We offer multiple giving funds for donors with different preferences, and strongly believe each of these options is a very impactful way to give. By donating to one of GiveWell’s giving funds (outlined below), you take advantage of our ongoing research and analysis, ensuring that your gift is allocated to the highest-impact giving opportunities that we’ve identified.
If you want to support GiveWell and/or our grantees but aren’t sure which option is right for you, this guide can help you decide how to direct your giving.
Table of Contents
Top Charities Fund
Donations to the Top Charities Fund are used to support highly cost-effective funding opportunities at our Top Charities. Our Top Charities are highly impactful, and we have a high degree of confidence in their work.
Recommended for: Donors who want to give to high-impact work that GiveWell has a high degree of confidence in.
What it is: A gift to GiveWell that is restricted to grants to our Top Charities. GiveWell takes no fees from these donations, and they will not be used for GiveWell’s operations or non–Top Charity programs.
What it will go toward: Donations are committed to specific Top Charities programs no more than six months after being donated. These are programs that we’ve estimated to be very cost-effective, and in which we have a high degree of certainty, in accordance with our criteria.
An example of a grant in this category:
- $73.5 million for Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) program in Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and Togo (Q1 2024). This program is extremely cost-effective: we estimate that the cost per life saved was $4,000, on average, for seasonal malaria chemoprevention grants we recommended in 2022-2024. This grant allows Malaria Consortium to maintain its current scale in several regions through 2025 or 2026 (depending on region).
All Grants Fund
The All Grants Fund, which makes grants on a rolling basis, allows donors to contribute to the most impactful grant opportunities we’ve identified, regardless of program. This may include grants to:
- incubate newer programs
- promote policy change
- fund relevant scoping and research
- support other potentially high-impact, cost effective initiatives that don’t fit neat categorization
Recommended for: Donors who wish to support a wide range of grantmaking, including funding opportunities substantially more uncertain, experimental, or less likely to achieve their expected impact than our Top Charities.
What it is: A gift to GiveWell that is restricted to grantmaking. GiveWell takes no fees from these donations, and they will not be used for GiveWell’s operations.
What it might go toward: Donations are allocated on a rolling basis to grants that meet our cost-effectiveness bar for funding.
Grants supported by the All Grants Fund include:
- $1.3 million to One Acre Fund for a randomized controlled trial of its tree program (January 2023).Planting trees for timber may raise incomes among poor households. One Acre Fund’s tree program encourages farmers to grow more trees by providing seedlings and training. This grant will fund a research study to estimate the program's impact on farmers' income; the information we get may allow us to more confidently fund the program or instead fund something more cost-effective.
- $18.2 million to PATH to support national malaria vaccines rollouts (March 2024). PATH will support the ministries of health in Nigeria, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burkina Faso, Mozambique, and Uganda as they integrate the RTS,S and R21 malaria vaccines into their national immunization programs. PATH will coordinate with stakeholders, support the development of training tools and strategies, facilitate community outreach, and strengthen data systems. We believe this grant will increase the number of children receiving malaria vaccines in the first years of the rollout, thereby reducing illness and death.
While we are often less certain about the individual grants we make via our All Grants Fund, since they include less proven or more experimental opportunities, we believe that—in aggregate—these grants represent the highest-impact use of marginal funding.
Unrestricted Fund
The unrestricted fund supports spending on any GiveWell priority, including our own operating expenses. This fund is the maximally flexible giving option.
Recommended for: Donors who are enthusiastic about GiveWell’s approach and want to support the activities—such as our research, recruitment, and fundraising—that allow us to keep finding and funding excellent grant opportunities.
What it is: A gift to GiveWell that we can deploy in any way we see fit. The donor does not designate a specific use for these funds.
What it might go toward: GiveWell’s operations (including staff salaries, facilities, etc.), grants to Top Charities, or grants to non–Top Charity programs. GiveWell’s operational budget is funded entirely by unrestricted donations, and most unrestricted gifts will go to support our operations, although they may also be used for grantmaking (more here).
Donating to an individual Top Charity
Donors may also choose to support a specific charity, rather than one of our giving funds.
Recommended for: Donors who are particularly excited about one Top Charity and want to ensure that their full donation supports it.
What it is: A gift to GiveWell that we then regrant to the individual Top Charity specified by the donor. GiveWell takes no fees from these donations, so the full donation amount (less payment processing fees) will go to that program.
What it will go toward: The Top Charity of the donor’s choice, subject to our review and approval process.
We collect donations on behalf of our Top Charities, rather than encouraging donors to give to these programs directly, because:
- It allows us to track the impact of our work to direct donations to these programs.
- It gives us a chance to ask if you’d like updates on GiveWell's research.
- When we collect donations on a program’s behalf, we can grant it out as either unrestricted or restricted to a particular use. Historically, some Top Charities have not given individual donors the option to restrict their donation to a single program, and often our Top Charity recommendation applies to only one program from an implementing organization. Giving through GiveWell ensures that your donation goes toward only the specific program that we have evaluated and currently recommend.
We recognize that some donors prefer to give directly to these programs instead of donating through GiveWell. We’ve provided a list of links through which to do so here. To help us track the impact of gifts made due to our research, we ask that you fill out our donation report form here when you donate directly to one of our Top Charities.
Fungibility
When you give to a specific fund, your donation is used as part of the total pool of funding that GiveWell directs. This means that, while your donation will support the fund of your choice, its true impact may be felt elsewhere. This is because your donation will affect how we decide to allocate money from other funds and sources.
For example, when you donate to the Top Charities Fund, you increase the pool of funding we have available to support Top Charities. This might mean that we end up allocating more of our flexible funding (such as the All Grants Fund), which we would have otherwise directed to Top Charities, to non-Top Charity funding opportunities instead.
More information on fungibility and how it affects impact is here.