The GiveWell Blog

Why we’re allocating discretionary funds to the Deworm the World Initiative

(updated on: ) | by Catherine

Many donors who give through GiveWell’s website choose to donate to support “Grants to recommended charities at GiveWell’s discretion,” rather than selecting a specific recommended charity or charities as the target of their gift.

We periodically grant these “discretionary funds” to what we see as the highest-value funding opportunities among our top charities. We last granted discretionary funds in April; then, we granted $4.4 million to the Against Malaria Foundation and $0.5 million to the Deworm the World Initiative.

Since we last allocated funds, we received an additional $1.25 million in discretionary funds that we recently granted out. We also hold roughly $1 million in discretionary funds that we plan to grant out in the next month or two. We plan to grant all of this funding to the Deworm the World Initiative.

Recommendation for donors

We continue to recommend that donors give 100% of their donation to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF). In other words, although we’re choosing to grant discretionary funds to Deworm the World, we don’t believe that donors who rely on our recommendations should adjust their giving at this time. We explain the rationale for this below.

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From the archive: 6 tips on disaster relief giving

(updated on: ) | by Catherine

We’ve received several questions about donating in response to Tropical Storm Harvey. We wanted to share this post, which was originally published in 2013, with our advice for disaster relief giving. We’re unsure if bullet points #4 and #5 still apply, as it has been a few years since we last investigated giving opportunities for disasters, and we have mostly considered international disasters.

Our general advice on disaster relief giving:

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Update on GiveWell’s intervention research in 2017

(updated on: ) | by Catherine

One of our major goals for 2017 is “intervention prioritization,” our work to assess a large number of programs (interventions) as potential GiveWell priority programs we’d be interested in recommending charities working on.

Summary

This post will provide a brief overview of our intervention work this year, focusing on the interim and full intervention reports we’ve published in 2017.

Programs we plan to continue investigating:

Programs we decided not to prioritize additional research on:

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Our approach to processing undesignated donations

| by Maryana Pinchuk

Though GiveWell donors typically indicate how they would like their donations to be designated – e.g., for the support of one or more of our recommended charities – we occasionally receive donations without any designation information. It is important to us that donors understand our process for handling these donations: as a general rule, we treat all undesignated donations as unrestricted gifts, which means they will most likely to be used to fund GiveWell’s operating expenses.

In this post, we will:

  1. Discuss undesignated donations more in-depth and outline our rationale for treating them as unrestricted gifts.
  2. Explain how our thinking on processing these types of donations has evolved over time to better meet our donations processing goal – to make it easy for donors to communicate their designation preferences, be transparent about where donations are allocated, and keep our administrative costs low.
  3. Provide information on how to make sure that, as a donor, your designation preferences are communicated to us.

If you have any questions about the designation of a future or past donation to GiveWell, please email us at donations@givewell.org.

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Mid-year update on GiveWell’s progress

(updated on: ) | by Catherine

This post will provide a brief overview of GiveWell’s progress in a number of areas so far this year. In summary,

  1. Research: We are making progress on reaching charities that might be a good fit for a GiveWell recommendation and asking them to apply. We are also moving forward with GiveWell’s intervention prioritization goals.
  2. Operations: The separation of GiveWell and the Open Philanthropy Project was a major organizational priority in the first half of the year and was finalized on June 1. We’ve also increased the specialization on the operations team and outsourced some of GiveWell’s operations work.
  3. Outreach: Outreach is now a major organizational priority. We hope to develop a strategy for significantly increasing money moved to our recommended charities by September.

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Deciding whether to recommend fistula management charities

(updated on: ) | by Catherine

We’ve long been interested in fistula surgery as a potential GiveWell priority program. However, as with other surgery charities, we have struggled to identify an organization that meets GiveWell’s criteria. Now, we’re working with a group called IDinsight and are excited that we may be able to consider a fistula surgery organization as a potential GiveWell top charity.

Our longstanding interest in interventions to treat fistula can be attributed in part to the popular narrative presented about fistula–the condition, which is often associated with social ostracization–appears to cause a significant amount of suffering, and seems to be treatable. We’re not sure how representative the popular narrative is, but as donors, it has contributed to our continued interest in better understanding this intervention, along with the feeling that surgery charities in general may offer low-cost, life-changing impacts.

Summary

This post will discuss:

  • Fistula management, including surgery, as an intervention.
  • Our open questions and uncertainty around fistula management programs, particularly their costs.
  • Our plans to partner with IDinsight to help answer some of our questions about fistula management.

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