We’ve begun investigating the ongoing famine in Somalia / East Africa. We will be writing more on this topic as we learn more, but for the moment, we wanted to share a few preliminary thoughts: This appears to be a very challenging situation for aid organizations, and it is difficult to determine who is in… Read More
The GiveWell Blog
Month: July 2011
A charity to watch: GiveDirectly
Note: we sent GiveDirectly an early draft of this post and have made modifications after some back-and-forth. We’ve been interested for a long time in the idea of simply giving out cash to the very poor, as a promising form of charity, and we’ve long been puzzled over why there don’t seem to be any… Read More
A good volunteer is hard to find
We’ve written before about how volunteers often end up costing charities more in time and resources than the work they do for the organization is worth. (Charities seem to justify taking on these volunteers because of they often become donors and informal fundraisers for the charity.) In our experience, valuable volunteers are rare. The people… Read More
KIPP Houston has a 1.4 million dollar shortfall. How did this happen?
KIPP is one of the most well-known and, we believe, effective charities in the United States: it has a long track record of improving students’ performance in school and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has cited it as a model for education reform. In our recent analysis of KIPP, we’ve been surprised to learn that… Read More
Update on GiveWell’s web traffic / money moved: Q2 2011
In addition to evaluations of other charities, GiveWell publishes substantial evaluation on itself, from the quality of its research to its impact on donations. This year, we have added quarterly updates regarding two key metrics: (a) donations to top charities directly through our website (b) web traffic. Money moved By “money moved” we mean donations… Read More
How much time do charities spend participating in GiveWell’s process?
In May, we emailed all the charities we have analyzed in-depth asking them to fill out a brief survey about their experiences with our process. We asked: How much time did you spend on our process? How clear were you at the outset about what our process would entail? Do you think, looking back, that… Read More