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About GiveWell

What does GiveWell do?

GiveWell's mission is to find outstanding giving opportunities and publish the full details of our analysis to help donors decide where to give.

GiveWell is focused on finding a small number of outstanding giving opportunities, not on reviewing as many charities - or as many causes - as possible.

As of March 2013, we are working to expand the breadth of our research. Historically, we have primarily focused on charities working internationally. We have not covered charitable causes like the arts, animals, disease-specific research organizations (e.g., Susan G. Komen for the Cure, American Cancer Society), and we have given limited consideration to charities focused on helping people in need in the US (more).

Who is behind this project?

We were started by a group of donors who wanted to accomplish as much good as possible with their donations and found that there wasn't a strong source of information available on how to do this. Since 2007, we have worked full-time to research the issues and charities that we write about our on website and blog. Thousands of hours of research have gone into our recommendations.

For more information, please see:

GiveWell's research has received attention from major media, scholars and philanthropists. For more, see our reputation page.

How does GiveWell support itself?

GiveWell is supported by donations from foundations (the Hewlett Foundation is a major funder) and other individual supporters. GiveWell does not solicit donations from the general public.

For details on our revenues and expenses, see our financial statements.

What types of donors use GiveWell's research?

GiveWell serves donors who want to accomplish as much good as possible with their donations but don't have the ability to identify top charities on their own. These donors rely on GiveWell's research and have confidence that when they donate to GiveWell's top charities they are supporting outstanding organizations having a significant impact on donors' lives.

GiveWell does not serve donors who want to know whether a particular charity is legitimate or are particularly interested in a charitable cause that isn't already on our research agenda.

Who can access GiveWell's research?

We aim to publish all of the research we do and everything we publish is available freely on our website. GiveWell is committed to extreme transparency. In addition to publishing research reports on charities we do and do not recommend, we publish:

In some cases, researchers or organizations share information with us on condition that we keep it confidential, and we honor confidentiality in these cases.

What is GiveWell's impact? How is GiveWell's success evaluated?

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 impact-focused giving and transparency in giving decisions).

(1) is relatively straightforward to measure. We track donations to our recommended charities through a variety of methods, including the donation links on our site and by asking donors to submit our donation report when they give through another channel. We report the results quarterly on our blog and on our impact page.

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.

These metrics are complex and cannot be precisely quantified. However, as with evaluating our applicants, we believe we can evaluate ourselves using a combination of empirical data, analysis, and judgment calls, and that we should do so as transparently as possible. We post annual self-reviews of our progress as well as external assessments of the quality of our research

GiveWell's recommended charities

How does GiveWell conduct research and what are its findings?

Our focus is on finding great charities. To do this, we:

  1. Focus on areas that we feel offer donors outstanding opportunities to do good. To date, we have focused primarily on international aid, and, in particular, global health (more on why we focus on these areas).
  2. Consider a large number of organizations and rely on heuristics, or meaningful shortcuts, to distinguish between organizations and identify ones that we think will ultimately qualify for our recommendations.
  3. Conduct in-depth evaluations on organizations we believe are strong contenders for our recommendation, including interviews with staff, reviews of publicly-available and internal documents about the charity's work and plans, and site visits to the charity's programs.

For more information, please see:

Are GiveWell's top charities tax-deductible where I live?

Donations to GiveWell are tax-deductible in the U.S., and we are able to take donations for the support of any of our top charities. In addition, donations to our top charities themselves are eligible for tax deductions in the following countries:

We ask that donors who use our research to decide to support these organizations through their own websites complete our donation reporting form so we are able to track our own impact.

Unfortunately, there are many countries where many people wish to use our research (most notably Australia) but none of our top-rated charities are tax-deductible. (The Against Malaria Foundation is pursuing tax deductible status in Australia, but we are unsure whether, or when, they might be able to obtain it.) In some countries (but not, as far as we know, Australia), donors may be able to take advantage of donor-advised funds or fiscal sponsorship organizations in order to make tax-deductible gifts to our top charities.

In general, we think that differences in effectiveness between charities are sufficiently large that in cases where the best giving opportunity may not be tax-deductible, it makes sense to give a smaller post-tax donation to the best organization rather than a larger pre-tax donation to a tax-deductible organization. However, we understand that donors may have different intuitions on this question, and are hoping to eventually have tax-deductible giving opportunities in other countries with many GiveWell users.

Why does GiveWell recommend so few charities?

We recommend few charities by design, because we see ourselves as a "finder of great giving opportunities" rather than a "charity evaluator." In other words, we're not seeking to classify large numbers of charities as "good" or "bad"; our mission is solely to identify, and thoroughly investigate, the best.

The charities we don't recommend may be doing great work, and our lack of recommendation shouldn't be taken as evidence to the contrary. However, our top charities are the ones that we believe best fit our criteria: evidence-backed, cost-effective, and capable of effectively using more funding.

Thoroughly investigating even a small number of charities is a great deal of work. It generally includes thoroughly reviewing the research behind charities' programs, researching possible concerns about these programs, extensive back-and-forth with charities to gain full understanding of their processes and past and future uses of funds, multi-day site visits to charities' operations in the field, and ongoing updates, as well as extremely time-intensive cost-effectiveness analysis (estimating how much good is accomplished per dollar spent). Thus, in order to confidently stand behind our recommendations, we need to focus our resources on the most promising candidates.

We discussed this in greater depth in this blog post.

What does GiveWell think about charities that do not qualify for its top rankings?

We believe that there are many organizations that do great work but don't meet our criteria or work on issues outside the scope of our research. We recommend the organizations that we would (and do) give our personal money to in order to accomplish maximal impact, and we target donors who broadly share our values.

How is GiveWell different from charity evaluators like Charity Navigator?

Charity evaluators like Charity Navigator aim to assign an objective rating to many different organizations. This requires relying on less detailed information about a charity and its activities. These services may be helpful to donors who are trying to determine whether a particular charity is legitimate or not.

GiveWell aims to serve donors who seek a recommendation about where to give. GiveWell does thorough, in-depth research on a small number of organizations so that we recommend outstanding organizations that donors can be confident in.

How can my organization apply to be considered for a top ranking?

Please review our page with application instructions.

Getting involved

How can I get involved and help GiveWell?

The best ways to help GiveWell are to:

  • Give to our top charities. Doing so helps GiveWell by increasing the donations we are able to attribute to our work, which in turn increases our influence.
  • Spread the word. Personal referrals are a key source of GiveWell donors. If you have ideas for what we could do to improve our appeal to the people you're hoping to reach, we're happy to hear from you.
  • Follow, read, and engage with our research. We greatly value feedback, and have put substantial effort into soliciting second opinions on our work. One good way to stay posted on our evolving research is to follow our blog.
  • A note on volunteering. We do not offer volunteer opportunities except in rare cases of exceptional fit with a volunteer's qualifications (particularly if the volunteer has technical expertise, legal expertise or marketing ability).

How can I apply for a job at GiveWell?

Please see our jobs page.

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