Notes from Research Conversations

Last updated: October 2023

Our research process involves talking with nonprofit representatives, subject matter experts, and other stakeholders to learn more about potentially promising programs and funding opportunities. In the past, we often published notes summarizing the main points from these conversations to be transparent about our work.

Over the past several years, we have been publishing more pages describing the rationale for funding recommendations (a list of grant pages is here) and our assessment of programs we've evaluated (a list of program reviews is here). As a result, conversation notes have become less important in providing transparency about what we believe and why.

What we learn from our conversations informs our research and will continue to be cited on our grant pages and program reviews. However, as of October 2023, we plan to reduce the frequency with which we publish full notes from those conversations. When we do publish notes, we will continue to add them to the database below.

All of the notes in the table below have been approved for public posting by the people involved. Some notes have been edited after the conversation to correct errors, remove confidential information, or add additional information.1

You can receive updates when notes from our research conversations are published by subscribing here.

How to use this table

Here are a few key pointers for how you can engage with the table of conversation notes:

To filter by topic: You can use the "Filter" button to view different subsets of the notes in the table. To see notes on a specific topic (e.g. malaria, vaccines, salt iodization), click on "Filter," change the first dropdown menu to "Topics," and select topics of interest from the third dropdown menu.
To apply multiple filters: You can apply multiple filters simultaneously by clicking "+ Add filter" under the "Filter" menu.
To sort by conversation date: To see the notes from the most recent conversations, click on "Sort," select "Date" from the first dropdown menu, and click on "9 → 1."
To see a full view of this table: For a full view of this table, see here.

A previous version of this page is available here.

1Previously, conversations related to our work on the Open Philanthropy Project were available on this page. Open Philanthropy is now a separate entity from GiveWell and these conversations are now available on the Open Philanthropy website.