After our first year, GiveWell completed a thorough report on our accomplishments, shortcomings, and lessons learned, and outlined our plans for the future. The full report is available via this link:
- Year 1 Review and Plan (ZIP format, five files: review of our first year, plans for the coming year, and three appendices summarizing our research findings and plans)
The report is also summarized below.
Table of Contents
Summary of Year 1 Review
(Click for full review in PDF format)
GiveWell started as a group of donors, trying to accomplish as much good as possible with our donations. It became a full-time project when we realized that no helpful public resources exist for doing so, and that the lion’s share of U.S. giving comes from individual donors who likely face the same lack of information.
We hoped to address this problem using the following basic model:
- Using grants as leverage to get substantive information from charities, by asking questions in our grant application (regarding the specifics of their activities and evidence for effectiveness) that we could not answer from their publicly available materials.
- Carrying out intensive, full-time research in order to make informed recommendations.
- Publicly publishing our recommendations, reasoning and sources to the web.
- Building publicity and a reputation for quality in order to get donors to use these recommendations.
- Financing our grants, salaries, and operating expenses with direct donations from those most passionate about our work.
The primary goal of our first year was to determine whether the first three steps in this process were viable, and if so, to establish a “proof of concept” for our model: a website with useful, well-sourced recommendations for donors. Without such a “proof of concept” in hand, we had no way of getting support from people who did not know us personally, so we raised startup capital from our former coworkers to create it. We hoped that we would be able to create this website by December of 2007 (which we believed would be a particularly good time to get attention), and get preliminary information on its potential to affect donors, as well as publicity that would lead to useful contacts.
Our specific goals, in order of importance, were:
- Conduct quality research using the “grants as leverage” model described above, while learning as much as possible about how to improve our research process for future years.
- Publish this research on a useful, readable website that can inform individuals’ giving decisions while making all our reasoning and sources clear.
- Secure enough publicity to make useful contacts and get a preliminary idea of the potential of our model to engage donors.
- Clear the funding and logistical hurdles of starting our organization. This includes raising the necessary capital for our first year, building a Board of Directors, completing various legal registrations, and establishing procedures for managing our finances and operations.
The table below provides a summary of our progress on these goals; more detail follows.
| Goal | Importance | Successes | Concerns and shortcomings | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Research | Very High | Successfully and cost-effectively got meaningful information from charities; generated substantive and useful information about where to donate. | Process took twice as long as expected; was often frustrating for charities. Overly narrow classifications of charities led to suboptimal allocation of grants. | B+ |
| Website | High | We were able to publish nearly all our sources publicly. Website completed under budget; sufficiently usable to generate reasonable levels of engagement for a new website. | Website readability and usability still leaves much to be desired. | B |
| Publicity | Medium | Attracted significant positive attention in the nonprofit-centered and mainstream media. Saw significant spike in website traffic leading to many contacts and over $30,000 in donations to recommended charities. | Overly aggressive, inappropriate marketing called our judgment into question and damaged our reputation (justifiably). | C |
| Startup hurdles | Essential (but low time commitment) | Raised sufficient startup capital, secured US-recognized nonprofit status, completed all necessary registrations, set up payroll and accounting procedures, formed Board of Directors. | Did not establish a full set of policies and metrics for oversight purposes. Board members limited in availability and did not provide sufficient oversight. Little progress on finding potential staff. | B+ |
Summary of Plan for the Coming Year
(Click for full plan in PDF format)
GiveWell’s ultimate vision is of a world in which:
- Individual donors can easily find meaningful information about what charities do and whether it works.
- A large amount of money from these donors flows systematically to the charities with the most proven, effective, scalable ways of helping people.
- This dynamic leads to an ongoing public dialogue about how to help people, and to constant improvement in the way charitable resources are allocated.
There are many ways this vision can come about. Some involve GiveWell’s becoming a large organization in its own right, performing a great deal of research and directing a great deal of money; others involve GiveWell’s being supplemented or even replaced by other organizations that do thorough research on charities and make their findings public.
What is key to all of these scenarios is the presence of a research model that is recognizably viable (capable of collecting meaningful public information about what charities do and whether it works) and influential (capable of affecting how individual donors give).
As our review of 2007 explains, we believe that at this point we have produced a model that is viable, but we have only the most preliminary evidence of how influential it can be. We feel that our top priority for this year is beginning to expand our influence. Continuing to perform quality research (and thus continuing to establish our viability) is also important. If we can accomplish these two things, we will build the case for our model of giving, and make significant progress toward our vision.
Specifically, our high-level goals – in order of importance – are:
- Increase the “money moved” by GiveWell, where “money moved” refers to the sum of (a) grants given directly by the Clear Fund and (b) individual donations that are made to recommended charities, primarily on our recommendation. Our money moved provides an indicator of how much influence our research has and how much donors value it; in the long run, GiveWell will be viable if and only if we are moving a large amount of money relative to our operating costs.
- Perform more quality research on what charities do, whether it works, and how individual donors can accomplish as much good as possible. This research is our core value-added, and continuing to create it is nearly as important as increasing its influence.
- Engage more critical thinkers who will critique, discuss, and help improve our research. In addition to improving the quality of our research over time, finding more critical thinkers will improve our ability to hire more staff in the future, if warranted.
- Strengthen our organizational oversight, starting by adding to our Board of Directors.
Goal 1 not only answers the most important current question about GiveWell – the question of how influential or model can be – but it is important in pursuing all three of our other goals, since our ability to move money will affect the likelihood that charities share information with us and that qualified people collaborate with us. It is important to recognize that this goal – increasing our “money moved” – is by far the most important one for this year. If and only if we make good progress on it, we will be much better positioned to accomplish our other goals (especially 3 and 4) in future years.
