Frequently Asked Questions

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

We publish a list of top charities, which are our recommendations for donors. GiveWell is focused on finding a small number of outstanding giving opportunities, not on reviewing as many charities — or as many causes — as possible.

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 on our website and blog. Thousands of hours of research have gone into our recommendations.

For more information, please see:

• GiveWell's credibility
• People behind GiveWell

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

The charities we recommend work in global health and development. We seek out charities implementing programs that have been studied rigorously and ideally repeatedly, and whose benefits we can reasonably expect to generalize to large populations, though there are limits to the generalizability of any study results. The set of programs fitting this description is relatively limited, and mostly found in the category of health interventions, though there is also substantial evidence on cash transfers.

We feel the charities we recommend offer the best bang for the buck in terms of lives saved or improved per dollar donated. We’ve found that your dollar goes further overseas, which is why we focus on charities working internationally.

We have not covered charitable causes like the arts, animals, and disease-specific research organizations (e.g., Susan G. Komen for the Cure, American Cancer Society). Although we considered charities focused on the U.S. (where we’re based) when GiveWell first started, we no longer recommend any organizations focused here. More

GiveWell’s operations are supported directly by donations from foundations and individual supporters. We do not take a percentage of donations made to top charities through GiveWell’s website, nor do we receive any fees from top charities for being featured on our site. In 2018, the most recent year for which complete data is available, GiveWell raised $12.4 million in unrestricted funding (which we mostly use to support our operations), compared to $5.7 million in 2017.1 Major institutional supporters, including Good Ventures and the eleven largest individual donors, contributed about 67% of GiveWell’s operational funding in 2018, up from 44% in 2017.

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

GiveWell serves donors who want to accomplish as much good as possible with their donations. These donors rely on GiveWell's research and have confidence that when they donate to GiveWell's top charities they are supporting outstanding organizations that have a significant impact on people's lives.

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

Everything we publish is available freely on our website.

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

• A blog with ongoing, detailed updates on our research.
• Audio recordings of meetings of our board of directors
• Notes from interviews with charities and experts
• Research discussions about our work

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

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

1. How many donations 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 on our impact page and in our annual metrics report.

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.

(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.

Our focus is on finding the best giving opportunities for individual donors. To do this, we:

1. Focus on areas that we feel offer donors outstanding opportunities to do good. We focus 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:

• Frequently asked questions about our research
• Full details of our research process

Our process for identifying Top Charities is rooted in our own struggles as donors and our attempt to find charities that were proven, cost-effective, and scalable, such that we could draw a maximally confident, linear, quantified link between donations and outcomes, along the lines of "$X per life saved" or "$Y per person enabled to get a job paying 20% more than they could have gotten otherwise." (See our former criteria.)

We don't believe that our top charities offer linear, reliably quantifiable returns along the lines of "$X per life saved," but we do believe that they are distinguished from other charities by their focus on evidence-backed programs aiming to help the global poor and by their transparency and accountability, all of which we believe to be important qualities. (More at our criteria.)

Many, but not all, staff support GiveWell's top charities with their personal giving.

We think the principal advantages of our current top charities are that:

• They represent the best opportunities we're aware of to help low-income people with relatively high confidence and relatively short time horizons. If you're looking to give this year and you don't know where to start, we'd strongly recommend supporting our top charities.
• Due to the emphasis on thorough vetting, transparency, and following up, our top charities represent excellent learning opportunities, and we feel that one of the most desirable outcomes of giving is learning more that will inform later giving. Supporting our top charities helps GiveWell demonstrate impact and improves our ability to learn, and we are dedicated to sharing what we learn publicly.

Some counter-considerations:

• We have strict criteria about the sorts of charities we recommend. These criteria are partly about achieving maximum impact, but partly about having recommendations that others can fairly easily be confident in.
• Seeking strong evidence and a straightforward, documented case for impact can be in tension with maximizing impact, as argued at this post by the Open Philanthropy Project. (The Open Philanthropy Project was incubated at GiveWell and looks for giving opportunities that can be longer term, harder to assess, and harder to explain. It does not have official recommendations for individual donors.)
• Thus, we think there may be many giving opportunities that are better than our top charities but don't meet our criteria and/or are not known to us.
• Even though we believe our top charities are backed by strong evidence, none of our recommendations are a 'sure thing' and a few carry a significant risk of failing to do much good.

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, transparent, 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 discuss this in greater depth in this blog post.

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.

We recognize that this is a potential issue with our rankings, and we provide our full list of eligible charities, regardless of whether they engage in our process — at Full List of Eligible Charities.

With that said,

• Given the large amounts of money that are driven by our recommendations, we believe that charities have strong incentives to engage in our process. We also make substantial efforts to give charities a sense of what they will need to provide in order to achieve recommended status (see our guide to applying for our recommendation). So we believe that charities seeking substantial funding and likely to do well in our process have strong reasons to apply for our recommendation.
• We proactively reach out to eligible charities to encourage them to apply and discuss our process with them.
• Supporting our top charities has the advantage that (a) they have been thoroughly vetted, with the results written up in detail in our charity reviews; (b) they represent excellent learning opportunities, and we feel that one of the most desirable outcomes of giving is learning more that will inform later giving. Supporting our top charities helps GiveWell demonstrate impact and improves our ability to learn, and we are dedicated to sharing what we learn publicly.

We work on an annual cycle, and our goal is to have a list of the best options by December, when the majority of giving occurs. Every year, we revisit our current top charities and standouts to assess whether they should remain on our list, taking into account factors such as updated room for more funding. We also aim to consider new organizations for inclusion.

GiveWell’s top charities from previous years can be found here.

Many charity evaluators 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.

(1) It allows us to track our own impact on donations, (2) it gives us a chance to ask you if you'd like to receive updates on GiveWell's research, and (3) when we grant the funds to the charity, we can designate them as we believe is best (generally unrestricted).

No, GiveWell collects no fees from donations to support its recommended charities. Once we have reviewed and approved your request to grant a donation to our recommended charities, 100% of your donation (after credit card fees) will be used to support the charity or charities of your choice (more details on the grant approval process here).

GiveWell (a.k.a. The Clear Fund) is a federally-recognized tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization. US donors are able to take tax deductions for donations to GiveWell to the extent permitted by US tax laws. In addition, GiveWell is able to make grants to our recommended charities. Please note that donations to GiveWell are irrevocable and donor requests to grant donations to our recommended charities are subject to our approval (more details on GiveWell's approval process here).

Please visit this page to view the ways in which to make a tax-deductible donation to GiveWell and our recommended charities for donors based outside the US. We are not aware of tax-advantaged giving options for donors in countries not listed on that page. Please contact us at donations@givewell.org to let us know about other tax-advantaged giving options.

Unfortunately, there are a number of countries where people wish to use our research but none of our top-rated charities are tax-deductible. In some countries, 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.

We currently aim to make grants to charities within about two months after the end of each calendar quarter (for example, by the beginning of June based on donations collected in January through March). We may alter this schedule in the future (e.g. if a charity tells us that having the funds sooner will impact its operations or if we face capacity limitations).

This page lists discretionary grants we have made since 2014.

Donors to GiveWell can request that we use their donations for the support of a particular recommended charity (or charities), or for grants to recommended charities at GiveWell’s discretion. Donors communicate allocation preferences to us in several different ways, depending on the donation method they choose; for example, by specifying how they want their donation to be used on our credit card donation form or check donation form, or by emailing us.

Our grantmaking process includes review and approval of grants to recommended charities by our Board of Directors. We generally approve grants in accordance with donors’ allocation preferences by granting all funds (less applicable financial transaction fees) to the charities that donors have told us they want to support, and have historically made grants in accordance with donors' allocation preferences in all cases. However, we retain the right to exercise final discretion over how funds from all donations are allocated.

GiveWell retains final discretion over how funds from donations are allocated to ensure that donations from US donors are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law, including when GiveWell grants funds to international charities formed outside the US. Generally speaking, US donors cannot take a charitable contribution deduction for a donation to international charities that are not formed in the US. Some of GiveWell’s recommended charities (and charities we might recommend in the future) are formed outside the US and do not have tax-exempt US-based organizations. GiveWell has reviewed each of these organizations and confirmed that they advance charitable purposes and otherwise meet applicable US legal requirements, so we, as a US 501(c)(3) organization, are able to grant funds to them. However, in order for a US donor to take a charitable contribution deduction for a donation that the donor recommends we grant to such an international charity, GiveWell has to exercise legal discretion and control over the donated funds, which means that we have the right to allocate the funds to a different charitable purpose than to a grant to that international charity.

Please send us an email at donations@givewell.org if you would like to modify or cancel your monthly donation to GiveWell.

We can only assist with donations made for the support of recommended charities through GiveWell; in order to change or cancel a donation made directly to a GiveWell-recommended charity, you will need to reach out to the charity directly.

If your existing donation is designated for granting to our recommended charities, we will automatically allocate the money you donate in accordance with our updated recommendation. There is no need for you to take any action.

If you are interested in making a donation of stock to GiveWell, please fill out this form. If you are interested in making a donation to GiveWell via bank transfer, please fill out this form.

GiveWell has a donor advised fund (DAF) through Vanguard Charitable for this purpose. More information and instructions for donating are available here.

If you are giving by credit card, there is an option on our online donation forms to dedicate your donation to someone. If you check this box and and tell us the person's email address, we'll send them an email letting them know about your gift. Alternatively, you can download and use our acknowledgement letter templates.

We’re sorry about the trouble. We know that some donors occasionally experience problems with our donation pages. One thing that has worked for some donors in the past is using a different browser.

If that fails, we can also accept credit card donations via PayPal at http://www.givewell.org/about/donate/paypal and we can accept donations by check made out to GiveWell and sent to 1714 Franklin Street #100335, Oakland, CA 94612. Other donation options are listed above.

We appreciate you letting us know if you continue to have website issues so that we can troubleshoot. Please email donations@givewell.org with a description of the problem.

We sometimes receive donations without guidance on how the donor wants them to be used, such as a check made out to "GiveWell" with no accompanying check donation form as well as donations made through certain online platforms or donor advised funds. We will treat these donations as unrestricted funding, which we may choose to either use for operating expenses or to grant to recommended charities. This designation will be communicated via the receipt you receive from GiveWell, and we're happy to change it if you let us know.

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).

Please see our jobs page.

Please review our page with application instructions.

Please fill out this form if you'd like to arrange a phone call with a GiveWell staff member to discuss our research. We also host regular public research discussions to discuss our recommendations and answer questions; please email info@givewell.org if you'd like to be notified about these. For media inquiries, please email media@givewell.org.

GiveWell has experienced several cases of others pretending to represent GiveWell. We don't contact people based on their posting of resumes on job sites and we never ask applicants to send money on our behalf. Three names that have occurred frequently in fraudulent messages are "Susan Komer," "Susan Komen," and "Andrew Russell" (we will add other names to this paragraph if you alert us about them). If you are uncertain that a contact is real, please email us at info@givewell.org. For more information, please see this page.