Every month we send an email newsletter to our supporters sharing recent updates from our work. We publish selected portions of the newsletter on our blog to make this news more accessible to people who visit our website. For key updates from the latest installment, please see below!
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Our 2025 Grant Investigation Survey Results
When we investigate potential grants, we work closely with implementing organizations—gathering data, asking detailed questions, and assessing cost-effectiveness. Sometimes this results in us making a grant, and other times it doesn’t, but we want to ensure our process always reflects our core values of truth-seeking and transparency. So, for the second year in a row, we sent an anonymous survey to find out how we’re doing.
The survey was sent to organizations that participated in our grant investigation process from April 2024 through July 2025. We invited 122 individuals representing 75 organizations to participate—more than double last year’s sample—and we received 80 responses (a 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.
The results were encouraging: overall satisfaction rose from 4.2 to 4.6 out of 5, with particularly high marks for honest communication and treating organizations as experts in their work. We also saw new themes emerge this year. Several respondents said they gained value from GiveWell beyond funding, through shared data from similar programs, connections to other implementers, and monitoring and evaluation guidance. Others appreciated our responsiveness during the US foreign aid freeze and resulting uncertainty.
The survey also pointed to areas we need to improve, including being clearer about why we’re asking for specific information, doing more to share what we’re learning with partners, and building a mutual understanding of monitoring and evaluation best practices. We’re actively working on these areas and plan to conduct the survey again in 2026 to track our progress. To learn more, check out our blog post.
Investing in Information for Greater Future Impact
In addition to our core grantmaking, GiveWell is funding an increasing number of grants designed to generate information that will help us direct more funding to highly cost-effective programs in the future. In 2025, we made 18 grants totaling approximately $39 million aimed specifically at improving future funding decisions.
In our latest podcast episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Program Director Julie Faller about these “value of information” grants.
Elie and Julie cover:
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