Published: April 2014
Our mission to find great giving opportunities guides our priorities in the two domains of our research: evidence-backed international aid charities and our newer project called GiveWell Labs. We use different criteria for these two domains, which are described below.
Criteria for evidence-backed international aid charities
Our current top charities are characterized by the following qualities:
- Serving the global poor. Low-income people in the developing world have dramatically lower standards of living than low-income people in the U.S., and we believe that a given dollar amount can provide more meaningful benefits when targeting the former. More
- Focused on evidence-backed interventions. We have a high standard for evidence: we seek out programs that have been studied rigorously and repeatedly, and whose benefits we can reasonably expect to generalize to large populations (though there are limits to the generalizability of any study results). The set of programs fitting this description is relatively limited, and mostly found in the category of health interventions (though there is also substantial evidence on cash transfers).
- Thoroughly vetted and highly transparent. We examine potential top charities thoroughly and skeptically, and publish thorough reviews discussing both strengths of these charities and concerns. We also follow top charities' progress over time and report on it publicly, including any negative developments. Charities must be open to our intensive investigation process — and public discussion of their track record and progress, both the good and the bad — in order to earn "top charity" status. We also provide a list of charities meeting our first two criteria for donors who are concerned that this requirement creates problematic selection effects.
For more on our process and the reasoning behind it, see Our Process.
Criteria for GiveWell Labs
GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.
We don't expect to use the same criteria we've used for our traditional work. We haven't fully committed to specific criteria or a specific process. At this point, all we're committed to is seeking to make the best use we can of our limited resources (time, staff capacity) to find the best giving opportunities possible, and continuing to practice extreme transparency in the process. Our goal is not to apply the "evidence-backed/thoroughly-vetted/underfunded" framework to causes where it may be out of place, but rather to improve the level of transparency and public dialogue around how to make the most of one's giving (even if, for many causes, such dialogue revolves around heavily intangible and intuition-laden ideas).
Our thinking on GiveWell Labs evolves quickly and concrete recommendations could be far in the future, so we haven't provided much static content. If you're interested in more information on GiveWell Labs, see this page, as well as our complete set of blog posts on GiveWell Labs, which are arranged in reverse chronological order.