GiveWell's goal is not to be objective, but to be transparent. We do not believe that charity analysis can be reduced to facts and formulas - any good giving decision involves intuition and judgment calls - so rather than trying to avoid such judgment calls, we try to put all our reasoning out in the open where others can assess it and critique it.

This page discusses what our audience can expect from us in terms of (a) transparency about our research and reasoning; (b) mechanisms for viewing, and submitting, feedback on our research and reasoning; (c) transparency about our organization in general (above and beyond our research).

Transparency about our research and reasoning

We strive to accommodate any reader who wishes to understand why we hold the positions and recommendations we hold.

• We use links and footnotes to support statements of fact on our website. You can expect links and footnotes to provide all the empirical support we have for the statements they pertain to.

  When you see a statement without an associated link or footnote, you can assume that there is no additional support for the statement being made, though you are welcome to contact us to verify this.

• Much of our content is summary in nature, but for donors wishing to walk through our entire decision making process, we maintain process pages that should be easily accessible from relevant pages. Examples:
  • Process page for overall international aid report
  • Process page for disaster relief report
  • Process page for U.S. equality of opportunity report
• We maintain a blog and research email list that allow people to follow our process in something close to real time. Following one or more of these is a good way to get a sense for how we think, and how it may differ from how you think, over time.
  The blog generally consists of content that we believe is interesting to a general audience and/or captures GiveWell's core opinions (and changes in core opinions). The research email list contains information on our progress, and general topics of discussion, that we don't feel are of general enough interest to be posted to the blog.

Feedback on our research and reasoning

We actively solicit and publicize feedback on our research and reasoning.

• Every charity we publish content on is invited to complete a Charity Response; for those charities that opt to do so, the Charity Response appears in a tab at the top of the page (example).
• We invite outsiders to complete structured evaluations of our research.

  We are committed to publishing every evaluation that (a) is completed along the lines of the structure we provide; (b) we have permission to publish. This is the case whether or not the evaluation is favorable to us, and whether or not it is solicited (though we reserve the right to modify the latter condition if we are flooded by non-substantive submissions such as spam). If you email us a structured evaluation, we will publish it in an easily accessible place; currently we intend to post submissions along with our other external reviews.

• Outsiders can also submit thoughts on our work through our blog (comments section) and research email list, both discussed above.
• We will soon be publishing and maintaining a collection of substantive criticism of our work, whether via the above venues or others.

Information about our organization in general

We share:

• Standard information about our organization including our financials, policies, Board and staff members, and transparency policy for official records (XLS).
• Records of all Board meetings (sometimes lagged) including dates, times, audio of the meetings, and attachments that were discussed at the meetings.
• Self-evaluation records including all of our annual reviews of GiveWell's progress and priorities.
• Quarterly reports on key GiveWell metrics, starting with Q1 2011
• Summary page on GiveWell's key metrics
• A summary of major mistakes we've made as an organization