This page presents the results from Giving What We Can’s 2024 iteration of our ongoing project to evaluate impact-focused evaluators and grantmakers (which we collectively refer to as ‘evaluators’). We use this project to decide which evaluators we rely on for our giving recommendations and to advise our cause area funds.
In the 2024 round, we completed three evaluations that informed our donation recommendations for the 2024 giving season. Specifically, we evaluated:
As with our 2023 round, there are substantial limitations to these evaluations, but we nevertheless think that they are a significant improvement to a landscape in which there were no independent evaluations of evaluators’ work.
On this page, we:
In future iterations of this project, we aim to conduct new evaluations of our existing vetted evaluators, re-evaluate evaluators we do not yet rely on and expand beyond the seven evaluator programs we’ve covered in 2023 and 2024. We also hope to further improve our methodology.
For more context on why and how we evaluate evaluators, see our main evaluating evaluators page.
Based on our evaluation, we have decided not to currently include FP GHDF in our list of recommended charities and funds and do not plan to allocate a portion of GWWC’s Global Health and Wellbeing Fund budget to the FP GHDF at this point. However, we still think FP GHDF is worth considering for impact-focused donors and we will continue to host the program on the GWWC donation platform.
Some takeaways that inform this decision include:
Taken together, these issues left us unable to justifiably conclude that the FP GHDF is currently competitive with GiveWell’s recommendations.
While our decision is not to recommend FP GHDF at this time, we would like to emphasise that we did not conclude that the marginal cost-effectiveness of the GHDF is unambiguously not competitive with GiveWell’s recommended charities and funds — in fact, we think the GHDF might be competitive with GiveWell now or in the near future. Instead, our finding is that we can’t currently justifiably conclude that the fund is competitive with GiveWell in expectation, based on the evidence we have seen in our evaluation and the uncertainty surrounding staffing changes.
We also highlight positive findings from our evaluation. For example, we think that FP GHDF’s strategy of funding promising early-stage organisations plausibly has significant positive externalities, and the fact that FP GHDF has made several grants to organisations before GiveWell indicates they have some track record for identifying these promising funding opportunities.
For more information, please see our 2024 evaluation report for FP GHDF.
Based on our evaluation, we have decided to include ACE MG in our list of recommended charities and funds and we expect to allocate half of GWWC’s Effective Animal Advocacy Fund to ACE MG.
The key finding informing this decision is that ACE MG’s recent marginal grants and overall grant decision-making look to be of sufficiently high quality to be competitive with our current top recommendation in animal welfare: EA Funds’ Animal Welfare Fund (EA AWF) — by our evaluation of EA AWF in 2023. This is in large part due to our view that ACE MG has improved meaningfully since our previous evaluation, when we concluded that ACE MG performed slightly less strongly on several proxies for the marginal cost-effectiveness of its grants. In particular, we noted improvements in the quality of ACE MG’s:
We did find what we think to be room for improvement in ACE MG’s approach to more clearly integrating scope, particularly when comparing between applicants implementing different types of interventions. However, we don’t think this room for improvement affects the ACE MG’s position as being — to our knowledge — among the best places to recommend to donors.
We do not believe that our investigation identified ACE MG to be justifiably better or worse than EA AWF in terms of marginal cost-effectiveness — based on our 2023 evaluation of EA AWF — and so we continue to recommend EA AWF as a donation option alongside ACE MG, and to allocate half of our Effective Animal Advocacy Fund to EA AWF.
For more information, please see our 2024 evaluation report for ACE MG.
Based on our evaluation, we have decided not to currently include ACE’s Recommended Charities or the Recommended Charity Fund (RCF) in our list of recommended charities and funds nor to allocate a portion of GWWC’s Effective Animal Advocacy Fund to these programs at this point in time. However, we still think ACE’s Recommended Charities are worth considering for impact-focused donors and we may consider inviting some of these programs to apply to become supported programs on the GWWC donation platform in early 2025.
Some takeaways that informed our decision include:
Additionally, while our decision is not to rely on ACE’s Charity Evaluation program, we would like to emphasise that we are not making the case that the marginal cost-effectiveness of (any particular) ACE Recommended Charity is clearly not competitive with ACE MG or the EA AWF. In fact, we think it is plausible that some of these charities are competitive with our recommended funds, and may be great options to consider for donors with particular worldviews and who have time to delve deeper into ACE’s materials. Instead, our conclusion is that we can’t justifiably conclude that the program consistently identifies charities competitive with the funding opportunities supported by our current recommendations (ACE MG and EA AWF), based on the evidence we have seen in our evaluation.
For more information, please see our 2024 evaluation report for ACE’s Charity Evaluation Program.
Based on the results of this research, we’ve made some changes to our list of recommended programs and management of our cause area fund in the animal welfare cause area. For reasons described above and below, following our 2024 evaluations, we have made the following changes to our list of recommended programs:
Correspondingly, we now plan to allocate 50% of our Effective Animal Advocacy Fund to ACE’s Movement Grants program and 50% to EA Funds’ Animal Welfare Fund (EA AWF), where previously this fund was allocated to 50% EA AWF and 50% The Humane League.
Because we decided to not (yet) rely on the Founders Pledge Global Health and Development Fund, GiveWell — whom we evaluated in 2023 — remains our only vetted evaluator in the global health and wellbeing cause area. As such, we plan to continue:
As we did not evaluate any evaluators in the reducing global catastrophic risks cause area, EA Funds’ Long-term Future Fund (EA LTFF) and Longview’s Emerging Challenges Fund (LV ECF) — both of which we evaluated in 2023 — remain our vetted evaluators in this cause area. As such, we plan to continue:
As part of our review of our recommended programs for the 2024 Giving Season, we have made the decision to remove The Humane League’s (THL) corporate campaigns program from our list of recommended programs. Our reason for this is that we believe we can no longer justifiably recommend THL’s program alongside our existing recommendations in animal welfare.
While our decision was to no longer recommend THL’s program, we want to be clear that our decision does not reflect any negative update on THL’s work. Instead, this is reflective of evidence being out of date, us maintaining the scope of the evaluating evaluators project, and keeping to our principles of usefulness, justifiability and transparency.
Specifically, this conclusion is predominantly based on the following:
THL’s corporate campaigns remain a supported program on our platform for donors who wish to continue supporting their work, and though we can no longer justifiably recommend them, we still think they are an option worth considering for impact-focused donors with particular worldviews and time to engage with the evidence supporting their corporate campaigns program.
We explain the reasons for choosing to evaluate each evaluator within the relevant 2024 report. Among other reasons, in 2024, these choices were informed by:
The choice of which evaluators to prioritise affects our overall recommendations. For example, because we have not yet evaluated Founders Pledge’s Global Catastrophic Risks Fund, we do not recommend the fund. This lack of comprehensiveness is one of our project’s initial key limitations. We try to partially account for this by highlighting promising alternatives to our recommendations on our donation platform, and providing resources for donors to investigate these further.
As discussed above, a key goal for our evaluations project was to decide which evaluators to rely on for our recommendations and grantmaking. We were additionally interested in providing guidance to other effective giving organisations, providing feedback to evaluators, and improving incentives in the effective giving ecosystem.
For each evaluator, our evaluation aimed to transparently and justifiably come to tailored decisions on whether and how to use its research to inform our recommendations and grantmaking. Though each evaluation is different — because we tried to focus on the most decision-relevant questions per evaluator — the general process was fairly consistent in structure:
Note: we were highly time-constrained in completing this second iteration of our project. On average, we spent about 10 researcher-days per organisation we evaluated (in other words, one researcher spending two full work weeks), of which only a limited part could go into direct evaluation work — a lot of time needed to go into planning and scoping, discussion on the project as a whole, communications with evaluators, and so on.