Please note: this content is not actively maintained. Kickstart applied for a grant GiveWell offered in 2007, but did not receive the grant. The information below explains why.
Kickstart applied for our funding and recommendation in Cause 2: Global Poverty, but did not advance past our Round 1 screen, which aimed at finding charities with strong self-documentation (based on our principle of focusing on already-proven programs). Note that unlike other evaluators, we focus on finding and examining the strongest charities, not on providing equally thorough ratings to each one. More on our process is available at this link.

Specifics of why Kickstart did not advance

We used the following principles in conducting our Round 1 screen of Cause 2: Global Poverty:

1. Look for strong documentation that lives have been changed for the better. One of the challenges of this cause is that it involves trying to help people who are far away and from very different cultures than our own; the fact that a charity's described activities seem to make logical sense isn't enough, by itself, to convince us that positive change has occurred.
2. Look for a sense of how many lives have been changed (and how they've been changed) by an organization's activities. A sense of how many lives are changed "per dollar" is essential to decide between logical but different approaches, so we focused on the applicants that seemed most likely to be able to provide this sense.
3. Aim for a complete or near-complete understanding of applicants' activities. Our Round 1 application asked applicants to feature a single program, but we also took the size and scope of the organization into account: a large, comprehensive organization needs extremely strong documentation in order to give any sense of its activities and effects, whereas an organization with a simpler and more cohesive model might be evaluated with less documentation.

Kickstart was among the charities that did not provide this type of evidence and instead submitted evidence that gave descriptions of their activities relying on one or more of the following: anecdotes, newspaper articles, survey data (types of evidence that we are skeptical about, as we have written on our blog), and evidence of the size of the problems they were attacking - but did not give us information that gave us high confidence that their programs were creating positive life change, or information that we felt could begin to get at their cost-effectiveness in changing lives. It's possible that Kickstart has the information we want, and didn't send it due to misinterpretations of our application, time constraints, or other reasons. But due to time constraints of our own, we opted to focus on the applicants who seemed most promising.

Application materials submitted by Kickstart

More information

• Click here for a complete list of charities we've evaluated.
• Click here for an overview of our findings in the area of international aid.
• Click here to see our top-rated charities.