Open Philanthropy Project
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| Founded | 2007 |
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| Founder | Holden Karnofsky, Elie Hassenfeld |
| Type | Charity evaluator United States IRS exemption status: 501(c)(3), ruling year 2007 |
| Location |
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Area served
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Global |
| Website | givewell |
GiveWell is an American non-profit charity evaluator and effective altruism-focused organization. Unlike many 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.
In 2006 Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld, who worked at a hedge fund in Connecticut formed an informal group with colleagues to evaluate charities based on data and performance metrics similar to those they used at the fund, and were surprised to find the data often didn't exist. The next year, Karnofsky and Hassenfeld formed GiveWell as a nonprofit to provide financial analyst services to donors. They eventually decided to rate charities based on the metric of how much money it cost to save a life. In the first year, funding to run the nonprofit was provided by a fund called the Clear Fund into which the former members of informal club, now directors of GiveWell, had put around $300,000, with about half of that going to fund the organization.
In the first year, Karnofsky and Hassenfeld advocated that charities should generally spend more money on overhead, so that they could pay for staff and record keeping to track how effective their efforts were; this ran counter to standard ways of evaluating charities based on the ratio of overhead to funds deployed for the charity work itself.
In late 2007, GiveWell's founders promoted the organization on several internet blogs and forums using sockpuppets to ask questions about where to find good information about how to donate and then answering them, recommending GiveWell. GiveWell's board of directors investigated and found that the founders Karnofsky and Hassenfeld had acted inappropriately and as a result, it fined each of them $5000 and Karnofsky was demoted from executive director to a program director.
In 2008, GiveWell received funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation's Nonprofit Marketplace Initiative.The Hewlett Foundation continued to be a major funder of GiveWell until March 2014, when the Hewlett Foundation announced that it was ending the Nonprofit Marketplace Initiative based on a 2010 study it commissioned that found that only 3% of donors selected charities based on performance metrics, but rather on loyalty, personal connections, and their faith, and a subsequent 2012 showing that efforts to provide better data were not changing that pattern.
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