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Our progress to date

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This page outlines the history of the GiveWell project, in terms of our plans and self-reviews.

Table of Contents

Original business plan (published 4/7/2007)

On 4/7/2007, we published "The Case for the Clear Fund," our original business plan. It was written mostly to solicit the support and feedback of our existing contacts. The full PDF is available at this link:

See our story for an abbreviated version.

First-year review (published 6/19/2008)

After our first year, GiveWell completed a thorough report on our accomplishments, shortcomings, and lessons learned, and outlined our plans for the future.

Goal Importance Successes Concerns and shortcomings Grade
Research Very High Successfully and cost-effectively got meaningful information from charities; generated substantive and useful information about where to donate. Process took twice as long as expected; was often frustrating for charities. Overly narrow classifications of charities led to suboptimal allocation of grants. B+
Website High We were able to publish nearly all our sources publicly. Website completed under budget; sufficiently usable to generate reasonable levels of engagement for a new website. Website readability and usability still leaves much to be desired. B
Publicity Medium Attracted significant positive attention in the nonprofit-centered and mainstream media. Saw significant spike in website traffic leading to many contacts and over $30,000 in donations to recommended charities. Overly aggressive, inappropriate marketing called our judgment into question and damaged our reputation (justifiably). C
Startup hurdles Essential (but low time commitment) Raised sufficient startup capital, secured US-recognized nonprofit status, completed all necessary registrations, set up payroll and accounting procedures, formed Board of Directors. Did not establish a full set of policies and metrics for oversight purposes. Board members limited in availability and did not provide sufficient oversight. Little progress on finding potential staff. B+

The full report is available via these links:

These documents were the focus of our board meeting on 9/8/2008.

Change of direction (published 11/17/2008)

At our board meeting on 9/8/2008, we agreed that our top priority for the coming year was money moved, with research as a secondary priority. After several months pursuing the plan linked directly above, we felt that we were prioritizing our time and resources badly, and that we weren't on the best possible path to our eventual goal. We created a "vision document" outlining our eventual goal in more concrete terms than we had before; a new business plan, featuring an emphasis on research as opposed to marketing; and a "transition document" laying out what we had learned and why we felt a change of course was appropriate. In sum:

  • We believed that we could raise substantial amounts of money through our network, particularly through high-net-worth donors. We now believe that this networking approach is too time-intensive, and that the correct target market for us is medium-size donors whom we must reach in more systematic, scalable ways.
  • We believed that the current state of our research would be sufficient to raise large amounts of money. We now believe that in order to reach our target market in a large-scale way, we need substantially broader and deeper research.
  • We believed that we had no way to create a substantially broader and deeper set of research without extreme growth in staff. We now believe that a deep, broad resource can be built within a few years, while scaling up from our current expenses to no more than $1.6 million per year.
  • We believed that raising money through our network was the key to “proving” demand and thereby raising more operating funds and drawing more media exposure. We now believe that investors – including us – are unlikely to see money raised through our network as proof of demand. Instead, we must make progress toward a long-term goal of moving money at scale.
  • We believed that we could, and needed to, “prove” significant demand in the short term. We now believe that we can show incremental progress on demand as we continue our research, but the full state of demand for it can only be assessed once our research content is substantially improved.

Full documents are available below:

These documents were the focus of our board meeting on 11/10/2008.

2009 review and plan (published 2/19/2010)

Our full 2009 review and 2010 plan are available in this document (DOC).

The above document refers to the following documents:

We originally published this review and plan on our blog over five posts:

2010 review and plan (published February 2011)

This was published as a set of six blog posts:

  • GiveWell's annual self-evaluation and plan: a big picture change in priorities. Previously, we had aimed to cover as many causes (microfinance, education, etc.) as possible, to accommodate donors interested in those causes. However, we were finding that the lion's share of our money moved was going to our top charities in our top-rated causes. We decided to de-emphasize covering causes we didn't personally find promising so that we could focus entirely on finding the best possible giving opportunities (even if that meant continuing to focus on very small number of causes).
  • Stats on GiveWell's money moved and web traffic.
    • We tracked over $1.5 million in donations to top charities in 2010, compared to just over $1 million in 2009.
    • Our website traffic nearly doubled from 2009 to 2010, and donations through the website nearly tripled. Our overall increase in money moved appears to be driven mostly by (a) a gain of $200,000 in six-figure donations; (b) new donors, largely acquired via search engine traffic and the outreach of Peter Singer.
    • Our growth in online donations to recommended charities was significantly faster than that of the more established online donor resources (Charity Navigator and GuideStar); our total online donations remain lower than these resources', but are now in the same ballpark.
  • Self-evaluation: GiveWell as a donor resource. We discussed the state of GiveWell in terms of research quality and usefulness. We felt that our quality was strong, our credibility was reasonable but with room for improvement, and that our biggest problem was that we hadn't identified enough truly top-notch charities to absorb a significant amount of funding.
  • Self-evaluation: GiveWell as a project. We discussed the state of GiveWell from the perspective of stakeholders (Board members, direct supporters of GiveWell, etc.) We felt our influence, as well as the robustness of our research (i.e., the extent to which it could be systematically maintained without relying on the founders), were improving but remained major priorities; fundraising was a major need as well.
  • GiveWell's plan for 2011: top-level priorities. We gave a broad overview of our top priorities: finding more top-notch charities, then fundraising, then maintaining/systemizing/vetting our research, then marketing/outreach, and finally exploring more causes to lay the groundwork for future research.
  • GiveWell's plan for 2011: specifics of research. We laid out our possible strategies for our most important goal of the year, finding more top-notch charities.
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