A major focus of Giving What We Can’s research team is evaluating impact-focused charity evaluators and grantmakers — this page explains what this work comprises, why this is our focus, and how we do it.
We want to make the best possible recommendations we’re aware of to donors looking to maximise their impact. To be able to serve donors with a variety of values and starting assumptions, and to cover as many causes and charities as possible, we rely on third-party expert evaluators for our recommendations and grantmaking, rather than evaluating individual charities ourselves. We evaluate evaluators and their methodologies so that we can always rely on the highest-quality and most up-to-date recommendations available across a range of causes.
On this page, you can find the evaluators we currently rely on, the evaluators we’ve looked into so far, key results and context from each iteration of our evaluators research, and background and context about the evaluators project as a whole.
Note that we do not recommend using sites like Charity Navigator or GuideStar to determine where your donations will have the greatest impact, since comparing impact is not the primary focus of these organisations. (More here.)
Based on the results of our 2023 and 2024 evaluators research, we currently rely on the following evaluators/grantmaking programs (in alphabetical order) for our charity recommendations and to advise our cause area funds:1
We’ve so far lookoed into eight impact-focused evaluator programs. You can read each report below:
This section links to more specifics about each iteration of our evaluate the evaluators research, including the headline findings of our research, the changes that were made to our charity recommendations and funds as a result, and background/context on the project – including how we chose the specific evaluators we looked into that year.
This section explains the what and why behind the evaluate the evaluators project more generally and applies to all iterations of the work.
We evaluate evaluators to decide which evaluators:
At a high level, we do this by:
We think it’s the best way we can help donors maximise their impact.
We don’t have the capacity to evaluate individual charities ourselves — there are far too many for just one research team to cover, more than a million in the US alone! — so we need to turn to other expert evaluators and grantmakers focused on impact. By our count, there are now over a dozen impact-focused grantmaking and charity evaluation organisations, some of which provide different charity recommendations in the same cause area. This leaves us, other effective giving organisations, and donors with an important choice on whose recommendations to follow.
Before 2023, we made this choice based on factors like the public reputation of an evaluator in the effective giving ecosystem, and whether its stated approach seemed to broadly align with our donors’ goals. But we wanted to do better, and thought it would be valuable to provide donors with more information about evaluators.
Beyond making our recommendations to donors, we think there are several extra benefits to evaluating evaluators:
There are substantial limitations to our first iterations of this project, which we did in 2023 and 2024, but we nevertheless think that this is a significant improvement on the status quo, in which there were no independent evaluations of evaluators’ work. We discussed some of our concerns with this status quo when we first announced our research direction at the end of 2022.
In this section, we highlight:
As we do with our impact evaluation, we aim for usefulness, transparency, and justifiability, rather than comprehensiveness and procedural uniformity. Put another way, we aim to transparently communicate how we use our judgement to find the areas we think are most useful to investigate, to come to a justifiable decision on whether and how to defer to an evaluator. Some implications of this approach include that we are flexible in what we choose to investigate (making each evaluation different) and open to stopping an evaluation once we feel able to make a justifiable decision.
We also aim to avoid surprises for evaluators by alerting them of our thinking throughout the process. This is in part because we want to work with evaluators to understand and improve their approach, rather than just judging them, and also because we value their expertise.
Please see our yearly reports for the specifics of how we chose the evaluators we looked into for each iteration of our project.
More generally, because of our worldview-diverse approach, we’ve based our research on the goal of maintaining impact-focused charity and fund recommendations in the three cause areas2 we think contain some of the most cost-effective funding opportunities across a broad range of plausible worldviews (rather than taking a view on how impact varies across these cause areas). As a research team, we think we can add most value within a cause area, whereas donors can decide for themselves which cause areas best align with their worldview.
Our choice of these three cause areas (global health and wellbeing, animal welfare, and reducing global catastrophic risk) has been informed by global priorities research from organisations like Open Philanthropy, the Global Priorities Institute, and (in the past) the Centre for Effective Altruism.
There are some promising philanthropic cause areas that we did not (yet) include (such as climate change). We intend to keep evaluating new cause areas and evaluators to add further recommendations, provided we find a strong enough case exists that, from a sufficiently plausible worldview, a donor would choose to support those cause areas over other options.
Additionally, prior to beginning our evaluator research, we:
These considerations heavily influenced our choice of evaluators in 2023, which in turn has influenced future iterations of the project.
A key limitation of our approach to evaluator research is that our charity and fund recommendations may not (yet) include some donation opportunities that are, in fact, competitive with the ones we recommend. This is because we haven’t (yet) investigated all promising evaluator programs in the impact-evaluation space, and only recommend opportunities from evaluators we’ve vetted. Relatedly, we haven’t (yet) investigated several promising cause areas, such as climate change or effective giving meta organisations.
Notably, this means we’re highly confident that our charity and fund recommendations are based on the best research we’ve evaluated within each cause area. However, it also means we’re not highly confident that opportunities we’ve excluded are necessarily less impactful. We’ve tried to account for this by explaining how we came up with our recommendations on our best charities page, adding a recommendations FAQ that goes into further detail, highlighting that there are a wider range of promising programs available to donors via our donation platform, and providing resources for donors to investigate these further.
On a similar note, even after several iterations, this project will not allow us to cover the entire charity space: there aren’t evaluators in every promising cause area, and evaluators are generally far from able to cover all promising charities within the cause areas they focus on – they use prioritisation frameworks and reasoning to help ensure they’re evaluating the most promising ones.
Nevertheless, we think this project is the most efficient way for us to cover as large a part of the high-impact charity space as possible in a high-quality manner, and – as stated above – we provide donors with various promising alternative options if they want to have more choice and delve deeper themselves.
Finally, the quality of our recommendations is highly dependent on the quality of the charity evaluation field in a cause area, and hence inconsistent across cause areas. For example, the state of charity evaluation in animal welfare is less advanced than that in global health and wellbeing, so our evaluations and the resulting recommendations in animal welfare are necessarily lower-confidence than those in global health and wellbeing.
A few other potential limitations (most of these are also noted in the relevant reports):
Given these limitations, we aimed to:
Even with our efforts to take an approach that prioritises transparency, justifiability, and usefulness, we appreciate there still are significant limitations to our evaluations, and see the first few iterations of this project as a minimum-viable-product version which we look forward to improving on in future iterations. However, as mentioned above, we think doing these evaluations represents a significant improvement to the previous situation, in which there were no independent evaluations of evaluators’ work we (or donors and other effective giving organisations) could rely on.
Rather than evaluating individual charities, since 2023, Giving What We Can evaluates which third-party expert evaluators donors can best rely on to maximise their impact. This allows us to make even higher-quality fund and charity recommendations to donors with a wide variety of values and starting assumptions. We think this represents a big improvement over how we previously chose which evaluators to work with — based on rough heuristics— even though it still has limitations. It has also facilitated the launch of our cause area funds, which present a reliable default option for donors who want their money to be allocated according to our latest research.
Over time, we want to expand to more cause areas and evaluators, go more in-depth where it's useful, and keep refining our process based on feedback. Most importantly, we'll keep focusing on empowering donors and collaborating with evaluators to help donors have the biggest impact. We're grateful to all the evaluators who worked with us on this project so far, and look forward to continuing to improve together.
For those who would like to see our current giving recommendations, check out our best charities page. For the full selection of programs Giving What We Can supports, see our donation platform.