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The basics

What is GiveWell?

GiveWell is an independent, nonprofit charity evaluator. We find outstanding giving opportunities and publish the full details of our analysis to help donors decide where to give.

Unlike existing evaluators, which focus solely on financials, assessing administrative or fundraising costs, we focus on how well programs actually work – i.e., their effects on the people they serve.

How and why did GiveWell start?

GiveWell started as a group of donors, employed full-time in the hedge fund industry, discussing how to accomplish as much good as possible. We found ourselves fascinated by the research we were conducting, but also found that it isn't a part-time job, and few public resources exist that can help with it. We raised $300,000 from our former coworkers and left our jobs to start GiveWell. More ...

What are you trying to accomplish?

Individual donors give over 100x as much every year as the Gates Foundation and over 5x as much as all foundations combined. (See chart)

We aim to direct as much funding as possible of this large pool to the best charities we can find, and create a global, public, open conversation about how best to help people.

How does GiveWell get information about charities?

We obtain information about charities by (a) reviewing materials posted on an organization's website, (b) contacting an organization directly, or (c) conducting applications for direct grants (charities share information with us in the hopes of being awarded a grant).

How does GiveWell pay its own salaries and operating costs?

We have a set of core donors who believe strongly in our mission and pay our operating costs.

How can I help?

See our Get Involved page.

How can I learn more?

See our:

• Business plan history for a summary of our accomplishments, shortcomings, and lessons learned to date, and plans for the future.
• Blog for ongoing updates and research discussions.

How can I contact you?

See our contact page.

GiveWell background and model

GiveWell began as an informal group of 8 friends, trying to figure out where to donate. As we struggled to find good information, and became aware of how important such information is, we created a business plan for a project to conduct thorough research on charities and publish it publicly. For more, see our story and our bios.

We have attempted to get information from foundations including the Gates Foundation, Kellogg Foundation, Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, and Robin Hood Foundation. We have received some informal guidance in researching the issues, but have generally been told that information about particular charities' outcomes is considered confidential. Appendix D of the business plan we wrote for our project, when launching it in March 2007, discusses this issue, as does a blog post of ours on the Robin Hood Foundation.

We believe that information about how to help people should never be secret. We strive to disclose everything that goes into our decisions, in a way that individual donors can understand and use. We encourage foundations to pursue the same goal.

GiveWell operates as a public foundation, pooling donations in order to give grants. This is a common model - it describes United Way among other organizations - the difference being that GiveWell publicly discloses its reasoning, so that even those who don't donate to GiveWell can still take advantage of our research.

We hope that those who respect the quality of our decision-making and research, and wish to help us do more of it, will donate directly to us; but we also want to help donors who would rather give directly to excellent charities without making any commitment to GiveWell. This decision is not relevant to the content of our writeups, which aim to compare our applicants to each other rather than to GiveWell. We therefore believe that our writeups do not suffer from any conflict of interest; if you believe that there are cases in which our writeups are unfair, we'd appreciate your bringing them to our attention.

We will cover any and all causes for which we have adequate demand, funding, and staff; there is no conceptual limit to how large we can grow or how many causes we can cover, although the challenge of finding and managing staff will limit our rate of growth to some extent.

• There is a GiveWell registered in Massachusetts. We are not connected with them in any way.
• There is a GiveWell in Australia that performs a similar function to the "watchdog" organizations listed here, providing information taken from public records. Like other watchdogs, it differs from us in its emphasis on breadth (providing basic, publicly available information on many charities) over depth (examining the details of what charities do and whether it works); it also differs from us in that it covers Australia-registered charities rather than US-registered charities.

Getting involved

See our donation page.

See our donation page.

We are open to hiring researchers to join our team.

See our supporter form.

GiveWell: strengths, weaknesses, and self-evaluation

We believe that our primary qualification is our willingness to share and discuss everything that goes into our decisions.

The question of where to give is a difficult one; we believe that it cannot be contained within a single academic field or intellectual approach, and we've also observed that there is no apparent "expert" consensus on it (even if it could be determined what qualifies one as an "expert" in charity evaluation). Charity evaluation inevitably involves analysis, intuition and judgment calls, and even philosophical decisions. Ultimately, there is no such thing as a giving decision that is "foolproof" and can't be legitimately questioned and criticized. We believe this is why other grantmakers are hesitant to share their reasoning publicly - and exactly why it is so essential to do so.

We believe ourselves to have a strong combination of analytical intelligence, common sense, and passion for the issues we study, which positions us well to make reasonable bets. Those who have worked with us in the context of highly selective and competitive environments will attest to this. We also consult with experts whenever relevant, and for each of the causes we have studied, we have spent significant time discussing our decisions with at least one person who is extremely experienced in the field. However, we take the position that transparency - the willingness to share all the details of our decisions in public - is more valuable by far than any of these qualities, or than any quality of a grantmaker. In other words, your single best reason for trusting us is that you don't have to.

As our story explains, GiveWell would not exist if we'd been able to find a website that could help us substantially with our donation decisions. In 2007, when we were getting started, we compiled a list of other donor resources we knew of, available here.

We make no such assumption. GiveWell's staffers are motivated by emotion, and we believe that failing to do rigorous analysis is usually a result of not caring enough, rather than being over-emotional (as we've argued informally on our blog).

We do recognize that many donors may not share our values and worldview, and like any venture, we do not aim to serve everyone. Our research is specifically intended to help those who donate primarily in order to improve the world, and for whom accomplishing as much good as possible is more important than the other perks of donating.

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

In the business world, regulating/exposing/preventing gross misdeeds is important; but the majority of investment decisions have far less to do with these issues than with difficult and intuition-laden predictions of which companies will perform best. Relentlessly funding the best performers leads to constant improvement (for example, cell phones continually get better because people reward quality, not because they are vigilant about cell phone scandals). We believe it is this dynamic - demanding and rewarding the best - that is currently absent from charity, and that is more needed than more coverage of scandals.

Other organizations do report on charity scandals, likely better than we could. The American Institute of Philanthropy is one such organization.

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

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

(1) is relatively straightforward to measure. When people make donations to our recommended charities using the links on our site, we are able to track these donations; we also, of course, track how much is given directly to GiveWell (and thus granted to the charities we select).

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

(3) is the hardest to measure, because the spread of ideas is complex and wide-ranging; so although we can track changes in dialogue, attributing them to our specific activities is difficult. That said, the uniqueness of our message at this point in time makes it relatively feasible to trace relevant ideas back to us.

These metrics are complex and cannot be precisely quantified, just like the metrics we apply to our applicants. However, as with evaluating our applicants, we believe we can evaluate ourselves using a combination of empirical data, analysis, judgment calls, and guesswork (rather than simply the latter).

See our progress page for a complete collection of our annual self-reviews as well as business plans.

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

We believe that our research speaks for itself on this matter. We encourage you to read our reports and determine whether the differences between charities that we've identified are large enough to justify our costs.

Our Form 990s and audited financial statements are available on our Official Records page.

We do not know of a good "one-size-fits-all" way of evaluating charities, so we don't try to do so. Instead, we try to deeply understand the activities a charity carries out, the problems it addresses, and the evidence for its effectiveness. This is an enormous amount of work for even one charity, which is why we use a Round 1 application to go from a large field of applicants to a set that we can reasonably evaluate.

Rather than trying to evaluate every charity in the world, our approach is to use heuristics and imperfect information to find the ones we can have the most confidence in. We believe this is a superior approach for a donor whose primary aim is to help people as well as possible, not to evaluate a particular charity.

We don't believe there's any such thing as perfect information, and it isn't realistic to thoroughly evaluate every charity in the world. That's not our goal. Our goal is to find charities that we have high confidence in, and provide much better information than an individual can get on his or her own (as well as to create a starting point for a global dialogue around how to improve the world as well as possible).

Our recommended charities are the organizations we would bet most confidently on, based on the information we have - which is very far from perfect information, but also very far from what individual donors would have access to otherwise.

We generally don't think this is a major concern, for two reasons:

• We believe that those most likely to use our site are donors who do not have a strong prior commitment to a particular charity. At this early stage, we don't expect our analysis to sway those with deep-rooted personal connections and commitments to the organizations they already support.
• If this turns out not to be the case, it will be because donors are choosing to trust our analysis over their existing convictions. We see this as a purely good thing - a case of funds' being redirected to superior organizations. In all other areas of our economy, people demand the best deal they can get, and fund only the companies that are the best at providing it; we believe that consumers are generally better off for this dynamic, and would be happy to see the same dynamic benefit the people charities seek to help.

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

Our official bylaws state that the Board of Directors must have at least three full meetings per year, consistent with the guidelines of the Better Business Bureau. We meet more often when there are major issues to discuss.

Our page for official records lists all meetings that have taken place along with documents reviewed and audio of the meeting.

We use Network for Good to process donations to recommended charities, rather than linking directly to the charities' own donation forms, because:

• Network for Good provides a single set of URLs; thus, we don't have to change our links every time an individual charity updates its website.
• Network for Good allows us to track the donations that are made through GiveWell, which in turn helps us to monitor our own effectiveness.

In some cases, we have been able to make arrangements with top charities that satisfy the criteria above while allowing lower transaction fees.

Evaluation process and possible pitfalls

The short answer is that we have no universal or one-size-fits-all way of measuring an organization's impact. Unlike many evaluators, who insist on "objectivity" and assess only things that can't be argued about (and thus, to our minds, things that matter little if at all), we take the approach of making subjective judgment calls - informed as much as possible by empirical evidence and thorough research - and making our reasoning as transparent as we possibly can. This way, others can come to their own conclusions as well as critique us, which helps us to continue learning and improving.

Generally, we evaluate an organization within the context of a predefined cause and goal, which we lay out explicitly at the top of our cause overview (i.e., developing-world surgery or developing-world economic empowerment). We do what we can to get a sense of how well the organization accomplishes this goal on a "per-dollar/per-year" basis. However, when we do so, we generally consider any such estimates to be extremely rough, and also place weight on general organizational quality (as we perceive it), and benefits unrelated to the cause.

We use empirical data and hard analysis to inform our decisions as much as is feasible (and always have much higher confidence in an organization that can demonstrate its impact empirically), but there are always limits to what can be proven about an organization's impact on human lives. We quantify impact as much as we can to get a sense of cost-effectiveness, but there are always limits to how well two organization's effects can be compared. We consult with people who are highly experienced with the issues in question, but we also believe that fresh and outside perspectives are important, particularly for emotion-laden issues such as the ones we deal with.

We believe that trying to eliminate the human element from giving is futile. We aim to fully incorporate this human element, as all grantmakers do, while (a) informing our decision as much as possible with research and analysis; (b) being transparent enough that one who wishes to examine our reasoning can do so.

Ranking charities has the following benefits:

• Some donors do not have the time or inclination to perform their own comparisons; see us as hard-working, passionate, intelligent people who make reasonable decisions; and therefore prefer to put their money where we're putting ours. We find this reasonable, and seek to help these donors.
• Ranking enforces discipline, which in turn enforces thorough analysis. It's the intellectual exercise of comparing two charities that leads us to ask more and more questions, using facts as much as possible before filling in what we don't know with intuition and judgment calls. Publishing a standard set of information on each charity would lead us to request, publish, and use far less information.
• Ranking charities provides context for the information. We believe it is significantly easier to read and engage critically with our reviews - especially for someone who doesn't have time to read every word of them - when it is clear where we are coming from and what conclusion our analysis is ultimately supporting.

As our recommendations and reasoning should show, we consider many aspects of our applicants besides data. That said, data absolutely plays a large role in our process, and charities with strong self-documentation have a decided advantage. We believe this is a strength of our process, not a weakness, for the following reasons.

• Self-evaluation and -documentation allows an organization to learn from its mistakes, in a way that nothing else can. We generally focus on charities aiming to create significant and lasting life change; in this context, observations of how clients react to a program while enrolled in it simply aren't enough to predict how the program will affect their lives. Ultimately, a charity that does not systematically and empirically evaluate itself is a charity that has little ability to test its reasoning and learn from its mistakes. We have much higher confidence in a charity that takes the effort to test its work against empirical reality.
• We seek charities that we can confidently recommend to individual donors. We believe there are times when intuitive and informal knowledge - particularly about the quality of an organization's people - can substitute for empirical evidence. But when recommending that an individual send a check to an organization s/he has never personally interacted with, often serving people hundreds or thousands of miles away, we prefer to have as much factual evidence as possible. While some charities may have poor documentation while still doing valuable work, assessing this is not realistic for us or the donors we serve. Our goal is not to perfectly name the best charities, but to recommend excellent charities with high confidence.

We hesitate to answer this question in the abstract - it all depends on what is being measured, what can be learned from it, and how much the measurement costs. However, we firmly believe that measurement is worth significant expense, mostly for the reasons detailed immediately above.

Without rigorous self-evaluation, a charity can be missing out on opportunities to make its activities several times more effective (or to identify activities that aren't effective at all); we believe that conducting this measurement will generally be more beneficial than spending the extra 10-20% of funds on activities that haven't been critically evaluated.

As our rankings and reasoning should show, our "cost per life saved" type metrics do not play the dominant role in our decision-making. They are one factor we consider among many. For more, see our guide to cost-effectiveness analysis.

The short answer is that this is the same challenge faced by nearly all donors. If we insisted that all giving decisions be informed by thorough on-the-ground experience, we would be insisting that most people give only locally, or refuse to give at all.

We believe the benefits of being able to help the people in most need - no matter where they are - are too great to leave on the table. Therefore, we look for charities that have the capacity to document their work, and the ability to explain and prove it (as much as possible) to those who haven't experienced it directly.

It's also worth mentioning that the goal of a charity often has far more to do with what clients do after a program than with their behavior during a program. For example, when evaluating job training programs, we fear that "direct observation" may reflect that a program is enjoyable, as well as that the people invested in the program are seeing what they want to see - rather than that the program successfully helps clients to get and keep jobs, something that can only be assessed through rigorous collection of data.

We do not believe that minimizing overhead cost is a good goal for a charity, or a good way to judge a charity.

We were part of a December 2009 press release making this argument, co-released with Charity Navigator, GuideStar, GreatNonprofits, Philanthropedia, Philanthropy Action and the Hewlett Foundation.

It's probably true that any charity spending 75%+ of its budget on overhead is a fraud. But this is never the case with the charities that apply for our grants. Frauds take advantage of uncritical people, not rigorous and competitive evaluation processes. We believe that every single one of our applicants is well-established and well-intentioned - and that that isn't enough.

We believe that helping people is difficult. Charities work on challenging problems from disease epidemics thousands of miles away to the achievement gap. As with any other difficult problem, we believe that no amount of money can replace great ideas and intelligent plans. Spending 99.9% of funds on programs helps no one if these programs are ineffective; and making them effective means working hard on designing them, evaluating their results, and learning from them - all activities that often fall under the "overhead" classification.

When overhead is good

We would guess that a great charity is typically built on:

• Great people. Great people command high salaries, and keeping payroll low means losing them - not a good way to save money.
• Strong self-evaluation. Charities try to change people's lives; we believe a good one should know whether it has been succeeding, and should be constantly re-examining itself to see how it can do better. The only way to do this is through rigorous study of what happens to its clients (and, ideally, similar non-clients): is the charity improving their health, or grades, or income as hoped? Such studies are difficult and expensive, but the only alternative is to keep running a program every year, without ever finding out whether the theory behind it is working in practice. To us, that seems far more wasteful than spending money on evaluation.

These are both examples of "diverting money from programs", and both things we believe nonprofits should be doing more of, not less.

"How much money goes to overhead?" is a question about accounting classifications, not about lives changed. We believe that people currently focus on charities' accounting because so little information is available about anything else. The IRS Form 990 is the only form that is filled out and made publicly available by all charities, and it requires a detailed financial audit but practically no information on activities and results; so most attempts to rank charities try to find meaning in this information, even though there is a widespread consensus that this meaning is not there.

We take a different approach: we focus on a charity's results (lives changed). We seek to fund charities that are great at helping people, whatever the mechanics of their operation and the details of their accounting. Evaluating results is time-consuming, difficult, and costly, so we can't rate all charities at once. But we think this evaluation is worth it. It's the difference between measuring success in dollars spent and measuring success in lives changed; it's the difference between throwing money at the world's problems and taking our best shot at solving them.

We do not believe that minimizing fundraising expenses is a good goal for a charity, or a good way to judge a charity.

We feel that as long as fundraising brings in more than it costs, it is a smart and reasonable investment for a charity. Even in cases where charities overspend on fundraising (something that standard financial documents, by themselves, can't reveal), we believe that fundraising efficiency tells you more about the fundraising staff than about the programs and their effectiveness, which we believe are far more important in the scheme of things.

To be sure, wasting money is a concern - but the way we calculate our "cost-effectiveness" metrics incorporates all fundraising and administrative expenses, and therefore should include any problems caused by inefficiency - without hyperfocusing on this inefficiency. (For example, if Charity A is 10% more wasteful than Charity B, but runs programs that are twice as effective, it is the better choice overall.) Ultimately, we believe that what matters isn't how much is "wasted," in and of itself, but how much is accomplished and for how much money. That is what we seek to assess.

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

In the business world, regulating/exposing/preventing gross misdeeds is important; but the majority of investment decisions have far less to do with these issues than with difficult and intuition-laden predictions of which companies will perform best. Relentlessly funding the best performers leads to constant improvement (for example, cell phones continually get better because people reward quality, not because they are vigilant about cell phone scandals). We believe it is this dynamic - demanding and rewarding the best - that is currently absent from charity, and that is far more needed than more coverage of scandals.

Other organizations do report on corrupt charities, likely better than we could. The American Institute of Philanthropy is one such organization.

To a large degree, yes. In our limited experience, small/start-up charities rarely have the capacity to strongly document their effect on people's lives. We find this wholly appropriate given the nature of our project: finding charities that we can confidently recommend to individual donors, donors who have no direct experience with the charities and issues in question.

We believe that small/start-up charities generally should be (and generally are) funded by those who personally know and believe in the people running them. This direct and personal knowledge can easily compensate for a lack of hard empirical evidence. Indeed, GiveWell's startup capital came entirely from our former coworkers, at a time when we had no product or results to show. We have no intention (or possibility) of replacing this sort of charity.

Instead, we seek to help individual donors, who are looking for a charity they can give to with confidence despite no personal connection. We believe that these donors are best served by mature, scalable, high-capacity charities that can convincingly demonstrate their impact and can reliably translate money into lives changed.

More discussion at this blog post.

Extremely large charities are generally particularly well-suited to our evaluation process. In our experience, they generally have large enough development staffs to complete our application without requiring executive time; so even though our grants represent a small part of their budget, turnout among large charities has been strong. And we believe that an extremely large charity must have thorough self-evaluation and self-documentation if its executives are to manage it in any informed way; examining this documentation (or the lack thereof) can tell us a lot about the organization.

We generally conduct site visits once we have identified the strongest applicants within each cause. In our first year, we conducted site visits to The HOPE Program and Year Up (within the Employment Assistance cause); KIPP, Teach for America, and the Children's Scholarship fund (within the Education cause); and Nurse-Family Partnership (within the Child Care cause). After completion of our international aid report, GiveWell conducted site visits to two highly rated charities in Africa.

We continue our dialogue with all evaluated charities, to the extent that they're interested in doing so. In the future, this dialogue may or may not go along with formal re-evaluations (this depends on which causes we cover in the future). Either way, if we lose contact with a charity to the point where we can no longer have confidence in it, we will eventually withdraw our recommendation. All recommended charities are organizations that we would bet on, with confidence, today.

Our recommendations are intended for donors who are trying to figure out which charity to support, often without the ability to visit and compare organizations first-hand. For donors such as these, we think it makes sense to support organizations that can make a strong case for impact to donors without extensive experience with the organization. If you've seen a particular charity's activities and have confidence that they are your best donation opportunity, you should give there. Please recognize, however, that we would not recommend an organization without assessing it ourselves.

The causes we analyze

Understanding even a single charity is difficult; understanding a cause is extremely involved. Rather than trying to reduce all of charity down to simple formulas, we do few enough causes at a time so that we can gain understanding of the issues, context, and charities.

Our choice of causes is influenced both by donor demand and by our own interests and passions and the preferences of our donors.

If you'd like to influence our future research, please fill out survey and let us know what causes are important to you.

The charities we evaluate

Please refer to this page which lists all charities we've considered.

It takes a great deal of time and work to develop a good understanding of even one charity - that's work both for us and for the charity. The goal is not to rate each of the world's charities, but to find the ones we can confidently recommend.

We hope to cover more charities as time goes on. Please use our charity submission form to recommend that we evaluate a particular organization.

Gaining true understanding of even a single charity is an enormous amount of work; so we cannot review a charity upon request. However, you can use this form to let us know about a particular charity, and we will be sure to include it if and when we research relevant causes in the future.

Once we choose a cause to investigate, we generally try to consider as many charities as possible within that cause.

Please see our research process page for specific information on how we've found charities thus far.

We are open to evaluating any US-registered 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization that believes it can make a strong case for having the most proven, effective, scalable methods for accomplishing our goals (such as saving lives in Africa or providing employment assistance in New York City). Generally, when seeking charities to evaluate proactively, we focus on public charities (i.e., charities that get a significant amount of their support from individual donors), guessing that they would be better equipped for, more interested in, and more receptive to our evaluation process.

Not in the near future. Evaluating a single charity thoroughly takes an enormous amount of work, and we are much more interested in finding charities we can recommend with confidence (even if doing so requires heuristics and imperfect shortcuts) than in covering every charity. However, as we grow and cover more charities, we will organize what we have more robustly.

For many of the charities we review, the process involves extensive discussion with the organization. For organizations we publish reviews on but with whom we don't speak, we notify them by email. Our review for each non-recommended organization explains what criteria we used to evaluate them and where they fell short. We encourage organizations to submit additional materials if they believe they meet our criteria as listed at http://www.givewell.org/criteria.

We have reviewed all these organizations' websites seeking:

• A “bird's-eye view” of a charity's activities: all of its programs and locations, along with how much funding is going to each.
• Meaningful and systematic (not anecdotal) evidence of impact.
• Information about the likely impact of additional donations, including both plans for expansion and “funding gap” analysis (projections of how much a charity could productively spend, and how much current expected revenue falls short of this figure).

We have contacted all these organizations to let them know that we seek this information.

When and if we receive this information (either from these organizations or a donor), we'll review them more carefully. For the time being, we believe that our top-rated organizations, which do provide this type of information, offer donors a better option to accomplish as much good as possible with their donations.

Note that GiveWell's mission is to find outstanding charities, not review every charity in depth. We seek not only to find good organizations, but organizations that allow donors to accomplish as much good as possible with their limited funds.

Advice

Because evaluating a single charity is an enormous amount of work, and because we don't believe in "one-size-fits-all" evaluations, we hesitate to respond to inquiries as general as this one. If you have a specific question, we're generally happy to share our opinions.

Unfortunately, we've found that evaluating a charity well is extremely difficult to do on a part-time basis (see our story), so we can't be very helpful with this question. Your options include:

• Hiring a philanthropic advisor such as Geneva Global, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors to do custom research. Disclosure: GiveWell Board member Tim Ogden is a former employee of Geneva Global.
• Taking your best guess with an organization you can volunteer with. Working directly with the organization may give you a better sense of its organizational quality over time.

We do not know of any easy way to get a good charity recommendation (it was this problem that led to the creation of GiveWell).

We recommend giving to the charity you have the most confidence in, regardless of its size. For a donor who has very little knowledge, however, we recommend large charities. It is true that some small charities may be wrongly overlooked, but they can just as easily be rightly overlooked; just as with businesses, there is no particular reason to believe they are doing great work unless you have seen evidence of it. Though we would like to see more scrutiny on charities of all kinds, we would guess that - knowing nothing else about two charities - the larger one has probably survived more scrutiny over its history.

This is not our area of expertise; we focus on finding the best charities, not dealing with overly solicitous ones.

Although we disapprove of Charity Navigator's one- to four-star ratings, the website has some resources that are excellent when taken in context, including a writeup on how to avoid direct mail solicitations that we recommend.

No.

Site navigation

We are most confident in our top-rated charities. We recommend you review our top-rated organizations and donate to one of them.

Yes, see our donation page.

See our story.

See our Official Records page.