GiveWell Helps Donors Calculate the Good a Charity Will Do By Farhad Manjoo December 15, 2013 Around this

time last year, when my wife and I were looking to give some money to charity, I was struck by a sudden utilitarian panic. I wasn't giving away very much, so how could I know that my small contribution would amount to anything? What if the money just went to some charity's overhead or marketing? Or, perhaps even worse, what if I gave money to a charity that was efficient with its resources but was dedicated to a cause that wasn't the most worthwhile use of my money? So I asked for help on Twitter. Within a few minutes, someone sent me a link to GiveWell, a nonprofit charity-review organization that has completely changed the way I think about donating money. GiveWell studies charities the way a stock analyst might research companies. The group was founded in 2007 by Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld, who were analysts at the hedge-fund Bridgewater Associates and had been stymied by a lack of online guidance about how to give. "We wanted to do the same thing for charitable giving as we could do for any online purchaseget the best deal for the money we were giving," Mr. Hassenfeld says. After raising $300,000 from their colleagues, the pair founded GiveWell and began a gargantuan research task, studying academic articles and reams of data from hundreds of charities around the world, as well as conducting many interviews. Every year since then, GiveWellwhich now has 11 full-time researchershas produced a short list of "top charities," groups it believes will use your donation to produce the largest impact in the world. The recommendations reflect not just the staff's intense investigations but also its attempt to grapple with a series of vexing, nearly unanswerable questions about who in the world might benefit most from more money and how. GiveWell sits at the center of a small but growing movement in philanthropy, what you might call "evidence-based giving," which is particularly in vogue among tech millionaires and billionaires. In addition to praise from economists and those in the traditional philanthropic world, GiveWell has earned accolades from tech types. Its largest funder is Good Ventures, the foundation created by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who now runs the foundation. In its philosophical outlook, GiveWell also has much in common with other tech-funded philanthropies, including Pierre Omidyar's , Jeff Skoll's and especially Bill Gates's. Indeed, GiveWell recently moved its headquarters from New York to San Francisco, in part because its philosophy has found more traction with donors in Silicon Valley than finance types on the East Coast.

The tech set's interest is no surprise: Like many start-ups, GiveWell is disruptive. It wants to transform philanthropy from a field where decisions are often governed by emotion and, even, marketing to one whose work is measured, tested and constantly optimized to produce the most good. "They take a very analytical, skeptical, 'scientific' approachin the broadest sensethat I think can appeal to a lot of people in Silicon Valley," Ms. Tuna says. This year, GiveWell has picked three top charities: GiveDirectly, an organization that provides cash transfers, via cellphone, to people in Kenya and Uganda (and rigorously monitors its results), the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative and the Deworm the World Initiative, two programs that pay for inexpensive but highly effective parasitic treatments in developing nation. To those unfamiliar with GiveWell's process, its recommendations in favor of small charities that most people haven't heard of might sound strange, even somewhat arbitrary. Why does it recommend giving internationally rather than to one's local homeless shelter? Why focus on deworming rather than clean-water initiatives, microfinance or programs that provide livestock to the poor? There are larger questions, too, some so large they can seem impossible to answer. If you want to produce the most good in the world, should you give money to initiatives that directly relieve poverty or suffering, or are your funds better spent trying to fix the larger, the world's longer-term problemslike corruption, poor infrastructure, poor healthcare, poor education, extreme weather eventsthat plague the world? Last week, during a presentation for donors and a long interview, staffers told me that making apples-and-oranges comparisons between disparate uses for money will never be easily quantifiable. "Compared to other enterprises in life, like running a tech company, one of our challenges is we'll never really know whether we've made the right decisions," Mr. Hassenfeld says. Still, GiveWell's researchers say that in many cases they can use research and data to arrive at "more right" answers. For instance, if you're a small donor looking to significantly improve other people's lives, it's incontrovertible that you can get significantly more done by putting your money in a developing region than anywhere in the Western World. GiveWell's pages-long analysis makes this point plain: GiveWell's top-rated American charities must spend about $10,000 to $20,000 to increase a single child's academic performance. By contrast, you'll treat one child for every dollar you give to deworming initiatives in Africa, a treatment that will profoundly improve that child's life. Similarly, for every $3,400 you spend on anti-malarial bednets in Africa, you'll save one life. (Even if you don't follow its recommendations, GiveWell's website is a font of knowledge about charities and development issues; if you wouldn't book a hotel room without checking it out on TripAdvisor, don't give to a charity without checking it out on GiveWell.)

In the last three years, the amount of philanthropic funds that GiveWell attributes to its research what it calls "money moved"has doubled annually, the pace of a quickgrowing start-up. This year, it will likely be responsible for $15 million to $20 million in donations. But as GiveWell has grown, it has found its mission shifting, in part because there aren't very many charities around the world that satisfy its requirements and because the few that do are often too small to quickly digest the millions that GiveWell's recommendations might elicit. To address this concern, GiveWell recently launched GiveWell Labs, an ambitious, years-long research effort that aims to investigate dozens of potential uses of philanthropic funds, causes ranging from climate change to labor mobility to softwarepatent reform. The project will serve as the basis for Mr. Moskovitz and Ms. Tuna's foundation, which expects to begin spending large sums on some of the issues GiveWell identifies as being especially promising philanthropic areas. Mr. Hassenfeld thinks other newly minted tech billionaires will also sign on to the group's mission. "The Bay Area is a good fit for the approach we're taking," he says. "Since we've been out here, we've met a lot of people who've asked us how they can help."