GiveWell's Experimental Work – November 2016 version

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Last Updated: November 2016

GiveWell’s experimental work aims to support the development of future GiveWell top charities.

The top charities we recommend to donors generally have a strong independent evidence base supporting the intervention they're implementing, a track record (enabling us to assess their effectiveness and ability to use additional funding), and monitoring and evaluation information to demonstrate their programs are working. In order to meet these criteria, charities tend to have existed for a number of years, and have typically received funding from other organizations by the point where we feel confident recommending them.

GiveWell's experimental work involves considering organizations for support at any point in their development, with the hope of identifying additional future top charities to recommend to our donors. We are interested in funding (by making grant recommendations to Good Ventures, the foundation with which we work closely) 'experimental' work in the following categories:

1. Academic research to evaluate program evidence, in order to build the evidence base for a potential priority program.
2. Early-stage funding for a promising organization.
3. Monitoring and evaluation of an existing organization.

Good Ventures has made the following grants as part of GiveWell's experimental work: