We agree that not everyone has an accurate view of GiveWell’s work, and that we should continue to improve our communications around the kinds of opportunities we recommend. Publishing information about our reasoning and goals on our website and blog is one way we aim to do this, as is speaking with the media and donors who use our research, but we agree there is room for improvement. In my experience working on GiveWell’s outreach, it has been particularly challenging to effectively communicate around the following:
We think we can continue to improve in our written and verbal communications around these topics. A goal on our website and in our own communications is to provide the most accurate picture we can at any given level of detail, within reasonable bounds of staff capacity and time. Someone who only reads a headline on our website should have the most accurate picture it’s possible to have after reading only a headline; someone who only reads our page listing top charities should have the most accurate picture associated with that level of detail, and so on.
Going forward, we think we can improve by more proactively reaching out when we become aware of a misimpression of GiveWell. We’ve had internal discussions about this, prompted by this post, and plan to more proactively communicate about mistakes or misunderstandings of our work when we become aware of them, including emailing the media with clarifications. We did not do this in the case of the quote you cite from The Atlantic article, and on reflection think this is something we should do in the future.
On the name of “top charities”: We’d be interested in whether there is a term that you feel would more succinctly and accurately convey our views on our recommendations than “top charities.” We want to avoid projecting overconfidence, but we also don’t want to suggest we’re less confident or think these are less good options for most donors than we believe they are. A concern with applying a restricted category, such as “top charities within global health and development,” would be suggesting that we hadn’t considered opportunities that fall outside of this category or that we chose this category arbitrarily, neither of which is true: GiveWell focuses on global health and development because our initial research led us to believe that the charities most likely to succeed by GiveWell’s criteria of cost-effectiveness and a strong, generalizable evidence base work in global health and development. (More on this here and here.) Similarly, a concern with referring to GiveWell’s top charities as something like “reasonably good options” could lead donors to be confused about whether we were recommending them—which, in the case of most low-time, low-trust donors (more below; this is the group we believe makes up most of our donor base), we do think they likely represent the best options.
GiveWell and the Open Philanthropy Project, the “last dollar,” and whether GiveWell’s top charities are better giving opportunities
Here, it’s helpful to distinguish between GiveWell and the Open Philanthropy Project, which are currently part of the same organization, but which we plan to legally separate this year. GiveWell—referring to our longtime work to find and recommend top charities, as described on www.givewell.org—does not have an organizational position on the “last dollar” question for Good Ventures, because GiveWell’s mission is to recommend and move money to the charities that meet its criteria; it does not have an organizational mission to consider Good Ventures’ overall or long-term budget. However, staff members serving the Open Philanthropy Project do, since theirs is a long-term partnership with Good Ventures and they are actively weighing tradeoffs between grantmaking opportunities that Good Ventures will have resources to fund in the short- and long-run. The Open Philanthropy Project views the “last dollar” discussion you refer to above (http://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/good-ventures-and-giving-now-vs-later-2016-update) as unstable, and thinks it would be a mistake to view its recent writeup as high confidence that Open Philanthropy Project opportunities are better—in some sort of absolute sense—than GiveWell top charities.
GiveWell believes the following is true:
We do think GiveWell’s top charities represent the best giving opportunities we’re aware of for donors who have limited time to spend on their decision. That’s due to the strength of the evidence base, cost-effectiveness, and their transparency and ability to be vetted and spot-checked by donors with even a low degree of trust in GiveWell. As noted on GiveWell’s top charities page, “They represent the best opportunities we’re aware of to help low-income people with relatively high confidence and relatively short time horizons.”
We also think that it’s possible that more cost-effective or otherwise ‘better’ giving opportunities exist, but that we a) haven’t found them yet, and/or b) don’t consider them as potential top charities because they fail to meet our criteria (e.g., not having a strong evidence base or not needing additional funding), which were designed to serve low-time donors and produce the types of recommendations described above.
Some donors—who have a high degree of trust in a particular person or organization and want to outsource their thinking about giving to that person or organization, or who have a large amount of time with which to spend identifying and assessing giving opportunities—might identify other opportunities they feel offer the best bang for their buck, such as those identified by the Open Philanthropy Project.
We hope that the separation of the Open Philanthropy Project from GiveWell this year clarifies the difference in our approaches, which we believe is also a source of confusion.
Thanks again for your thoughtful post on our work.
(Continued from previous comment)
(2) Market humbly.
We agree that not everyone has an accurate view of GiveWell’s work, and that we should continue to improve our communications around the kinds of opportunities we recommend. Publishing information about our reasoning and goals on our website and blog is one way we aim to do this, as is speaking with the media and donors who use our research, but we agree there is room for improvement. In my experience working on GiveWell’s outreach, it has been particularly challenging to effectively communicate around the following:
a) The uncertainty associated with deworming research. b) The limitations of our cost-effectiveness analyses. c) The type of opportunities GiveWell considers as potential top charities, and why.
We think we can continue to improve in our written and verbal communications around these topics. A goal on our website and in our own communications is to provide the most accurate picture we can at any given level of detail, within reasonable bounds of staff capacity and time. Someone who only reads a headline on our website should have the most accurate picture it’s possible to have after reading only a headline; someone who only reads our page listing top charities should have the most accurate picture associated with that level of detail, and so on.
Going forward, we think we can improve by more proactively reaching out when we become aware of a misimpression of GiveWell. We’ve had internal discussions about this, prompted by this post, and plan to more proactively communicate about mistakes or misunderstandings of our work when we become aware of them, including emailing the media with clarifications. We did not do this in the case of the quote you cite from The Atlantic article, and on reflection think this is something we should do in the future.
On the name of “top charities”: We’d be interested in whether there is a term that you feel would more succinctly and accurately convey our views on our recommendations than “top charities.” We want to avoid projecting overconfidence, but we also don’t want to suggest we’re less confident or think these are less good options for most donors than we believe they are. A concern with applying a restricted category, such as “top charities within global health and development,” would be suggesting that we hadn’t considered opportunities that fall outside of this category or that we chose this category arbitrarily, neither of which is true: GiveWell focuses on global health and development because our initial research led us to believe that the charities most likely to succeed by GiveWell’s criteria of cost-effectiveness and a strong, generalizable evidence base work in global health and development. (More on this here and here.) Similarly, a concern with referring to GiveWell’s top charities as something like “reasonably good options” could lead donors to be confused about whether we were recommending them—which, in the case of most low-time, low-trust donors (more below; this is the group we believe makes up most of our donor base), we do think they likely represent the best options.
GiveWell and the Open Philanthropy Project, the “last dollar,” and whether GiveWell’s top charities are better giving opportunities
Here, it’s helpful to distinguish between GiveWell and the Open Philanthropy Project, which are currently part of the same organization, but which we plan to legally separate this year. GiveWell—referring to our longtime work to find and recommend top charities, as described on www.givewell.org—does not have an organizational position on the “last dollar” question for Good Ventures, because GiveWell’s mission is to recommend and move money to the charities that meet its criteria; it does not have an organizational mission to consider Good Ventures’ overall or long-term budget. However, staff members serving the Open Philanthropy Project do, since theirs is a long-term partnership with Good Ventures and they are actively weighing tradeoffs between grantmaking opportunities that Good Ventures will have resources to fund in the short- and long-run. The Open Philanthropy Project views the “last dollar” discussion you refer to above (http://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/good-ventures-and-giving-now-vs-later-2016-update) as unstable, and thinks it would be a mistake to view its recent writeup as high confidence that Open Philanthropy Project opportunities are better—in some sort of absolute sense—than GiveWell top charities.
GiveWell believes the following is true:
We do think GiveWell’s top charities represent the best giving opportunities we’re aware of for donors who have limited time to spend on their decision. That’s due to the strength of the evidence base, cost-effectiveness, and their transparency and ability to be vetted and spot-checked by donors with even a low degree of trust in GiveWell. As noted on GiveWell’s top charities page, “They represent the best opportunities we’re aware of to help low-income people with relatively high confidence and relatively short time horizons.”
We also think that it’s possible that more cost-effective or otherwise ‘better’ giving opportunities exist, but that we a) haven’t found them yet, and/or b) don’t consider them as potential top charities because they fail to meet our criteria (e.g., not having a strong evidence base or not needing additional funding), which were designed to serve low-time donors and produce the types of recommendations described above.
Some donors—who have a high degree of trust in a particular person or organization and want to outsource their thinking about giving to that person or organization, or who have a large amount of time with which to spend identifying and assessing giving opportunities—might identify other opportunities they feel offer the best bang for their buck, such as those identified by the Open Philanthropy Project.
This is discussed on GiveWell’s top charities page: www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities#Proscons.
We hope that the separation of the Open Philanthropy Project from GiveWell this year clarifies the difference in our approaches, which we believe is also a source of confusion.
Thanks again for your thoughtful post on our work.