Since 2007, GiveWell has maintained a list of top charities. The organizations and programs on that list have changed over time, but the goal has remained the same: to help donors decide where to give.
In service of that goal, we’ve spent roughly the last year working on a plan to add to and update our criteria for top charities, so that they accurately reflect our prioritization of funding opportunities and are more helpful to donors. The revised criteria emphasize programs from which we expect high impact, with the additional requirement that we have a high degree of confidence in our expectation.
We hope these changes will also draw a brighter line for donors between our top charities and other excellent funding opportunities we support, a distinction that we haven’t always made clear. Recognizing that some donors want to contribute to grants outside our top charities list, we’re also introducing a new giving option: the All Grants Fund. Providing this option as a complement to the Maximum Impact Fund is an important step as grants to programs outside our top charities become a bigger part of our work.
In this post, we will:
Explain why we are making these changes
Share our updated criteria and our updated top charities list
Explain how these changes affect donors’ giving options
Why we’re revising our top charity criteria
Our top charities list—and by association the Maximum Impact Fund—is often the first thing that people encounter when they’re introduced to GiveWell. We want it to be easy to understand why these programs are on our list.
Additionally, our top charity programs should reflect the kinds of giving opportunities that people are seeking from such a list. After soliciting feedback, we believe that most donors are looking for opportunities that are both high-impact (i.e., GiveWell expects donations will do a lot of good per dollar) and high-confidence (i.e., GiveWell is relatively sure that that expectation will bear out).[1]
By adding criteria that are more specific, we also hope to establish clearer guidance on when programs should be added or removed.
Our revised criteria
Previously, we listed four criteria for top charities: evidence of effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, room for more funding, and transparency. These continue to be the criteria we’ll use to evaluate funding opportunities, but they no longer fully describe the few programs that we consider top