This post lays out highlights from our metrics report for 2011. For more detail, see our full metrics report (PDF).

1. In 2011, GiveWell moved $5,285,992 to our recommended charities, a significant increase over past years.

2. While our #1-ranked charity received the most funding, many organizations received significant funding due to our recommendations. Most of our money moved went to AMF (our #1-ranked charity as of December 2011), which received over $2 million. SCI (our #2-ranked charity as of December 2011) and VillageReach (our top-rated charity through November 2011) both received more than $600,000. Three additional organizations received more than $75,000 as a result of our recommendation and one other organization received more than $50,000.

3. Web traffic continued to grow.

4. The main sources of increased traffic were Google search (AdWords and organic).

5. The vast majority of our money moved came from a relatively small set of donors giving very large gifts.

Good Ventures grants to our top charities as well as funding to committed GiveWell Labs accounted for approximately 1/3 of our total money moved ($1.75m / $5.3m). Excluding those funds entirely, 55 donors giving $10,000 or more accounted for 70% of our money moved. In the table below, and in the following analyses of our 55 largest donors, we exclude funding from Good Ventures to our top charities and funding committed to GiveWell Labs.

6. These 55 donors tend to be (a) young (for major donors) and (b) most often employed in finance or technology. Close to 80% of our money moved (about whom we have information) comes from donors who are under the age of 50; approximately 45% comes from donors under the age of 40. (Note that we did not always know donors’ ages and, in some cases, made our best guess.)

7. These major donors most commonly find GiveWell because they are proactively looking for a resource that will enable them to give more effectively; otherwise, donors are most likely to learn about us via people like Peter Singer, mentions in the media (either print or online).

8. Based on the major donors who responded to our survey, approximately 2/3 of the funding was reallocated from other organizations; approximately 1/3 were just beginning to give.

9. Most commonly, funds were reallocated from other international organizations.

9. GiveWell’s website now processes more giving than GuideStar’s and about 42% as much as Charity Navigator’s, though it offers far fewer charities as options. This comparison provides evidence that the growth we saw in 2011 is due not to generalized increases in online giving or use of charity evaluators, but rather to GiveWell-specific factors. (Note that the GiveWell figure in this chart includes only what was processed through our website - not all money moved - in order to provide a valid comparison to the others, for which we only have online-giving data.)

As in past years, we’re going to be posting our annual self-evaluation and plan as a series of blog posts. This post summarizes what changed for GiveWell in 2011 and what it means for the future. Future posts will elaborate.

For us, the major developments of 2011 were:

• New contacts with major donors and the launch of GiveWell Labs. Prior to 2011, we had only one contact whom we would have classified as a “megadonor,” i.e., someone who seemed to have a reasonable chance of making extremely large gifts (in the range of $1 million or more) in the reasonably near future if we could generate good enough giving opportunities. In 2011, we made contact with several more, including Good Ventures.

  We realized that these contacts made it both more possible and more important to produce research of use to major philanthropists. We therefore launched GiveWell Labs, a new arm of our research process that will be open to any giving opportunity, no matter what form and what sector. GiveWell Labs made little progress in 2011 aside from being launched, but we expect it to be a major priority for 2012.

• Our money moved grew significantly, hitting $5 million for 2011. This was partly a function of the major donors mentioned above, but partly a function of continuing to see strong growth in money moved from smaller donors. Excluding GiveWell Labs and Good Ventures, our money moved figure roughly doubled over last year, which was consistent with the growth we’ve seen in past years.
• Our general level of “access” improved significantly. By “access,” we mean the ability to get relevant people (including charity staff, foundation staff, and academics) to engage with us and discuss relevant issues. This makes it possible to learn about relevant issues more quickly, improving both the quality and speed of our research, and reduces the problem of missing potential top charities because of their reluctance to engage with us.

  We believe that our access improved partly because of our relatively strong “money moved” figure for 2010, which we highlighted on our new For Charities page, and partly because of our improved reputation and network. Good Ventures has been very helpful on this front.

• Our needs (and opportunities) for more staff are growing. Over the summer of 2011, we had 7 total staff (2 of them temporary) and still felt that we could benefit from more capacity. We currently have 5 total staff. Prior to 2011, we had never had more than 4 total staff at one time.

  As we become more systematic and thorough, we see more opportunities to improve our research by hiring; GiveWell Labs may introduce the need for more capacity as well. And the increased level of attention we get has increased administrative work.
  Recruiting will be a major priority for 2012.

• We were successful in raising more operating funding. Fundraising was our #2 priority for 2011. We met our goal, with some help from both institutions and individuals. We balanced our budget for 2011 and project a balanced budget for 2012; if we succeed in making more good hires, we will need to raise more to cover our costs for 2013.
• We identified two strong top charities and intensified our focus on global health and nutrition. Identifying top charities was what took the most effort in 2011. We believe it’s no accident that all of the strongest charities we’ve found so far are within the broad area of global health and nutrition. We will be focusing on this area intensively in 2012; we believe that deeply investigating a set of priority interventions (and the organizations that carry them out) is the most promising route to finding more outstanding giving opportunities.
• We drew substantial attention for our work on disaster relief (particularly relating to the Japan crisis in March) and errors in World Health Organization cost-effectiveness figures. We believe that these contributed to our improvements in money moved, website traffic, and general reputation. We will continue to maintain our disaster relief research and will continue to deeply investigate research questions that are important to us.

Overall, it was a very encouraging year. Our work, our reputation and our influence all improved significantly, and we see substantial room for more improvement. We believe GiveWell now has enough impact to justify its operating expenses, and hope to have much more impact in the future.

Of course, we also made plenty of mistakes in 2011, and we’ve recently updated our shortcomings log to reflect them.

We’re OK with funding a project that might fail, but it’s very important to us that we be able to recognize, document, publicly discuss, and learn from such a failure if it happens.

This is the area in which we feel most strongly that current philanthropists are coming up short: they’re failing to learn (or at least, to help others learn) from their track records. For a simple example, take the issue of sustainability in developing-world aid.

• A common goal of a philanthropic program is to see the government - or another funder - take over at some point, leading to lasting impact that doesn’t depend on continued funding.
• We’ve seen many different approaches to accomplishing this. For example, VillageReach initially paid entirely for its own project, with the hope that the government would switch over to its model once the proof of concept had been established; now that that idea has failed to pan out, VillageReach is asking for more cost-sharing from the government up front as it re-implements its model.
• Yet there appears to be so little evidence on what sorts of projects have and haven’t achieved sustainability in the past that one paper by prominent scholars argues that the whole idea of sustainability is an “illusion” (an argument endorsed by William Easterly).

Most of the funders we’ve talked to don’t seem to have very clear senses even of their own organizations’ track records (both good and bad). Even if funders are learning internally and informally from their own failures, they aren’t learning from each others’.

We believe that we have an unusual commitment to public and documented discussion of whether our giving ends up accomplishing what we hope. We’ve been releasing regular updates on VillageReach, the organization we directed the most money to in 2010, and we intend to do the same with our current top charities. These updates are specific and honest about both good and bad news (and there has been a fair amount of the latter).

We believe that having an up-front, pre-declared plan for determining whether a project goes as hoped should be common in general, but it is particularly important to us because we see it as an area where we can add value that other funders are failing to add. When considering options for GiveWell Labs, we feel that even if we focused on relatively low-ambition, low-upside, “typical” direct-aid projects, our public discussion and documentation of their progress will make these projects unusually helpful.

Accountability is also particularly important to us because we are just getting started with GiveWell Labs (and are new to giving in general). Learning is important, and that means being up front about what we’re trying to accomplish and how, in a way that will make it possible for us to detect, report, and learn from failure.

Even as a serious GiveWell fan, though, there were a number of things that I didn’t know about the organization that I should have. These aren’t secrets or titillating stories about office politics, just some things that I’ve learned that I didn’t know before.

The biggest challenge remains “find outstanding giving opportunities” - not “get more eyeballs.” I wasn’t totally ignorant about the difficulty of finding outstanding giving opportunities, but I thought that GiveWell was clearly doing so better than anyone else working publicly, and that accordingly it should focus more on outreach, rather than improving research. As an outsider, I didn’t have a good sense of how much went into the recommendations or all the work that goes into charities that don’t end up receiving recommendations. I didn’t think it was easy, but it seemed like Holden and Elie pretty much had it under control, and that there was lots of low-hanging fruit on the outreach side.

As far as I can tell now, neither of those things are really true.

On the outreach front, GiveWell had already tried or looked into many different strategies, even if they hadn’t blogged about it. And because our users generally aren’t typical donors, a lot of the things that charities normally do to cultivate donors might be actively harmful for us. (But we definitely haven’t thought of everything, so please do let us know or comment if you have ideas for how we could “sell” our research better.)

On the research front, although it isn’t very hard to come up with better recommendations than other charity evaluators, we face two problems I hadn’t fully considered:

• Room for more funding. Because a number of large funders are scooping up excellent funding opportunities in global health, many good chances to help people are already taken. We need to find charities that are good bets, but not so obviously good that they have all the funding they can productively use.
• Our competition isn’t other charity rating organizations. This is about the baseline that GiveWell’s recommendations are compared to, rather than the competition for funding opportunities. For a long time, it has seemed natural for people to compare GiveWell to Charity Navigator or Philanthropedia, but as we continue to grow, I think that comparison becomes less and less salient.

  As we raise our ambitions with projects like GiveWell Labs, we will be “competing” not with other charity evaluators but with foundations. Because some foundations are extremely strategic, well-resourced, and focused on the same goal of doing as much good as possible, finding better giving opportunities than they do is a much higher burden.

Both of these problems become harder as GiveWell grows, because we’ll need to create more “room for money moved” and will more naturally be compared to foundations rather than other charity evaluators.

Our standards for what we expect from charities are a moving target. This is true in two senses:

• Our standards for giving opportunities and evidence are generally higher than they used to be. Although we thought in December 2011 that our top charities in 2011 might not be as good an opportunity as VillageReach was in December 2010, they had both been through a much more thorough wringer than VillageReach had been when we first recommended it. On the evidence side, just compare our intervention reports for immunizations (VillageReach), bednets (AMF), and deworming (SCI). The latter two are much more thorough.
• We’re willing to accept less evidence from a specific charity if we have more confidence in an intervention. This dynamic played an important role in our decision between our top two charities. SCI had significant evidence that it had historically actually decreased the prevalence of worm infections, while AMF had very limited evidence that people actually used the bednets that they distributed. The overall evidence that people do generally use bednets that they’re given was stronger, however, than the evidence that deworming has developmental effects, which was crucial to the case for SCI. Even though SCI had more evidence that its own activities were successful, we thought that the evidence for AMF’s intervention made it a better choice.

The majority of the useful evidence we rely on to produce our ratings does not come from charities themselves. The VillageReach review, which focused on evidence from VillageReach’s pilot project, and Holden’s exchange with Giving What We Can, in which he argued for focusing on charities more than interventions, had made me think that GiveWell’s research focused overwhelmingly on charities rather than interventions. That impression was incorrect. I personally have spent far more of my time at GiveWell working on intervention-level research than research on individual charities, and while I’m not sure of the overall breakdown across GiveWell, it’s definitely not a blowout for charity-level research. Part of the reason for that is that high-quality evidence actually exists for many interventions; generally, that’s not the case for charities, even outstanding ones. This isn’t really much a criticism of charities, since it wouldn’t be a good allocation of resources for, e.g., every deworming charity to be doing research about the developmental effects of its own specific deworming projects.

GiveWell is really skeptical of academic research, even though we use it all the time. I’m still not sure if this level of skepticism is appropriate, but it seems to be a rational response to all the potential issues with publication bias. My impression is that the typical response to findings like “most published research findings are false” is to bemoan the structural issues and then ignore them when interpreting any particular study. GiveWell doesn’t do that.

I knew before I started that GiveWell really liked randomized control trials, but I thought that preference was due to econometric naivete rather than a principled preference. Now I know that one of the reasons why GiveWell prefers RCTs is that they make it harder for researchers to fudge results, intentionally or unintentionally, and thus hopefully make publication bias less of a problem.

Our research focuses more on global health than economic development. This realization struck me in October as I found myself reading articles on schistosomiasis from parasitology journals published in the 1970s, though it was obvious in hindsight given the charities GiveWell had recommended. I think the discussions of randomized control trials and the general trappings of cost-effectiveness analysis make it easy to think of our work as economic, and we do share many of the sensibilities and interests of the “randomista” movement in development economics, but in subject matter most of our research is focused on health.

In addition to navel-gazing about GiveWell, I’ve gotten to do some pretty neat stuff while I’ve been here: I went to Malawi, found some big errors in a WHO cost-effectiveness calculation for deworming, and had some really interesting conversations about how to do the most good. So, just in case you’re interested, we’re still hiring.

If you would like to access this report, please get in contact with the ALNAP secretariat.

We emailed the ALNAP secretariat, saying:

I am writing from GiveWell, an independent, non-profit charity evaluator to request access to the ALNAP report “American Red Cross – Haiti” that is listed on the ALNAP website at http://www.alnap.org/node/7131.aspx. Would it be possible to send us a copy of the report?

The secretariat responded that the evaluation cannot be shared externally due to an in-house policy.

Why should this report be confidential over a year after its publication?

(Thanks to Eliza Scheffler for finding this.)

Update: the page linked to in this post regarding the evaluation appears to have been removed (very recently - I am writing this at 11:02am and it was up as of 10:30am). Here is Google’s cache of the site and here is a copy of the Google cache stored on our server (for when the Google cache expires).

Upside

We use “upside” to refer to the possibility that a philanthropic project will have a huge/outsized impact. While it’s a good thing to fund projects that have this kind of potential - and while a single hugely successful project can make up for many failures - we also see danger in overthinking the upside of projects.

We don’t have experience with venture capital, but our impression is that in the for-profit world it’s extremely difficult to read the “upside” of different ventures, and thus many investments with “big win” potential are needed for one big win. Not only will many of the most hyped, funded, seemingly limitless-potential companies flop, but many of the biggest success stories won’t necessary look high-potential early on. For example, Twitter began as a frivolous-looking side project of another startup; Facebook’s founder was presenting a relatively unambitious-sounding vision of a college-only network a year after its founding. Another striking example of the danger of overthinking upside is provided by a published debate over AirBNB: Union Square Ventures saw a talented team and successful product, but declined to invest specifically because “I’m just not sure how big it’s going to be.” AirBNB later appears to have become a billion-dollar company.

Our feeling is that this sort of uncertainty extends to philanthropy as well. It’s hard to say in advance how generalizable and widely applicable an innovation is and how big the “latent market” for it is, and it’s also hard to say how an early-stage project will look in a few years. Because of this, we are against putting heavy weight on quantification of potential impact, and in favor of looking for projects with real-world feedback loops, so that they can learn and adapt as they go, hopefully eventually hitting on an approach that works and can be scaled and/or generalized.

Upside vs. likelihood of success

We do feel that there are probably some signs that distinguish high-upside-potential from low-upside-potential projects. The main one that strikes us is the extent to which a project’s goals revolve around development and testing of new knowledge, ideas and approaches, as opposed to repeating what has been done before or relying heavily on particular individual talents.

To the extent that that’s right, there is an inherent tension between upside and likelihood of success. To maximize the former, one looks for things that haven’t been done before; to maximize the latter, one largely looks for things that have worked before. For most of GiveWell’s history, we’ve focused on finding interventions and organizations with reasonably strong track records (though we’ve taken risks and considered upside as well); GiveWell Labs may give us more leeway for even higher-risk, higher-upside projects.

Our basic approach to the tradeoff:

• We consider likelihood of success much easier to evaluate than upside, and we’d prefer a project with only the former going for it to a project with only the latter going for it. However, we could recommend a project with no track record, high upside and strong performance on our other criteria (strong people, room for more funding, and plans for getting real-world feedback and learning from our results rather than a binary “success/failure” outcome).
• There may be “best of both worlds” opportunities in the “valley of death.” That is, it may be possible to find cases where there is a new approach whose basic promise has been demonstrated at a small scale, but which still needs more demonstration before it can reach very large scale. It isn’t clear to us whether funders often overlook these opportunities, but if they do, this could result in outstanding opportunities for us and our donors.

Tax deductibility shifts the focus from “having impact” to “navigating bureaucracy”

Many governments, including the U.S., provide very large benefits for people who support government-recognized charities. These benefits can be the equivalent of a 1:2 or so donation match. The goal here is admirable: encourage generosity and increase the flow of funds to charity.

The problem is that every country has its own (generally onerous, expensive and long) process for becoming a recognized charity. Last month we dealt with the following issues:

• The Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI), our #2 charity, is a registered charity in the U.K., but not in the U.S. We’re confident that it would meet the U.S. criteria for a charity - its activities consist of treating people in low-income countries for parasitic infections - but because it hasn’t gone through the process of registering a U.S. affiliate (which can take months), U.S. donors can’t get tax deductions for supporting it. We don’t want U.S. donors to have an incentive to support other charities when this is one of the best we’ve found, so we’ve worked to find a way …
  • We worked with Imperial College Foundation to set up a Google Checkout account, so that the Imperial College Foundation could take donations for the support of SCI.
  • This meant working with contacts we hadn’t worked with before, and it took some time; in the meantime, we took donations ourselves for the support of SCI (i.e., offering donors the option of giving directly to GiveWell, which is U.S.-registered, and earmarking their donations for the support of SCI).
  • Imperial College Foundation then had its Google Checkout account suspended - we still don’t know why, though we believe it has to do with an administrative technicality - returning us to a state where the only option for U.S. tax deductibility is to give directly to GiveWell for the support of SCI.
• The Against Malaria Foundation, our #1 charity, has taken the unusual step of obtaining charitable status in more than 10 countries. This likely took a good deal of effort, but has been very helpful in removing any disincentive for donors around the world to support it. It was great to see a European institution donate over $50,000 (we believe this is the same institution that expressed interest in giving the same amount to VillageReach last year, but ultimately didn’t go through with it because it couldn’t get a tax deduction in its own country). But even here there have been problems:
  • We were recently alerted that even though AMF is registered as a charity in Australia, it is not tax-deductible for donors in Australia. We’ve never considered the possibility that a country might have separate processes for these two things (the U.S. doesn’t); this took us by surprise and resulted in our having to email all those who had donated to AMF from Australia in the past to let them know about the error. There have been some refunds as a result.
  • A Swedish donor expressed interest in giving a large amount to AMF, but Sweden is not among the many countries where AMF is registered. The gift did ultimately go through, though we don’t know whether the donor got the tax deduction. There’s something a bit absurd to us about an organization like AMF - which clearly has a charitable purpose and has gone through proving this to over 10 different countries - still facing this problem.
• We’ve also dealt with multiple donors who wish to give stock rather than cash. This sort of gift can have major tax advantages, but it also involves a much more complex process both for the donor and for the charity. Since we have experience with taking stock donations and our top charities don’t, we’ve been facilitating these transactions through our own donor-advised fund.

One might defend these regulations, saying something along the lines of: “Sure, these laws make things more complicated, but they give people incentives to give more to charity - that’s a good thing.” This is partly true, but it isn’t quite that simple either. While SCI - one of the best organizations we’ve found for a donor looking to help the poor - is not a U.S. recognized charity, the U.S. Golf Association is. So is the National Cattle Men’s Beef Association (whose mission statement lists “increase consumer demand for beef” as its first point).

Much of charitable giving supports political advocacy (so the government is effectively subsidizing people to try to influence it), or local places of worship, or to foundations that give away money extremely slowly, or to alma maters whose balance sheets don’t seem to be crying out for government subsidies. A 2007 study estimates that only 30% of giving is even attempting to help the poor, and we don’t know how much of that 30% is effectively helping the poor; we believe the bulk is focused on the donor’s experiences, not on the recipient’s.

In addition, the incentives created by this system can be complex and strange. For example, Elie is married and I’m not, so his standard tax deduction (the tax deduction he gets if he chooses not to itemize charitable and other deductions) is much higher than mine. That means it looks like I will be getting a tax benefit for 2011 and Elie won’t. (If he owned his residence rather than rented it, he likely would get the tax benefit.)

We see a lot of room for improvement in the way the charitable tax deduction works. In particular, we’d like to see it become easier (and quicker) for charities delivering proven health interventions to poor countries to get the same tax status accorded the U.S. Golf Association.

There is no easy, reasonably priced way to give large donations online

We want people to be able to give to charity quickly and easily. So far, the only way we’ve found to facilitate this involves credit cards - and credit cards involve processing fees. We haven’t been able to find a standard processor with lower fees than PayPal’s, which exceed 2%.

2% may not sound like much, and on a $100 donation, it isn’t. But when someone gives $10,000 that means over $200 is spent on processing. We simply don’t see a good reason for this to be the case. It becomes better for such donors to give by writing a check, even though this is more time-consuming for both the donor and the processor, and much harder for GiveWell to track (in order to evaluate our own influence).

Fortunately, Google offers fee-free processing through 3/31/12 to nonprofits that are enrolled in its Google Grants program and using Google Checkout. Unfortunately, trying to take advantage of this raises all the same issues discussed in the previous section: now, instead of just advantages for charities that have gone through various governments’ registration processes, there are also advantages for charities that have gone through Google’s registration process (which can also take a significant amount of time).

Neither of our current two top charities have set up free donation processing with Google. We are, so we’ve been taking donations for the support of our top charities for those who wish to avoid fees.

Ultimately, we believe the better long-term fix will come from services like Dwolla, which deals with directly linked bank accounts (rather than credit) and processes transactions for $0.25 (or less) each, regardless of size. But we don’t believe that most of the donors using GiveWell’s research are signed up for these services (and signing up for them involves multiple verifications, including a bank verification that can take days). We aren’t sure yet how we’re going to handle the next couple of years, after Google stops covering fees and before a better payment system has entered widespread use.

Another major issue is that people making large donations very frequently run into problems with their credit card companies (due to the fact that they are spending so much more on a single item than they usually do). In our experience, about half of donations over $5,000 are declined the first time a donor tries to make the gift and are only cleared after he or she speaks with his card company. This can be particularly stressful for people trying to make last-minute gifts. Services like Dwolla may avoid this issue as well, due to the direct bank account link (we aren’t sure).

Possible fixes
For 2012, we’re considering:

• Continuing our shift from asking donors to give directly to charities to asking them to give to GiveWell for the support of those charities. We currently have giving to GiveWell as the primary option for SCI (since we’re a U.S. charity and SCI isn’t) and as a secondary option for AMF (for those seeking to avoid processing fees). We may shift toward having this be the primary option for all charities. This could greatly simplify all of the other fixes we’re working on, since whatever solutions we come up with will be easy to implement for all recommended charities. It would also simplify our own data collection and reporting. We will always provide an option for donors to support our recommended charities directly, but this option may become de-emphasized.
• Encouraging past donors to consider changing how they give. We may encourage people giving very large amounts ($5,000+) to use donor-advised funds and give appreciated stock, to realize full tax advantages and avoid fees. This will be a lot more hassle for them and for us, but the financial advantages may be worth it. We may also encourage people to make their annual gifts earlier in the year, to avoid the stress that can come with complications in trying to make gifts just in time for the tax year.
• Working with non-traditional payment processors with lower fees.
• Obtaining charitable status for ourselves in other countries so that donors giving to GiveWell for the support of recommended charities can obtain tax deductions.

Good giving is difficult enough already

We started GiveWell because we know there are people out there who want to give for maximal impact, but have minimal time to spare. We’ve worked hard to create a resource allowing these people to support outstanding charities as quickly and easily as possible. Unfortunately, the complexities of tax deductions and processing fees are working against this mission.

We’re doing what we can to deal with these issues as well. More broadly, we expect that the issue with processing fees will eventually see a good resolution, since cheaper processing methods are available and fighting for market share. We’re less optimistic about the tax code, which may only get more complicated - and more distortive when it comes to picking a charity - over time.

The numbers in this post are preliminary. We continue to learn about additional donations due to our research and will post an updated report when we publish our annual review in the coming weeks.

Money moved

By “money moved” we mean donations that we can confidently identify as being made on the strength of our recommendations. The following chart shows growth in overall money moved and compares this to GiveWell’s operating expenses. Overall money moved includes all donations driven by GiveWell, including $750,000 committed by Good Ventures to our top two charities and $1 million committed to GiveWell Labs (the latter funding has not yet been allocated to specific organizations). Note that we count “money moved” when it is committed, rather than when it is disbursed.

The table below show dollars donated and number of donations in 2008-2011 through our website. While money moved through the website is only a fraction of overall money moved, we believe this is a meaningful metric for tracking our progress/growth; total money moved, which includes mostly larger gifts that are “lumpier” and more unpredictable, is a better metric of our overall influence.

Overall, growth in 2011 was strong.

Below we break down money moved by charity. A few notes on this table:

• The majority of the donations have gone to our #1 and #2 charities, Against Malaria Foundation and Schistosomiasis Control Initiative.
• VillageReach, which was our #1 charity until November 2011 (when we decided to replace it due to limited room for more funding), also received significant funding in the first 11 months of the year.
• The next 6 charities in the table are our standout organizations.
• We have recommended Doctors Without Borders for its work in disaster situations, such as the famine in Somalia, and we have recommended Nurse-Family Partnership for its work in the U.S.
• “Other organizations” includes donations to 9 organizations we have recommended in the past, such as PSI, Village Enterprise Foundation, Stop TB Partnership, and Invest in Kids.
• The “allocation not yet decided/known” includes about $34,000 in donations to GiveWell designated for regranting to recommended charities, and about $45,000 in donations through Network for Good, a donation processor (we have not yet received information from Network for Good on which organizations received this funding).

Web traffic

The chart below show our web traffic over time, as measured by unique visitors each month. There are seasonal spikes each December when interest in charitable giving peaks (circled in the chart below). We label other spikes.

If you only have five minutes but you want to take advantage of the thousands of hours of work we put into finding the best giving opportunities, consider giving to our top charities. They have strong track records, accomplish a lot of good per dollar spent, and have good concrete plans for how to use additional donations.

A couple of things to keep in mind:

• After you give, spread the word. This is the perfect time to remind people (via Facebook sharing, tweeting, etc.) to give before the year ends. And people making last-minute gifts are likely to be receptive to suggestions.
• If you have any questions, we’re here to help. We should be available by phone for most of the day, and responding to email when we’re not. (See our contact page). Our research FAQ may also be a good resource.

The main reason we haven’t written much about these groups is that we still know very little about them. They tend to publish a great deal of web content aimed at fundraising, but very little of interest for impact-oriented donors. On the occasions when we’ve engaged with these groups, we’ve come away with the feeling that they engage in a wide variety of activities, and we can’t get a concrete sense of (a) the specifics of the activities; (b) the organization-wide track record; (c) likely uses of additional funding. (We wrote in 2007 about our inability to put together bird’s-eye views of their activities).

Below are general impressions from our limited information on, and interactions with, these groups. Note that in preparing this post, we examined the websites of the 7 organizations named in the first paragraph, looking for whatever information we could find on specific projects (as opposed to broad characterizations of activities), results (technical writeups, not narratives), and financial information (any budget breakdown by project or program type, or revenue source - we tabulated our findings in this spreadsheet).

• Mega-charities tend to provide only very broad-brush information on their activities, and next to no information on their results. Budget breakdowns are extremely broad (see our spreadsheet). Even the “papers” or “publications” sections of these websites tend to focus on papers giving general advice, rather than on details of past executed programs. (Examples: UNICEF, World Vision.) We have seen evaluation databases from Oxfam and CARE, and wrote about our impressions on the latter (similar to our impressions on the former) in 2009.

  CARE is, as far as we can tell, the only one of these organizations that publishes descriptions of its many specific projects, though these descriptions are still relatively broad and do not include budgets.

• Mega-charities tend to have extremely diverse activities, with relatively small amounts spent on health and large amounts spent on disaster relief (see our spreadsheet). We’ve reviewed what we can of these groups’ disaster relief work, and in general we view it unfavorably from a transparency/accountability standpoint. The relatively low amount of resources going to health is a negative for us, due to our view that this is the most promising area for individual donors. UNICEF appears to be more health-focused than the others discussed here.
• Mega-charities tend to get large amounts of money from governments, particularly the U.S. government. While the “percentage of support coming from the U.S. government” is not always clear and depends on how one counts cash vs. in-kind contributions, government support seems to generally be at least 20% and sometimes closer to 70% of total revenues. An exception is Oxfam; we couldn’t find a specific statement of revenue sources to address this, but in a recent conversation Oxfam representatives stated to us that Oxfam takes very limited funding from governments and no funding from the U.S. government.
• Mega-charities appear to us to often act as “contractors” for governments and other mega-donors. Scanning CARE’s projects provides some illustration of this idea, which is largely based on informal conversations we’ve had about these organizations (as well as the significance of government funding to these organizations). While these organizations often have substantial unrestricted funding as well, it isn’t clear to us whether this funding is used to supplement big-funder contracts or to run projects at mega-charities’ discretion. One thing we generally don’t see when examining these mega-charities is any indication of an overarching strategic plan, another sign that they may see themselves as essentially contractors (Oxfam is again an exception.)

Overall, our impression is that your donation to these organizations is very hard to trace, but will likely supplement an agenda of extremely diverse programming, driven largely by governments and other very large funders. We feel that when donating to these groups, you’re unlikely to get the sort of impact-per-dollar that you can with our top charities, which focus on some of the most proven and cost-effective interventions.

One organization we haven’t mentioned in this post is Doctors Without Borders. We perceive this group as more strategic, more transparent/accountable, more focused on health, and more promising overall than the organizations discussed here, and we intend to investigate it further in the coming year. We will also likely be investigating Oxfam, which we perceive as being the most independent and strategic of the organizations listed above, largely due to its lack of reliance on government funding.