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Center for Effective Philanthropy | https://cep.org/feed/Tag Archives: Transparency
Making our work more readable
Perhaps you noticed that our most recent blog post included a bit of whimsy and even a joke footnote. Our blog is changing slightly, and you can expect more of that!
When GiveWell first started blogging, the blog was a place to share broad thoughts on philanthropy and generate conversation. While we’re not planning to revert to the tone of our early blog posts (which we consider a mistake), we are trying to publish more on our blog and to make what we publish more readable. Our blog posts will be as accurate as ever, but we’re hoping that a more conversational tone will be easier to engage with.
This blog refresh stems from an organization-wide emphasis on legibility. This focus is related to our deeply held value of transparency. For people outside of GiveWell to truly evaluate the conclusions that drive our recommendations, our work needs to be not only public but also understandable.
In GiveWell’s dictionary:
Transparency [ tran·spah·ruhn·see ]: literally making information available
Legibility [ leh·juh·bi·luh·tee ]: making a decision easy to understand and agree or disagree with
Making our work more legible takes many forms. For example, alongside our main cost-effectiveness models, we now also publish shorter versions that are easier to digest (and can be used to identify key factors in our estimates).
If you’d like to see the difference for yourself, compare the full version, the simplified version, and the summary version of our cost-effectiveness analysis for a 2023 grant to Malaria Consortium.
We’ve also made grant pages (like this one, on identifying and treating a congenital condition called clubfoot) easier to follow by including a more extensive summary that lays out the case for the grant, provides a summary of our cost-effectiveness analysis, and identifies our key reservations. We think our previous grant pages (like this one, on malnutrition treatment) were generally less readable, and that key information that informed our reasoning was harder to find.
One of the ways we plan to maintain strong legibility is through the work of our newly established “cross-cutting” research subteam. An explicit goal of their work is making our research more accurate, transparent, and legible. For example, they’ve led efforts on “red-teaming,” an exercise in which GiveWell researchers not otherwise involved in a particular grant or program investigation search for
How We’re Listening, Learning, and Looking Forward
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Center for Effective Philanthropy | https://cep.org/feed/Elevating the Conversation
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Center for Effective Philanthropy | https://cep.org/feed/The Pandemic Shifted Priorities for the Communities We Serve, So We Shifted with Them
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Center for Effective Philanthropy | https://cep.org/feed/“OpenNotes” for Funders: A Radical Idea for More Transparency and Better Relationships
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Early signs show that you gave more in 2020 than 2019—thank you!
Our donor community appears to have given significantly more in 2020 than 2019, according to early data on donations we processed.
Growth was strong relative to previous years—even 2019, which also had strong growth—and across many different dimensions. Overall, donations to GiveWell more than doubled in 2020.
We estimate that these donations will collectively save more than 12,000 lives; provide over 2 million deworming treatments to children, leading to an approximate increase in that group’s lifetime earnings of more than $21 million; and deliver almost 3,000 cash transfers to low-income households. For simplicity, the impact estimates in this paragraph exclude some donation types, and so don’t represent the full impact of donations to GiveWell in 2020.[1]
“Donations to GiveWell” refers to donations that we received directly:
It includes donations to GiveWell for our recommended organizations—including for the Maximum Impact Fund—and unrestricted funding, which may be used for our operations.[2]
It excludes donations that were made directly to our recommended organizations (via their own donation platforms) as a direct result of our research, or to other groups that accept donations for GiveWell and/or our recommended organizations, since we don’t yet have complete information about those donations.[3] It also excludes GiveWell Incubation Grant funding.[4] Most donations from Open Philanthropy, a major philanthropic grantmaker with which we work closely, are part of this excluded category because they were made directly to our recommended organizations.[5]We expect these excluded donations to account for a large proportion of total funding we influenced last year. For example, in 2019, we received $54.9 million in “donations to GiveWell.” When we received complete information about donations made directly to our recommended organizations or groups supporting them due to our research, and included them in our assessment of our influence, the amount of money we tracked increased to $155.1 million.[6]
While this post is only a preliminary look at our donors’ collective giving last year, the early signs show incredible growth. Thank you to our donor community!
The takeaway: donations to GiveWell more than doubled
We received more than twice as much funding in 2020 as we did in 2019.
Please click to see larger image.
All amounts are rounded to the nearest $100,000. This chart excludes most support from Open Philanthropy and most GiveWell Incubation Grants.[7]
A caveat: we can slice our data in many different ways. Please take care