Tag Archives: Donations

Open Philanthropy’s 2023-2025 funding of $300 million total for GiveWell’s recommendations

This year, Open Philanthropy plans to give $300 million for GiveWell to spend over the next three years. We’re grateful for what this support will enable us to do.
Annualized, this is similar to what Open Philanthropy gave in 2020 and roughly in line with what we projected earlier this year. It’s less than Open Philanthropy gave in 2021 and 2022, and we’ll need strong growth in donations in order to make up the difference.1This refers to funds raised for the programs we recommend. As an organization, we’re in a very stable position financially. jQuery(‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_14366_1_1’).tooltip({ tip: ‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_14366_1_1’, tipClass: ‘footnote_tooltip’, effect: ‘fade’, predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: ‘top right’, relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); We expect to identify more great funding opportunities than we’ll be able to fund, and your support can fill those cost-effective gaps, helping to save and improve people’s lives.
Below, we share:

How this update affects GiveWell’s work (more)
More background on Open Philanthropy and GiveWell’s relationship (more)
Why Open Philanthropy’s spending is changing (more)
The impact donors can have by supporting GiveWell’s recommendations (more)

How Open Philanthropy’s giving affects GiveWell’s work
Open Philanthropy’s funding of $300 million over three years is roughly in line with what we were expecting in April 2023 and is a decrease from what we expected a couple years ago.2It’s between the 25th and 50th percentile outcomes we anticipated in our post, which was informed by ongoing conversations with Open Philanthropy about its likely giving. jQuery(‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_14366_1_2’).tooltip({ tip: ‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_14366_1_2’, tipClass: ‘footnote_tooltip’, effect: ‘fade’, predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: ‘top right’, relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); In 2021, we scaled up our efforts to find more funding opportunities in expectation of potentially reaching $1 billion in funds raised by 2025. While we no longer project raising $1 billion in 2025, our research team has risen to the challenge and has found more cost-effective funding opportunities than we expect we’ll be able to fund.
Open Philanthropy isn’t yet sure what level of funding it might provide for GiveWell’s recommendations after 2025, if it renews its support. Our outreach team is ramping up its fundraising efforts so that we can help as many people as possible, and we expect to support hundreds of millions of dollars worth of outstanding programs regardless of Open Philanthropy’s funding

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How much funding does GiveWell expect to raise through 2025?

Summary
We’re optimistic that GiveWell’s funds raised will continue to increase in the long run. Over the next few years, we believe our annual funds raised are more likely to stay relatively constant, due to a decrease in expected funding from our largest donor, Open Philanthropy, offset by an expected increase in funding from our other donors.
This chart shows our latest forecasts for total funds raised in millions of dollars: [1]

In November 2021, we wrote that we were anticipating rapid growth and aiming to influence $1 billion in 2025. Now, our best guess is that we’ll raise between $400 million and $800 million in 2025 (for comparison, we raised around $600 million in 2022). As in the chart above, we now think it’s possible but unlikely that we’ll raise close to $1 billion in 2025, and we also think it’s possible but unlikely that our funds raised in 2025 will be substantially lower (e.g. around $300 million) than they were in 2022.
We’re excited about the impact we can have at any of those levels of funding, and we’ll be continuing to direct as much funding as we can raise to the most cost-effective opportunities we can find.
Our forecasts are uncertain. We might be wrong about what the future will look like, just as our projections now are very different than they were in late 2021. We’ll have better information as time goes on.
This change in projected funds raised means that:

We’re funding-constrained: we believe that our research will yield more outstanding opportunities than we’ll be able to fund over the next few years. Your donations can help fill those gaps.
Because it’s valuable to maintain a stable cost-effectiveness bar, we may not spend down all the funds available to us in each year. Depending on how much funding we are able to direct and when it becomes available, we may smooth our spending over the next few years. Currently, we recommend funding to opportunities we believe to be at least 10 times as cost-effective as unconditional cash transfers (“10x cash”).
We are increasing our emphasis on fundraising relative to past years and relative to our previous plans for 2023 to 2025 in order to increase the chances of us being able to fill additional cost-effective funding gaps.

In the rest of this post, we discuss:

Our

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The Maximum Impact Fund is now the Top Charities Fund

We’ve decided to rename the Maximum Impact Fund to better describe what opportunities this fund supports. The Maximum Impact Fund will now be called the Top Charities Fund.
We recently announced changes to our top charity criteria that include a new requirement for our top charities: that we have a high degree of confidence in our expectations about the impact of their programs. Alongside this update, we also introduced a new giving option, the All Grants Fund. The All Grants Fund supports the full range of GiveWell’s grantmaking and can be allocated to any grant that meets our cost-effectiveness bar—including opportunities outside of our top charities and riskier grants with high expected value.1The expected value of a grant is the value of the grant’s outcomes multiplied by the probability that those outcomes will be realized. jQuery(‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_13910_1_1’).tooltip({ tip: ‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_13910_1_1’, tipClass: ‘footnote_tooltip’, effect: ‘fade’, predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: ‘top right’, relative: true, offset: [10, 10], });
The new All Grants Fund is a complement to what we have called our Maximum Impact Fund, which is granted to cost-effective opportunities among our top charities. However, we’ve received feedback that describing the fund that supports grantmaking only to our top charities as having “Maximum Impact” is confusing in light of the opportunity to support a wider range of opportunities (with potentially higher expected value) through the All Grants Fund.
Based on this feedback, we’ve decided to change the name of the Maximum Impact Fund to the Top Charities Fund.
Only the name is changing—we aren’t making any further changes to the underlying fund beyond those discussed in our previous post, so any incoming donations designated for the Maximum Impact Fund will automatically be allocated to the Top Charities Fund. We will continue to use donations to this fund to support the highest-priority funding needs among our top charities each quarter. As before, we will apply the same cost-effectiveness bar across our grantmaking, regardless of whether the funding comes from the All Grants Fund or Top Charities Fund.
We appreciate everyone who provided feedback and hope that the new name provides more clarity about how donations to our funds will be used.
More details about our funds and their impact are here.
Notes[+] Notes

↑1 The expected value of a grant is the value

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An update on GiveWell’s funding projections

As little as six months ago, we were in the position of having more funding available than we could spend on opportunities that met our very high cost-effectiveness bar. Today, the opposite is true—we don’t expect to have enough funding to support all the cost-effective opportunities we find.
In this post we will:

provide an update on GiveWell’s projected funding position,
explain how we have been successful in identifying cost-effective opportunities, and
share our initial thoughts about what this update means for GiveWell’s forward-looking grantmaking strategy.

The state of funding
We wrote last year that we would roll over approximately $110 million in funding from 2021 to spend this year. We ultimately rolled over substantially less because we were imprecise in calculating our projected funds in and out (more details available on our mistakes page). But at a high level, it remained true that we received more money than we chose to spend on highly cost-effective funding opportunities.
We expected to be in a similar position this year, rolling over approximately $110 million. We now believe that we will be funding constrained. There are two core reasons for this:

We found a lot more cost-effective opportunities that need funding. Based on our current research pipeline, we think we’ll be able to recommend up to approximately $750 million in grants that are at least 6x as cost-effective as cash transfers.1We compare charities (and funding opportunities within them) using multiples of our estimate for the impact of directly transferring cash to beneficiaries. For example, we describe an opportunity as “6x cash” to indicate that we think it’s six times as cost-effective as giving that amount in cash directly to the beneficiary. There’s an intuitive case for asking whether a program is better than what beneficiaries would buy for themselves using cash. If not, wouldn’t it be better to just give them cash instead? Any program we consider must exceed this standard and be multiple times better than cash in order for us to recommend it. jQuery(‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_13763_1_1’).tooltip({ tip: ‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_13763_1_1’, tipClass: ‘footnote_tooltip’, effect: ‘fade’, predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: ‘top right’, relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); Last year, we identified about $500 million in grants, most of which were at least 8x.
We think we will receive less money than we projected due to recent

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Why you’ll see more matching campaigns at GiveWell

Lots of charities run matching campaigns with claims like “Give today and double your impact!” We’re generally skeptical of these claims, which are true only if the matching donor would not have otherwise given to the charity.
We guess that many donors who are motivated to make a large gift to charity (as donors who put up funding for matches typically are) would do so whether or not their support is matched by others. What may often be happening with matching campaigns, then, is that a matching donor would have given to the charity anyway but has agreed to structure their donation as a “match” for marketing purposes. We’ve written about these concerns in the past.
But we don’t think matches are inherently problematic. In fact, if executed such that the matching donor would not have given otherwise, we believe they can be highly motivating for donors.
We’re aiming to increase the amount of funding we direct each year, and we’re planning to start regularly running matching campaigns in 2020 ourselves, in the hopes of reaching new donors and learning which channels are the most successful for marketing. We plan to take extra steps to structure our matching campaigns to offer a “true” match to the extent possible.
How we’ll structure matching campaigns
In order to make a more truthful claim about matching, we plan to verify that the donors who provide matching funds for GiveWell campaigns would not have otherwise donated. We are taking the following steps to do so:

Approaching donors who have shown interest in increasing GiveWell’s reach.
Asking if they would be interested in making an additional gift this year to underwrite our matching campaigns.
Assessing their giving history and our expectation of their likely giving in 2020 so that we can see if matching funds appear additive.
Confirming with potential matching donors that we are only interested in donations they would not have otherwise made.
Communicating to potential matching donors that we will only accept their gift in the amount we are able to match from other supporters. This might mean asking the donor to wait to give until the matching campaign is complete so that we only receive the correct amount, or returning unused funds to the matching donor.

It will be impossible to say with certainty that a matching donor would not have given

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