To celebrate the end of 2023, we’re highlighting a few key things to know about GiveWell—from A to Z. These aren’t necessarily the 26 most important parts of our work (e.g., we could include only “transparency” or “top charities” for T) but they do fit the alphabet, and we’ve linked to other pages where you can learn more.
All Grants Fund. Our recommendation for donors who have a high level of trust in GiveWell and are open to programs that might be riskier than our top charities.
Bar. We set a cost-effectiveness bar, or threshold, such that we expect to be able to fully fund all the opportunities above that level of cost-effectiveness. This bar isn’t a hard limit; we consider qualitative factors in our recommendations, as discussed here. This post also discusses our bar in more detail.
Cost-effectiveness. The core question we try to answer in our research is: How much good can you do by giving money to a certain program? This blog post describes how we approach cost-effectiveness estimates and use them in our work.
Donors. Unlike a foundation, we don’t hold an endowment. Our impact comes from donors choosing to use our recommendations.
Effective giving organizations. Organizations like Effektiv Spenden fundraise for programs we recommend and provide tax-deductible donation options in a variety of countries. We’re grateful to these national effective giving organizations and groups like Giving What We Can that recommend our work.
Footnotes.1Our research materials wouldn’t be complete without footnotes; they support our commitment to transparency. Citing our sources and explaining our claims makes it possible for people to check our work for themselves and draw their own conclusions. jQuery(‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_14668_1_1’).tooltip({ tip: ‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_14668_1_1’, tipClass: ‘footnote_tooltip’, effect: ‘fade’, predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: ‘top right’, relative: true, offset: [10, 10], });
Generalizability. How well evidence generalizes to different settings, including variations in program implementation and the contexts where a program is delivered. Also called “external validity.”
Health workers and community distributors. The people who deliver many of the programs we support; includes both professional health workers and distributors who receive stipends to deliver programs in their local communities. For example, community distributors go from household to household to provide seasonal malaria chemoprevention to millions of children.
Incubating new programs. We partner with the Evidence Action Accelerator and Clinton Health Access

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