Some of what I saw and discussed prompted me to rethink our frameworks for evaluating certain kinds of programs:

• Vaccinations. We’ve taken the “vaccination coverage rate” as a reasonable proxy for lives changed, since the evidence base for vaccines is so strong. But of course, “vaccination coverage rate” describes how many children received vaccines, not how many received functional and correctly administered vaccines. I was somewhat concerned that VillageReach staff found several vaccines in refrigerators that had “gone bad,” and I was glad to hear that VillageReach is considering adding an indicator to its information system to track how often this happens. The strong macro-level track record of vaccines (causing major drops in mortality at the country level, not just in carefully controlled trials) is some comfort here.
• Microfinance. We’ve been concerned about the possibility that clients are taking out loans against their own best interests, and have largely pictured “coercive” versions of this problem: loan officers pressuring clients to borrow more than they should, clients getting themselves into debt cycles, etc. A very interesting anecdote from a staffer raised a more subtle version of this concern: clients may be losing money on their loans without knowing it. The anecdote given was about a particular woman who was literally selling goods for the same price she had bought them for, making the problem obvious. It could, however, be a much more subtle problem for other clients - given high interest rates, potentially transportation costs, etc., it could take quite a bit of calculation and careful accounting even to know whether the business one is running with a loan is in fact operating at a profit or a loss. (And since many families may have several sources of income, a loss might not be noticed if accounting isn’t careful.)
• Cash transfers.. Our position has been that cash transfers can be assumed to be doing some good if they are successfully targeted to poor people in an area, something that may be difficult. It struck me that in certain areas (such as the village I saw with VillageReach), poverty targeting may not be much of a challenge at all (since everyone anywhere near the area is extremely poor); on the other hand, in these kinds of areas gifts of cash or livestock may be of very limited use (note the missionaries’ claim that village people receiving pensions for military service were largely spending them on alcohol).
• Social business. I was impressed that I constantly saw Vidagas canisters throughout my trip - in hotels, stores, even the missionaries’ truck. (Vidagas is a “social business” started by VillageReach; it delivers gas, and was started in order to address the challenge of consistently powering refrigerators to keep vaccines at the appropriate temperature.)

  Our position on social business has been that such a business should not be considered a success until it has demonstrated either an actual profit (not just sales covering unit costs) or demonstrable social impact along the lines of what we look for from nonprofits. On reflection, I think that in certain cases there is room for more middle ground here. There are certain areas where the mere fact of selling something for a non-trivial price would seem to indicate a certain success in filling a need, even if not all costs are covered. Of course, it all depends on the area - subsidized sales may make a lot of sense where infrastructure and access to markets is poor, but in urban areas it could serve simply to “crowd out” private supply and/or enrich middlemen.

  I don’t regret our skepticism of social business to date. It has always been more important to us to avoid “false positives” (i.e., recommendations of organizations that are not impactful) than to avoid “false negatives” (i.e., failures to recommend organizations that are impactful). And I have not seen any “social enterprise investment” fund put together the case I’d need to see, even using the “middle ground” roughly sketched out above. But I do want to keep thinking about how to recognize the good social businesses may be accomplishing without being overly credulous.

These visits very much made the activities of our top charities feel more “real” to me.

To this point, the work we’ve done on international aid has felt very abstract. That’s not a reason not to act/give based on it, but in many ways the situations we’re analyzing are so different from what I see every day that it can be hard to believe that the charities are helping real people in the way our analysis suggests they are.

Much of what I saw on the trip was, in fact, consistent with what I expected. To a large degree, it made the research “come to life.” I saw people and areas that really are at a level of poverty that I’ve never seen in the U.S.; I talked to staff about the details of what they’re doing, and to some degree saw them doing it; and I felt, very tangibly, how the work they’re doing can make a difference.

(As an aside, I’ve had the opposite experience with site visits to U.S. charities. I’m not sure why. The U.S. visits were definitely more “staged” while the international visits had a lot of wandering and improvisation; in addition, the U.S. charities tend to address less tangible problems, and it was often hard to connect the charities’ theories of their own value-added with what I was seeing.)

It was frustrating to say “no” to kids rubbing their stomachs and asking for money, and to see so many people who seem like they could benefit greatly from things that are pretty basic - though not necessarily easy to deliver. The bottom line is that while I’ve pushed to make my actions consistent with my beliefs, my beliefs about the importance of international aid carry a little more emotional weight now, and I feel more emotionally motivated to give and to give well. I would recommend a similar trip to anyone who intellectually accepts the importance of international aid, but is having trouble getting behind it emotionally.

Diverting skilled labor looks like a real concern.

The COO of SEF stressed that one of SEF’s biggest challenges is human resources (i.e., continually finding good people to staff it). I can easily see how this would be. As I mentioned in Part I, I found that the nonprofits I visited were employing capable, impressive people with a combination of local background and well-above-average educational credentials and command of English.

On one hand, seeing these staffers made me feel good about the organizations we were recommending. At the same time, it highlighted one of the most universal and hardest to evaluate concerns we have about nonprofit work: diversion of skilled labor from other potentially productive pursuits.

Adding to this concern was a general impression I got (reinforced by Leah from VillageReach) that nonprofit jobs are among the best-paying and most prestigious jobs for African locals. It looks like we have a situation where:

• Many of the people hired by nonprofits could also be potentially very helpful to their communities if they were doing for-profit work.
• They work instead for nonprofits, partly because nonprofits are out-bidding the for-profits for their services.
• Within a for-profit framework, there is often (not always and never perfectly) a connection between the value of a job and the salary, which creates a (imperfect) tendency for talented people to end up in roles where they can do more good.
• I have no sense of how (or whether) nonprofits are attempting to calibrate salaries and value, and I fear that they could be “overpaying for” (and thus misusing) local talent simply because they want the best people available and they have the donor-supplied funds to get them.

More on this idea in a future post. Though we have no great methods for quantifying the losses from “diversion of labor,” we do believe that this concern reinforces the importance of demanding that nonprofits be accomplishing as much good as possible and not merely some good.

Getting basic info about people’s standard of living seemed fairly straightforward.

I understand that estimating people’s incomes can be a very complex endeavor, but in the areas I visited, it seemed possible to get a sense very quickly for how “poor” one area was relative to another. I asked basic questions at the village level: where the nearest water source was, who was responsible for maintaining it, where the nearest school was, what the school fees were, etc. I walked around and observed how many of the dwellings were made of mud vs. concrete . And when talking to individual clients, I asked straightforward questions like “Do you have a TV?”, “Do you have electricity?”, “What do you eat?” and “When was the last time you had a fever and what did you do about it?” Answers were fairly consistent in a given area, but varied dramatically across charities (more below).

Throughout our investigations into international aid, I’ve been frustrated by the fact that most charities seem either unable or unwilling to produce data on clients’ standards of living. Because I don’t tend to trust stylized stories, and I haven’t had what I consider credible data on standards of living, I’ve constantly felt very unclear on who is being helped and how. I now find it less likely that this problem stems from prohibitive costs of data collection; I find it more likely that it stems from (a) the fact that donors rarely (if ever) ask for data on clients’ standards of living; (b) the possibility that some charities may not want to reveal that their clients are anyone but the “poorest of the poor” (even when their clients are still quite poor).

The three areas I visited were very different in terms of standards of living.

• Small Enterprise Foundation (SEF) clients: I visited two villages, one in the Microcredit program (SEF’s original program) and one in the Tšhomišano Credit Program (targeted more directly at the poorer people in a village). In both villages, at least half the buildings I saw were made of concrete, and everyone I spoke to reported convenient access to running water, electricity, a fairly well-stocked local market, and public transportation to larger cities. Living spaces appeared fairly cramped (they were larger than in the other areas I visited, but when I asked who slept where it quickly became clear that there wasn’t much space per person); clients reported eating meat “only when they could afford it.”
• VillageReach clients: infrastructure was much, much worse in these areas. The town of Macomia, where we spent the night, had no running water and no electricity except for generators; it took hours to reach (in a truck) from Pemba, which I believe was the closest area with reliable electricity and running water. The one village we visited took over an hour (of alert driving on very bad roads) to reach from Macomia, and the only concrete structures I saw there were the health center, a closed shop, and the school. I was told that other nearby villages were even harder to reach (in some cases impossible in a truck) and that access to water was a major problem. In terms of both standard of living and life opportunities, these areas appeared fundamentally worse than SEF areas.
• Soweto: I took a quick tour through a poor area of Soweto (urban). It was generally filthy (literally strewn with trash) and extremely crowded, with tiny steel shacks next to each other. It seemed to me like a much more unpleasant place to live than either of the other two areas, although on the flip side, people in Soweto appeared to have access to public transportation, electricity, good schools, etc. as they were very close to much wealthier residences.

One of the reasons Small Enterprise Foundation stood out to us is that it appears more diligent about targeting the poor than other organizations. Even so, its clients - while poor - appear to be substantially better off (in fundamental infrastructure-related ways, not ways that can be attributed to program effects) than VillageReach’s clients. This doesn’t make me less supportive of SEF (it’s largely consistent with my existing suspicion that microfinance clients are rarely if ever the poorest of the poor), but it’s an important thing to keep in mind that I feel better informed about now than before.

Are you looking to help people in the worst situation, and with the most basic needs, possible? Or are you interested in helping people who are better off to begin with, in the hopes that a little assistance might go a longer way with them? To me there’s no clear right answer, but it’s a decision donors are likely making constantly without knowing it.

More thoughts coming in Part III.

First, a note on representativeness. I was only in Africa for two weeks; I was a complete outsider; I certainly don’t think that anything I saw “proves” anything about the programs or areas I was looking at. In many cases what I saw (and what I discussed with staff) prompted me to discuss and think harder about issues I’d already thought about a little. So as I share thoughts from the trip, think of these as thoughts that were partly inspired by what I saw and discussed, not as “things I’ve learned.”

In fact, I was hesitant to visit the field too early because I was afraid that I would form a vivid picture of how things work based on what I saw, and that it would be difficult to imagine how differently things could work in other settings (and even on other days). From this point on, I am definitely going to have a little trouble thinking about microfinance without picturing what I saw at Small Enterprise Foundation (SEF), for example. I think that when dealing with multinational charities that work in a huge variety of settings, it is best to get most of our information by reading the observations and analysis of others.

With that said, here are some thoughts.

I was impressed with the staff of the two nonprofits I visited.

In many of my conversations with nonprofit staff, I feel like I’m being sold a story, people are telling me what they think I want to hear, etc., which makes me instinctively somewhat distrustful. I can honestly say that I felt none of this during my interactions with SEF and VR staff, and that includes the lower-level staff. They were straightforward with me about challenges and concerns. Most acknowledged that there are reasons to worry about whether they’re being effective, and did not seem interested in downplaying concerns or exaggerating successes. And most seemed to me to be quite intelligent, knowledgeable, and reasonable about the work they were doing.

These two organizations had already been identified as outstanding before I visited, and I would have ranked them among the very best organizations in terms of “straightforward, no-nonsense interactions with staff” even before I went (the other nonprofits I’d put in this category are Against Malaria Foundation, Population Services International, and Stop Tuberculosis Partnership). However, it’s possible that people who are working in the field in program roles tend to be better (more direct) communicators with GiveWell than people in fundraising roles, and I’m very curious as to what impression I would have come away with if I had done a similar visit to a charity we have a lower opinion of.

Getting pictures, audio and video was not a problem.

People I spoke to never objected to being recorded and were usually (with some exceptions) happy to have their pictures taken, sometimes even insisting on it. Children particularly enjoyed being photographed (for example, see this video of me taking pictures as well as the photos from my trip to the village).

This surprised me somewhat (arguably it shouldn’t have) only because I feel like I’ve seen relatively little use of multimedia to monitor, evaluate, and report on programs. For example, I’ve been told many times that I “have to see a program in action” to be sold on its effectiveness; yet now I wonder why the charities that feel this way aren’t posting large amounts of real-time, unedited footage to give America-based donors as much of the experience as possible.

Charities do often produce heavily edited videos and photos, but we see little value in such productions as evidence (or as monitoring/evaluation tools) because it is so difficult to distinguish observation from editorial.

We’ve written before that we see a lot of potential value in “qualitative evidence” that is presented systematically and transparently, but we rarely see this happening.

Connecting with clients - culturally and even linguistically - appeared to be a fairly significant challenge, and the way I believe most nonprofits deal with it points to the importance of systematic monitoring and evaluation.

Any American charity working in the developing world ultimately has to connect people (donors and clients) who speak different languages and come from very different cultures. If the charity is even of moderate size (i.e., working in more than a few village, as even the relatively small charities I visited do), it also has to manage operations beyond what upper management can observe directly. It seems to me that the usual approach to this challenge is to have several degrees of separation between upper management and the people doing work in the field.

• The CEO of the Small Enterprise Foundation does not speak the local languages, and the COO (originally from Croatia) says he has learned to understand quite a bit but still cannot speak them. The lowest-level staff, development facilitators (similar to “loan officers”), tend to have similar backgrounds to the clients and to speak the local languages well, but this of course means that their background is very different from that of upper management and donors (note that the development facilitator I spoke with has very limited English). In in-between roles, there are some employees who are better able to “bridge the gap” (such as the staffer who translated for me on day two). Given this situation, it isn’t surprising that SEF’s management process is heavily dependent on systematic collection, auditing and analysis of key metrics (as I discussed with the COO).
• VillageReach doesn’t employ as many people, but it also has people in major roles who are American and need help from translators to communicate with local staff (during my visit, we had a translator traveling with us partly to help with communications between Leah, from the Seattle office, and Durao, a local VillageReach employee).
• I did see one instance of an alternate approach: literally sending Americans to live among clients, learn their languages, etc. This was the approach taken by the missionaries who helped us out when VillageReach’s vehicle broke down in Mozambique. However, my impression (which they confirmed) is that this approach (which I imagine presents problems and challenges of its own) is relatively unusual even among missionaries and is essentially unheard of among nonprofits focused on humanitarian aid.

None of the above observations should come as a surprise, but to me they highlight the importance of formal, systematic monitoring/auditing/evaluation. We often focus on the benefits of monitoring/evaluation for donors, but in situations like those described above it also seems like they are essential for conducting any kind of meaningful organizational management. I have trouble seeing how an organization that conducts no formal data collection and auditing can even run a program of any meaningful size. I would certainly be curious to see how operations work within some of the charities we have found to be less data-oriented.

I think it’s also important to note how difficult translation and communication can be. For example, during my first day with SEF, my communication with clients required several steps: I would ask a question in English, SEF’s CEO would rephrase it so that the development facilitator could understand it, the development facilitator would ask the question in the local language and relay the answer back in English, and finally the CEO had to rephrase the English again so I could follow it. On my second day, I was with someone who was very strong in both languages, but you can hear how much work he put into translating my fairly short and basic-seeming questions. He explained that, in addition to culture-based difficulties with translation, he was being very careful with wording because clients very much want to tell donors what they think the donors want to hear.

We have long felt that survey data is most useful for extremely concrete, factual questions: “What did you eat yesterday?” is more useful than “What do you normally eat?” is more useful than “Did this program help you?” is more useful than “How much did this program help you?” More on this idea at this post on Philanthropy Action (co-maintained by GiveWell Board member Tim Ogden).

More thoughts from the trip coming in Part II.

I don’t think it’s wrong to make gifts that aren’t “optimized for pure social impact.” Personally, I’ve made “gifts” with many motivations: because friends asked, because I wanted to support a resource I personally benefit from, etc. I’ve stopped giving to my alma mater (which I suspect has all the funding it can productively use) and I’ve never made a gift just to “tell myself a nice story,” but in both cases I can understand why one would.

Giving money for selfish reasons, in and of itself, seems no more wrong than unnecessary personal consumption (entertainment, restaurants, etc.), which I and everyone else I know does plenty of. The point at which it becomes a problem, to me, is when you “count it” toward your charitable/philanthropic giving for the year.

My personal approach is to designate a certain percentage of my annual income for pure altruistic giving (most recently to the Stop Tuberculosis Partnership). When a friend asks me to give to a charity they’re “running for”, I give a small amount and think of it in the same bucket as holiday gifts - it doesn’t affect the size of my annual altruistic gift.

I believe that the world’s wealthy should make gifts that are aimed at nothing but making the world a better place for others. We should challenge ourselves to make these gifts as big as possible. We should not tell ourselves that we are philanthropists while making no gifts that are really aimed at making the world better.

But this philosophy doesn’t forbid you from spending your money in ways that make you feel good. It just asks that you don’t let those expenditures lower the amount you give toward really helping others.

(Note that the posts I authored on our self-review and plan, which ran while I was away, were all written and scheduled before I left.)

This trip was my first time in Africa; it was also an opportunity to have more in-depth conversations with the staff of these two charities (going beyond our usual key questions about cost-effectiveness, evidence of impact and room for more funding). In future posts, I’ll be sharing some thoughts I came away with.

For now, we’ve posted as much as possible of the “raw data” from my trip: pictures, video, and audio. I recorded most interviews with clients and staff and took pictures of most of what I saw. We’ve also included summary notes of each “episode” with the pictures/video/audio. You can see it all at this link:

Notes and multimedia from Holden’s 2/2010 visit to Small Enterprise Foundation and VillageReach

]]> http://blog.givewell.net/2010/03/05/picturesaudionotes-from-my-visits-to-small-enterprise-foundation-south-africa-and-villagereach-mozambique/feed/ http://blog.givewell.net/2010/03/04/blog-design/ http://blog.givewell.net/2010/03/04/blog-design/#comments Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:31:29 +0000 Elie Uncategorized http://blog.givewell.net/2010/03/04/blog-design/ We’ve changed the design of our blog to incorporate it more fully within the main GiveWell site.

If you read this blog through RSS you shouldn’t notice any changes.

Please let us know if you have any problems.

]]> http://blog.givewell.net/2010/03/04/blog-design/feed/ http://blog.givewell.net/2010/02/26/the-simplest-way-to-improve-your-givewell-rating-disclose-a-failure/ http://blog.givewell.net/2010/02/26/the-simplest-way-to-improve-your-givewell-rating-disclose-a-failure/#comments Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:40:54 +0000 Elie Uncategorized http://blog.givewell.net/2010/02/26/the-simplest-way-to-improve-your-givewell-rating-disclose-a-failure/ Organizations we review often ask us: what can we do to improve our rating on your site?

The most obvious answer is provide the type of evidence that the rest of our top-rated charities have to demonstrate your impact. But for many organizations, providing such evidence is not possible. Many may not have the resources to conduct the evaluation needed to demonstrate success. (This strikes some as “unfair,” but our goal isn’t to be fair - it’s to find charities that “casual donors” can be truly confident in.)

There is another way to improve your rating, however: demonstrating failure. (GiveWell tries to meet this standard for ourselves on our shortcomings page.)

We give Doctors Without Borders a 1-star rating because of its publication of a report demonstrating that a program they ran failed. We write:

In our experience, charities are very rarely willing to share evidence of disappointing impact. We believe that any charity that does so is being unusually honest about the challenges of international aid, and unusually accountable to donors. We expect that charities capable of spotting, documenting and sharing disappointing results are better positioned to improve our time.

If your organization is listed on the GiveWell site and you want to improve your ranking, publish a case study of a program you ran that failed. As usual, we’re not looking for marketing materials, and we won’t accept “weaknesses that are really strengths” (or reports that blame failure entirely on insufficient funding/support from others). But if you share open, honest, unadulterated evidence of failure, you’ll join a select group of organizations that have a GiveWell star.

]]> http://blog.givewell.net/2010/02/26/the-simplest-way-to-improve-your-givewell-rating-disclose-a-failure/feed/ http://blog.givewell.net/2010/02/19/givewells-annual-self-evaluation-and-plan-summary/ http://blog.givewell.net/2010/02/19/givewells-annual-self-evaluation-and-plan-summary/#comments Fri, 19 Feb 2010 14:56:37 +0000 Holden Uncategorized http://blog.givewell.net/2010/02/19/givewells-annual-self-evaluation-and-plan-summary/ We have been posting our annual self-evaluation and plan to the blog. Here’s a summary:

• Basic outline and questions we asked
• Self-Evaluation: GiveWell as a donor resource
• Self-Evaluation: GiveWell as a project
• Plan: top-level priorities
• Plan: specifics of research
• High-level summary in Excel format

The documents we’ve referred to in the above posts are linked from the plans and self-reviews page of the GiveWell website.

]]> http://blog.givewell.net/2010/02/19/givewells-annual-self-evaluation-and-plan-summary/feed/ http://blog.givewell.net/2010/02/18/givewells-plan-specifics-of-research/ http://blog.givewell.net/2010/02/18/givewells-plan-specifics-of-research/#comments Thu, 18 Feb 2010 15:59:19 +0000 Holden Uncategorized http://blog.givewell.net/2010/02/18/givewells-plan-specifics-of-research/ This is the final post (of four) we’re planning to make focused on our self-evaluation and future plans. The first post is here; the second is here; and, the third is here.

In a previous post, we laid out our reasons for focusing on the broad category of “research” over the next year. This includes

• Research vetting: subjecting our existing research to strong, critical scrutiny from people with substantial relevant experience and credentials.
• Research on new causes such as U.S. equality of opportunity, disease research funding, and environmental issues (particularly global warming mitigation).
• Research maintenance and systemization: formalizing our process to the point where it can be maintained with as little input as possible needed from the co-founders.

After considering the time and resources available to us, we’ve concluded the following:

• Research vetting will likely involve substantial “down time” (i.e., waiting for responses from the people we’re hoping to get vetting from). Therefore, it will be a major priority of ours but will not account for a huge amount of our time.
• Re: research maintenance and systemization. Over the next year, we will be pursuing one temporary expansion in capacity via a 5-month contractor (a person who has done substantial volunteer work for us in the past, and whom we feel can add greatly to our research). During that time, there will be four people putting substantial time into research: the two co-founders, our one Research Analyst, and the contractor. It would not make sense to plan more hires at this point, given the relatively small amount of well-defined work we have available and the uncertain time costs of working with both our Research Analyst and our contractor. (More reasoning at our previous post, under the heading of “Is GiveWell’s research process ‘robust’?”)
• We will be putting significant time - essentially, the time we have left over after dealing with research vetting, research maintenance and systemization, and “low-hanging fruit” in the areas of packaging and marketing - into research on new causes.

The top contenders for new causes are as follows, listed in the order in which we are currently prioritizing them:

• More sub-causes within international aid - including disaster relief/recovery, charities aiming to help orphans and vulnerable children, and more attempts to find a strong microfinance option. Because we find international aid to be a strong area for a donor, and because we have a strong sense of the major issues within it, this cause is a high priority. We expect much of the work in this area to be done by non-co-founders (i.e., our Research Analyst and/or contractor).
• U.S. equality of opportunity (early childhood care; education; employment assistance). We have already done substantial work in this area and have a concrete idea of how to create a high-quality report. We expect to be able to outsource much of the work on this report to non-co-founders. Therefore, although we don’t consider this the most worthwhile cause, the “return on investment” for us is very high in terms of what we can produce with a limited amount of work from the co-founders.
• Disease research funding. Our intuitions suggest that this is a very promising area for a donor, but we have not done any work on it to date, and as a result our research on it will be somewhat like our research on international aid was at first: open-ended, slow, and heavily dependent on co-founders, with the rate and the nature of progress difficult to predict. We hope eventually to understand enough about this area that we can apply a consistent methodology to disease research charities, as we do with our current international aid report.
• Environmental issues, particularly global warming mitigation. As with disease research, we have little background and expect a slow, open-ended process at first.

We have assembled a work plan with time estimates. Over the next year, we expect to complete research on the first two causes listed and to make some progress (though how much is difficult to predict) on disease research funding.

]]> http://blog.givewell.net/2010/02/18/givewells-plan-specifics-of-research/feed/ http://blog.givewell.net/2010/02/16/givewells-plan-top-level-priorities/ http://blog.givewell.net/2010/02/16/givewells-plan-top-level-priorities/#comments Tue, 16 Feb 2010 13:14:30 +0000 Holden Uncategorized http://blog.givewell.net/2010/02/16/givewells-plan-top-level-priorities/ This is the third post (of four) we’re planning to make focused on our self-evaluation and future plans. The first post is here, and the second post is here.

In previous posts, we discussed the progress we’ve made, where we stand, and how we can improve in core areas. This post focuses on the latter, and lays out our top-level strategic choice for the next year.

Broadly, we see the key aspects of GiveWell - the areas in which we can improve - as

Research, i.e., creating and maintaining useful information for impact-focused donors. This includes

• Research vetting: subjecting our existing research to strong, critical scrutiny from people with substantial relevant experience and credentials.
• Research on new causes such as U.S. equality of opportunity, disease research funding, and environmental issues (particularly global warming mitigation).
• Research maintenance and systemization: formalizing our process to the point where it can be maintained with as little input as possible needed from the co-founders.

Packaging, i.e., presenting our research in a way that is likely to be persuasive and impactful. This includes

• Consolidating/writing up/improving the case for our research’s credibility.
• Improving our website so that it is clearer and easier to use.
• Finding new ways to express the output of our research in ways that are more emotionally/intellectually compelling.

Marketing, i.e., increasing the number of potential “customers” we reach. This includes.

• Improving the persuasiveness and clarity of our research.
• Pursuing partnerships with other donor/consumer resources.
• Pursuing partnerships with donor-advised funds and wealth advisors, which might connect us to wealthy individuals seeking help with their giving decisions.
• Pursuing partnerships with people and organizations that focus on fundraising for particular causes, rather than particular organizations. GiveWell’s research could help such organizations fundraise for outstanding organizations within their causes (and outsource responsibility for finding such organizations and justifying their choices).
• Pursuing partnerships with corporate giving programs.
• Advertising.
• Concerted efforts at “earned media,” i.e., focusing our research on issues that are likely to interest the media (which are frequently the opposite of the issues we find most interesting and important) and engaging in concerted public relations efforts around these issues.

Research vs. packaging/marketing

One of the core debates that comes up repeatedly among GiveWell stakeholders is whether we should focus on research or packaging marketing.

In brief, the “focus on packaging/marketing” view is that:

• Our research is already more useful, for impact-focused donors, than other available resources.
• Our reach, and impact, leave much to be desired.
• Therefore, we should focus on reaching more people. Doing so will lead to quicker learning about the odds of GiveWell’s ultimately succeeding, as well as quicker learning about what our potential “customers” want from our research.

The “focus on research” view is that:

• We have substantial room for improvement in the credibility of our research (who endorses it), the breadth of our research (how many causes we’ve covered), and the robustness of our research (how dependent our process is on the co-founders).
• Improving these areas could be very important to later packaging/marketing efforts. (Having knowledge of more causes could substantially affect our strategy for “packaging” our research in ways that people are likely to find interesting. Both the number of causes and the overall credibility could be important to many of the potential partners mentioned under our marketing options.)
• Many of the most promising marketing strategies can be expected to benefit from the simple passage of time. We are interested in partnering with organizations that take a long time to make decisions and prefer that their partners have significant track records / be relatively established.
• While our research, as well as the passage of time, could substantially affect the way we package/market, the results of packaging/marketing (and the passage of time) are unlikely to have much effect on how we do our research. It therefore makes sense to work more on research before focusing on packaging/marketing.
• We believe that we are only ~2 years away from having broad, robust, credible research that could then be maintained at a relatively low cost (both in terms of funds and human resources). Therefore, we think it is practical and desirable to reach this point before focusing on packaging/marketing.
• Research is our core competency. The content we created for impact-focused donors is what makes us unique and it’s what we feel we do best. By contrast, we don’t consider ourselves particularly good at packaging or marketing. By focusing on research and making all of our output public and free, we enable others (who may be much better at packaging/marketing) to use and adapt it. (Peter Singer is an example of someone who has marketed our research better than we could.)

We have had many internal discussions on these issues. At this point, all members of GiveWell’s Board and staff feel that the “focus on research” view is stronger.

Therefore, we intend to focus on research over the next year, while allocating some time to the “lowest-hanging fruit” within packaging/marketing.

A future post will discuss the specifics of how we’re prioritizing the different aspects of “research.”

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