Over the past several years, GiveWell has been focused on growing, deepening, and improving our research team’s work in line with our core values of truth-seeking and transparency. As part of that effort, we’ve invited anonymous assessment of our grantmaking process in order to learn and improve.
In July 2024, we sent out our first anonymous survey to people we’ve worked with during grant investigations. While we typically ask for candid, live feedback from the organizations we work with, we had not previously invited anonymous assessment of our grantmaking process. The survey sought to better understand the extent to which we live out our values in our interactions with external organizations. The questions focused on organizations’ experiences with our grant investigation process and post-grant follow-up.
In 2025, we repeated the process with the same survey instrument and compared results to the prior year, to see what had changed and whether our daily work is reflecting our core values and operating principles.
GiveWell’s second annual grant investigation survey was sent to organizations that participated in our grant investigation process from April 2024 through July 2025.1We sent the same survey in two segments, one in February 2025 and one in September 2025. jQuery(‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_16393_1_1’).tooltip({ tip: ‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_16393_1_1’, tipClass: ‘footnote_tooltip’, effect: ‘fade’, predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: ‘top right’, relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); We invited a total of 122 individuals representing 75 organizations to participate, and we received 80 responses (66% response rate). Included in the total were 22 contacts from investigations that did not result in a grant, from which we received five responses.
What we learned
This year’s respondents rated their satisfaction with GiveWell’s investigation process higher than last year’s respondents: 4.6 out of 5 in 2025 compared to 4.2 out of 5 in 2024. Among the survey questions, GiveWell received particularly high scores for honest, professional, and transparent communication, and for showing respect to organizations and treating them as experts in their field.
While the response rates of the 2024 and 2025 surveys were similar—58% in 2024 compared to 66% in 2025—the sample size for the 2025 survey was substantially larger: 80 in 2025 compared to 32 in 2024. The larger sample size is largely a result of GiveWell’s rapidly increasing grant volume: we invited more than twice as many people to respond in the 2025 survey, one for each grant investigation we completed.
In addition to improvements in several areas, including overall satisfaction and satisfaction with the length of our grant investigations,2The average rating for satisfaction with the length of