Progress in 2019

Published: May 2020

This page details progress toward our stated goals for 2019. For a brief overview, please see this blog post.

We stated our goals for 2019 here. There were five major areas in which we planned to make progress:

  1. Building research capacity
  2. Experimenting with approaches to outreach to find ones that we can scalably use to drive additional money moved
  3. Exploring new areas of research
  4. Improving GiveWell’s organizational strength
  5. Ongoing research

We also listed concrete goals within each area. We cover each in turn in the sections below: what we wrote in early 2019 and what we actually accomplished last year. The below table summarizes whether we met our concrete goals.

Area Goal Did we achieve goal?
Building research capacity Have 3-5 signed offer letters in hand from new research staff. Yes
Outreach experimentation Decide whether to scale up Major Gifts work. Yes
Outreach experimentation Conduct experiments related to messaging about our work to reach more people. Yes
Outreach experimentation Complete search for a VP of Marketing. Yes
Exploring new areas of research Look into several new areas, including public health regulation and possible paths to support government aid agencies. Get substantially closer to the point where we have the staff structure to support grantmaking in new areas. No
Exploring new areas of research Stretch goal: Settle on a structure that we believe will support grantmaking in public health regulation and begin recommending grants in that area. No
Improving GiveWell’s organizational strength Hire one Operations Associate. Yes
Improving GiveWell’s organizational strength Improve the staff onboarding process at GiveWell. Yes
Improving GiveWell’s organizational strength Improve systems for soliciting feedback from staff. Yes
Improving GiveWell’s organizational strength Move to a new office. Yes
Ongoing research Our full list of concrete research goals for 2019 is in this document. Yes

Table of Contents

Building research capacity

We wrote:

"We announced earlier this year our plans to hire researchers at three levels of seniority, listed here from most junior to most senior: Research Analyst, Senior Research Analyst, and Senior Fellow. Our goal is to have 3-5 signed offer letters in hand from new research staff by the end of 2019.

"We’re hoping that additional research capacity will enable us to expand the scope of GiveWell’s research, with the aim of finding opportunities that are more cost-effective than our current top charities. We’re planning to roughly double the size of the research team over the next few years."

Goal: Have 3-5 signed offer letters in hand from new research staff. Two Senior Fellows and one Research Analyst signed offer letters and started full-time in 2019, and one of our Content Editors transitioned to a role as a Research Analyst. We also hired three new Content Editors, who contribute to our research in a number of ways detailed here.

We hired a Senior Advisor working on engagement with the international aid community, which we conceptualized as part of our research work.

Finally, our first Managing Director, who will help set GiveWell's strategy and work on engagement with the international aid community, signed an offer letter in December 2019. We expect him to start at GiveWell in summer 2020.

Outreach experimentation

We wrote:

"We plan to expand our outreach to current and potential donors going forward, with the aim of increasing the amount of money we direct to our recommended charities. As part of this work, we recently hired Stephanie Stojanovic as our first Major Gifts Officer. Our goal is to decide by the end of the 1st quarter of 2020 whether to scale our staff capacity further in the area of major gifts, based on Stephanie’s initial work.

"We’re also planning to conduct experiments in 2019 related to how we message about our work to reach more people. These experiments could include work on search engine optimization and building landing pages that aim to communicate what GiveWell does and why it’s valuable, among other possibilities. We expect to have results by early 2020, as the bulk of donations we receive are made in December.

"Finally, we’re planning to search for a VP of Marketing to oversee work across outreach domains (including major gifts, donor retention, advertising, marketing, and written communications). We guess there is a 50 percent chance we make a hire for this role in 2019."

Goal: Decide whether to scale up Major Gifts work. We intended to make a decision on scaling major gifts by the end of Q1 2020. We were on track at the end of 2019 and announced our plans to hire an additional Gift Officer in February 2020, based on the strong results from our first year of major gifts work.

Goal: Conduct experiments related to messaging about our work to reach more people. We conducted outreach experiments to reach new people. For example, we developed, tested, and implemented a new homepage. We also tried direct mail and advertising a donation match on podcasts.

Goal: Complete search for a VP of Marketing. We hired a VP of Marketing in November 2019.

Exploring new areas of research

We wrote:

"As mentioned above, we’re in the early stages of expanding the scope of GiveWell’s research. We plan to look into several new areas in 2019, including public health regulation and possible paths to support government aid agencies.

"This work is new for GiveWell, and as noted in our 2018 review post, we failed to make as much progress as we hoped in 2018 on our work on public health regulation. In 2019, we’re aiming to get substantially closer to the point where we have the staff structure to support grantmaking in new areas, though given how early we are in this work, we don’t yet have concrete goals we’re confident that we’ll achieve.

"A stretch goal for 2019 is to settle on a structure that we believe will support grantmaking in public health regulation and begin recommending grants in that area.

"We also plan to continue our investigation into possible paths to support government aid agencies; in particular, we plan to complete an investigation into an opportunity to do so in the area of results-based financing."

Goal: Look into several new areas, including public health regulation and possible paths to support government aid agencies. Get substantially closer to the point where we have the staff structure to support grantmaking in new areas. We failed to achieve this goal. We devoted less staff capacity than expected to new areas of research, including public health regulation, and made limited progress in developing the structure to support grantmaking in these areas.

Improving GiveWell’s organizational strength

We wrote:

"We expect to need additional operations capacity to maintain critical functions as GiveWell grows and to improve the organization going forward. We plan to hire one Operations Associate this year to assist with general operations needs, such as improving HR practices.

"We plan to hire many new staff over the coming years. In preparation, we plan to improve our procedures and information for recruiting, vetting, and onboarding staff to GiveWell this year, such as by improving inclusive recruitment practices and updating the substantive content of our onboarding activities. We also plan to improve our systems for soliciting feedback from staff about how GiveWell can improve as an organization, in order to give management better insight into how things are going.

"To accommodate our planned expansion, we plan to move to a new office that better suits our expected size and staff requirements."

Goal: Hire one Operations Associate. We hired two Operations Associates. We also hired an Operations Assistant; our previous Operations Assistant left in early 2019. All three new operations staff have been onboarded and are contributing to GiveWell's operations.

Goal: Improve the staff onboarding process at GiveWell. We updated our onboarding process.

Goal: Improve systems for soliciting feedback from staff. We conducted our first all-staff feedback survey in the fall of 2019.

Goal: Move to a new office. We moved from San Francisco, California, to a new office in Oakland, California, in October. The new office has more room into which we can grow.

Ongoing research

We wrote:

"We have a number of ongoing research projects, detailed here. These include:

  • "Completing a full draft of qualitative assessments of our top charities. In theory, we aim to maximize one thing with our top charity recommendations—total improvement in well-being per dollar spent—and this is what our cost-effectiveness estimates intend to capture. In practice, there are costs and benefits that we do not observe and are not estimated in our models, and so we allow for qualitative adjustments to affect our recommendations. We’re in the process of laying out a framework for qualitatively assessing relative organizational strength.
  • "Updating key inputs into our cost-effectiveness estimates, such as:
    • "How we use vitamin A deficiency data.
    • "Using new malaria prevalence and child mortality data.
    • "Using new data to update our estimates of costs incurred and target population reached for five of our top charities: Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention program, the Against Malaria Foundation, Helen Keller International’s vitamin A supplementation program, Sightsavers’ deworming program, and Evidence Action’s Deworm the World Initiative.
    • "Better understanding the counterfactual to the work Evidence Action’s Deworm the World Initiative has done in India. This goal is one we hope to achieve if we have time, but is not critical to our assessment."

Goal: Complete a full draft of qualitative assessments of our top charities. We published qualitative assessments of our top charities in November 2019.

Goal: Update key inputs into our cost-effectiveness estimates. Below, we list updates on the key inputs we highlighted in our plans for 2019:

  • "How we use vitamin A deficiency data." Our update is here.
  • "Using new malaria prevalence and child mortality data." Our update is here.
  • "Using new data to update our estimates of costs incurred and target population reached for five of our top charities: Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention program, the Against Malaria Foundation, Helen Keller International’s vitamin A supplementation program, Sightsavers’ deworming program, and Evidence Action’s Deworm the World Initiative." The following changes reflect updates to our cost per output analyses (which include information on costs and populations reached):
  • "Better understanding the counterfactual to the work Evidence Action’s Deworm the World Initiative has done in India. This goal is one we hope to achieve if we have time, but is not critical to our assessment." We did not complete this work.

A full log of the changes we made to our cost-effectiveness model in 2019 is here. The following changes were particularly important:

A spreadsheet tracking our progress against the full list of research targets we shared in early 2019 is here.