Research Overview

Last updated: February 2024 (February 2022 version)

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 focus on global health and poverty alleviation programs because that's where we've found dollars can go the furthest.

Research on programs

The first step in our research process is to identify programs that are highly evidence-backed and cost-effective. We start here because an organization's choice of which program to implement is one of the most important factors affecting the impact it can have.

Our program review process operates like a funnel. We conduct shallow reviews of a large number of programs. We prioritize more intensive reviews of the programs that seem the most promising. The more promising a program seems, the more time we spend assessing it.

We publish write-ups of these program investigations.

Links:

Identifying top charities

We then look for organizations that implement the most promising of these programs. We thoroughly vet these organizations and assess whether they meet our criteria.

To evaluate organizations, we speak with their staff and other relevant experts and review their financial documents, monitoring data, and plans. Often, we also conduct site visits. We review charities' past spending and monitoring data, and we forecast their future spending, to better understand their track record and expected impact. This helps us more adequately model their cost-effectiveness.

Based on these research investigations, we publish a short list of programs that meet our criteria as top charities and direct grants to support their work. Over time, we continue to assess the work, progress, and future plans of our top charities. We regularly review their funding needs and make grants from our Top Charities Fund to the top charity or charities that we believe can use the funding most effectively at the time it is granted. We publish the rationale for each such grant on our website.

Top charity research reports:

Other recommendations

We also research and recommend grants to funding opportunities outside of our top charities list. Some of these grants have the goal of incubating, scaling, or getting more certainty around a potential future top charity. Other grants are made purely on the basis of expected value, regardless of the recipient’s top charity status. For example, when we don’t think an organization is likely to ever meet our top charity criteria, but the grant is cost-effective and consistent with our mission to maximize global well-being, we may still make a grant to support the organization’s work. Grants of this type are made from the All Grants Fund or through unrestricted funding. You can read more about all of the different types of organizations GiveWell grants to here.1

Small discretionary grants

GiveWell enables some staff to recommend a certain amount of funding annually via "small discretionary grants." We believe that we can increase our expected impact by occasionally funding small, promising opportunities without investing a lot of time in evaluating them. You can read more about these grants, which make up a very small portion of the total funding we direct each year, here.