this work in the next few months. More on this in our post about our research plans for the year.

Outreach: As noted above, we feel we’ve reached the point where we are identifying outstanding giving opportunities more quickly than we can expand our reach to donors to fill the opportunities. Throughout most of our history, we felt that the opposite was true, that the amount of funding we could influence surpassed the opportunities we had identified, so this represents a significant shift for us. We don’t yet have concrete plans for future outreach work, but expect to give outreach significantly more attention than we have in the past.

We currently have one staff member, Catherine Hollander, who works on outreach full-time. Our outreach priorities in 2016 were to speak or meet with all major donors who were interested in talking to us, take any opportunities that came up to discuss our work with the media, and continue posting regularly to our blog. We feel that we accomplished our goals for connecting with major donors and keeping up with media requests, and fell short on blogging.

Catherine is leading the search for a Research Analyst, Outreach Focus to do more of the types of outreach we’ve focused on in the past, namely connecting with more media and major donors, and increasing the frequency of blog posts.

Does our impact justify our operating expenses?

GiveWell’s impact on donations (or “money moved”) to our recommended charities likely decreased somewhat in 2016. We are in the process of gathering and analyzing data on our influence on donations, but expect it to be in the range of $80-90 million to recommended charities and $9.2 million for Incubation Grants. Money moved to top charities in 2015 was $110 million.

Good Ventures’ giving to top charities fell from about $70 million to $50 million, due to changes in the way it is allocating funding across priorities and to a large one-off grant to GiveDirectly in 2015. Based on GiveWell’s recommendations, Good Ventures also funded $9.2 million in Incubation Grants, up from about $400,000 to $500,000 in each of 2014 and 2015.

Over the same period, we spent approximately $2 million on our operations. In total, GiveWell as an entity spent about $5.5 million on operational expenses, of which $3.5 million was spent on the Open Philanthropy Project.

We previously wrote that we believe that expenses that are 15% of money moved are well within the range of normal, so we feel comfortable with the relative size of our operating expenses at this point.

Does GiveWell have a positive and accurate public image?

We believe that GiveWell’s public image is largely positive and reasonably accurate. This is true for all or nearly all of the major media coverage we have received. See, for example, coverage on NPR and in The Atlantic, Esquire and Vox.

There are two aspects of our public image that we would like to change. First, media has sometimes portrayed our top charities as having guaranteed impact and as being the “best” charities—for example, a 2015 article in The Atlantic said, “If what you want is to save lives with certainty, several people said, you have to go to GiveWell.” We believe that our top charities offer the highest expected value among evidence-backed opportunities that we have found to date, but are not risk-free and may not be the best giving opportunities for donors with different values or unique expertise, connections, or resources. Second, charities may have an inaccurate view of the costs and benefits of engaging with us—more in this post.

Our biggest public image project in the last year was launching a redesigned website. This project took much longer than expected. The original launch date was April 2015, but due to unexpected problems and lack of staff capacity, it didn’t go live until September 2016. Our previous website had an outdated look and confusing architecture. We think the new one is a large improvement, though we aim to make some further improvements in the future.

Are we in a stable financial position?

The short answer is yes.

In 2016, we raised about $3 million in revenue available for funding our operations that was not specifically for funding Open Philanthropy Project expenses (Open Philanthropy has, recently, been fully funded by Good Ventures). We have roughly projected GiveWell’s expenses (excluding pre-split Open Philanthropy expenses) at $2.7 million in 2017 and $3.2 million in 2018. Given our money moved to top charities and our experiences with fundraising in the past, it seems reasonable to expect that we will be able to raise this funding, though we expect to do a more detailed analysis of our financial situation once the details of the split with Open Philanthropy have been fully worked out.

We do not expect revenue available for operations to decrease as a result of splitting with Open Philanthropy because most major donors have told us that they support GiveWell due to our work identifying top charities. We think it is likely that Good Ventures will continue to support 20% of GiveWell’s operational budget, as it has for the last several years.

The post GiveWell as an organization: progress in 2016 and plans for 2017 appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

This is the second of four posts that form our annual review and plan for the following year. The first post reviewed our progress in 2016. The following two posts will cover GiveWell’s progress and plans as an organization and metrics on our influence on donations in 2016.

Our primary research goals for 2017 are to:

• Speed up our output of new intervention assessments, by hiring a Senior Fellow and by improving our process for reviewing interventions at a shallow level.
• Increase the number of promising charities that apply for our recommendation. Alternatively, we may learn why we have relatively few strong applicants and decide whether to change our process as a result. Research Analyst Chelsea Tabart will spend most of her time on this project.
• Through GiveWell Incubation Grants, fund projects that may lead to more top charity contenders in the future and consider grantees No Lean Season and Zusha! as potential 2017 top charities.
• Further improve the robustness and usability of our cost-effectiveness model.
• Improve our process for following the progress of current top charities to reduce staff time, while maintaining quality. We also have some specific goals (discussed below) with respect to answering open questions about current top charities.

We discuss each of these goals in more depth below.

Intervention assessments

Intervention assessments are key to our research process. We generally only consider recommending funding for programs that are implementing one of our priority programs (an exception is if an organization has done rigorous evaluation of its own program, though in practice we have found this to be very rare). In recent years, we have completed few intervention reports, which has limited our ability to consider new potential top charities. We plan to increase the rate at which we form views on interventions this year by:

• Hiring a Senior Fellow (or possibly more than one). We expect a Senior Fellow to have a Ph.D. in economics, public health, or statistics or equivalent experience and to focus on in-depth evidence reviews and cost-effectiveness assessments of interventions that appear promising after a shallower investigation. In addition, Open Philanthropy Project Senior Advisor David Roodman may spend some more time on intervention related work.
• Doing low-intensity research on a large number of promising interventions. We generally start with a two to four hour “quick intervention assessment,” and then prioritize interventions for a 20-30 hour “interim intervention report” (example). We don’t yet have a good sense of how many of these of these we will complete this year, because we’re unsure both about how much capacity we will have for this work and about how many promising interventions there will be at each step in the process.
• Continuing to improve our systems for ensuring that we become aware of promising interventions and new relevant research as it becomes available. We expect to learn about additional interventions by tracking new research, particularly randomized controlled trials, in global health and development and by talking to select organizations about programs they run that they think we should look into.

Charity applications

In the past few years, we have been surprised by how little interest there has been from charities in applying for a GiveWell recommendation. Our impression is that for global health and development charities there are relatively few funders of our size: in 2015, we tracked $110 million given due to our research; we are in the process of compiling the data for 2016, but expect it to be in the range of $80-90 million to recommended charities. We would like to better understand whether we have failed to get the word out about the potential value we offer or communicate well about our process and charities’ likelihood of success, or, alternatively, whether charities are making well-informed decisions about their fit with our criteria. (More on why we think more charities should consider applying for a GiveWell recommendation in this post.)

This year, we have designated GiveWell Research Analyst Chelsea Tabart as charity liaison. Her role is to increase and improve our pipeline of top charity contenders by answering charities’ questions about our process and which program(s) they should apply with, encouraging promising organizations to apply, and, through these conversations, understanding what the barriers are to more charities applying.

We aim by the end of the year to have a stronger pipeline of charities applying, have confidence that we are not missing strong contenders, or understand how we should adjust our process in the future.

Incubation Grants

We made significant progress on Incubation Grants in 2016 and plan in 2017 to largely continue with ongoing engagements, while being open to new grantmaking opportunities that are brought to our attention.

Among early-to-mid stage grants, we plan to spend the most time on working with IDinsight and New Incentives (where our feedback is needed to move the projects forward), and a smaller amount of time on Results for Development and Charity Science: Health (where we are only following along with ongoing projects).

Another major priority will be following up on two later-stage grantees, No Lean Season and Zusha!, groups that are contenders for a top charity recommendation in 2017. For No Lean Season, a program run by Evidence Action, our main outstanding questions are whether the program will have room for more funding in 2018 and whether monitoring will be high quality as the program scales. We have similar questions about Zusha! and in addition are awaiting randomized controlled trial results that are expected later this year.

Cost-effectiveness model

We plan to continue making improvements to our cost-effectiveness model and the data it draws on (separate from adding new interventions to the model, which is part of the intervention report work discussed above). Projects we are currently prioritizing include:

• Making it more straightforward to see how personal values are incorporated into the model and what the implications of those values are.
• Revisiting the prevalence and intensity adjustment that we use to compare the average per-person impact of deworming in places that our top charities work to the locations where the studies that found long-term impact of deworming were conducted. More in this post.
• Improving the insecticide-treated nets model by revisiting how it incorporates effects on adult mortality and adjustments for regions with different malaria burdens and changes in malaria burden over time.

Current top charities

Our goal this year is to maintain the quality of top charity updates while decreasing the amount of staff time we spend and we ask top charities to spend on this work. Below, we detail our plans for following up with each charity.

Deworm the World Initiative, GiveDirectly, and Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI)

We have now followed these groups for several years and do not have major outstanding questions about them. We plan to ask for updates on financial information, monitoring results, and room for more funding and have regular phone calls with them to learn about operational changes that might lead us to ask additional questions.

Against Malaria Foundation (AMF)

We have two major outstanding questions about AMF that we hope to make progress on this year:

1. Will AMF’s monitoring processes be high quality? We wrote about our concerns about AMF’s past monitoring last year and expect new information to be available this year.
2. Going forward, AMF aims to fund larger distributions and commit funding further ahead of when a distribution is scheduled to occur than it has, for the most part, done in the past. Will this increase the extent to which AMF funds displace funds from other sources, or will there continue to be evidence that AMF’s funds are largely adding to the total number of nets distributed? More on this question in our review of AMF.

To help us make progress on these questions, we and AMF have agreed to have monthly calls to discuss questions we have about the monitoring AMF is producing and what AMF is learning about distributions it is considering funding. We will likely also seek out calls with AMF’s partner organizations to discuss these questions.

In order to estimate AMF’s room for more funding, we will seek out information on the location and size of funding gaps for mass net distribution campaigns from AMF, the African Leaders Malaria Alliance, and possibly other funders of nets. As we have in the past, we will use this information in conjunction with conversations with AMF about non-funding bottlenecks to its ability to fill various gaps.

The END Fund – deworming program

Compared with the charities we have recommended for several years, we have more open questions about the END Fund. The main questions we plan to seek more information on this year are:

1. We have not yet seen monitoring on par with that from our other top charities from the END Fund. We expect results from coverage surveys from END Fund programs this year. Will these surveys be high quality and demonstrate that the END Fund is funding successful programs?
2. We have not yet tried to compare the cost-effectiveness of the END Fund to our other top charities in our cost-effectiveness model. We will be seeking additional information from the END Fund about cost per treatment and baseline infection rates.
3. Questions around room for more funding: the extent to which funding due to GiveWell’s recommendation increases the amount that the END Fund spends on deworming versus other programs, actual and projected revenue from other sources, and what deworming grantmaking opportunities the END Fund expects to have.

We visited the END Fund’s programs in Rwanda and Idjwi island, DRC in January 2017 and will publish notes and photos from our visit shortly.

Malaria Consortium – seasonal malaria chemoprevention program

As with the END Fund, we have more open questions about Malaria Consortium than we do for the charities we have recommended for several years. Our main priorities are:

1. Further research on the evidence of effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, and potential downsides of seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) (due to time constraints we have not yet completed a full intervention report, though we felt sufficiently confident in the intervention to recommend Malaria Consortium).
2. Getting a better understanding of the methodology Malaria Consortium uses for estimating coverage rates.
3. Completing a more in-depth room for more funding analysis for the program for 2018 than we did for 2017.

Malaria Consortium expects to have several new studies of its SMC programs to share in April 2017 (details).

We may visit a Malaria Consortium seasonal malaria chemoprevention program in summer 2017.

Sightsavers – deworming program

As with the END Fund and Malaria Consortium, we have more open questions about Sightsavers than we do for the charities we have recommended for several years. We expect to make limited progress this year because the first deworming mass drug administration funded with GiveWell-influenced funds is not expected to take place until September at the earliest and monitoring results aren’t expected until early 2018. Because Sightsavers has done fairly little deworming in the past year, we don’t expect to be able to learn much from its ongoing programs. Our main priorities for the year are:

1. Getting more information from Sightsavers about baseline prevalence and intensity of worm infections in the areas it is working, to inform our cost-effectiveness analysis.
2. Using Sightsavers’ budget for the projects and planned treatment numbers to improve our estimate of the cost per treatment – another input into our cost-effectiveness analysis. Our current cost per treatment estimate is very rough.
3. Completing a room for more funding analysis for 2018.

Standout charities

Standout charities are groups that we have a large amount of information about and that meet some but not all of our criteria. Because we have not followed them closely over time, it is possible that they may now be a stronger fit (or that they no longer focus on the program we reviewed). We plan to have at least one phone call with each of these groups to discuss whether anything has changed that might lead us to reopen consideration of the organization as a potential top charity. Due to our focus on organizations that are most likely to become top charities, we don’t expect to make this work a priority beyond that.

The post GiveWell’s research plans for 2017 appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.