GiveWell
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| Founded | 2007 |
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| Type | Charity evaluator United States IRS exemption status: 501(c)(3) under the name "The Clear Fund." EIN/Tax ID: 20-8625442 |
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Area served
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Global |
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Key people
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Employees
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20 full-time who work primarily on GiveWell; 40 full-time including staff on the Open Philanthropy Project. This does not include contract workers such as conversation notes writers. |
| Website | givewell |
GiveWell is an American non-profit charity evaluator and effective altruism-focused organization. Unlike any other charity evaluators, GiveWell focuses primarily on the cost-effectiveness of the organizations that it evaluates, rather than traditional metrics such as the percentage of the organization's budget that is spent on overhead. GiveWell recommends several charities per year. In 2015, its top recommendations were the Against Malaria Foundation, GiveDirectly, the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, and the Deworm the World Initiative. GiveWell moved over $100 million to its top charities in 2015.
Though GiveWell does not explicitly focus on recommending international charities, most of its top recommendations have been for organizations that work in the developing world. GiveWell argues that the best charities working in the developing world are far more cost-effective than the best charities in the developed world. However, GiveWell has previously recommended some charities in the US, including KIPP (Houston branch) and Nurse-Family Partnership.
One of the key ways that GiveWell seeks to distinguish itself from other charity evaluators is through its focus on scalability, which it calls "room for more funding" — how much additional funding the charity can use, the activities that additional funding will be used for, and how well the effect of current funding can be extrapolated for additional funding. GiveWell has published a guide on room for more funding and has a number of blog posts on the topic.
Unlike other charity evaluators such as Charity Navigator, GuideStar, Philanthropedia and Great Nonprofits, GiveWell is not focused on rating large numbers of charities. Rather, GiveWell focuses on identifying outstanding charities that are proven, cost-effective, scalable, and transparent. It performs detailed reviews only for those charities that, based on its preliminary investigations, hold clear promise of being outstanding. Its 2011 international aid process review explains, "Our focus is on finding outstanding charities rather than completing an in-depth investigation for each organization we consider. For that reason, we rely on heuristics, or meaningful shortcuts, to distinguish between organizations and identify ones that we think will ultimately qualify for our recommendations."
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