[tempestn]

Since Givewell has come up a number of times here, the obvious question to me, as someone completely unversed in how these things work, is how does contributing to your fund compare to contributing to Givewell? It seems like your goals are similar. Is your claim that dollars contributed to your fund will ultimately be more effective? Or are you differentiating yourselves in a different way (different priorities, improved transparancy, something else)? I realize the model is somewhat different, but the comparison I would ultimately care about is in the end results - the effects that my contributions would ultimately have.

[colophonemes]

Our baseline for effectiveness (specifically with regard to the Global Health and Development Fund, which is managed by GiveWell founder Elie Hassenfeld) is Givewell's top charities. So, it's entirely possible that Elie will choose to grant to these, in which case your donation will be exactly as effective as donating to Givewell, but you'll get the advantage of using the EA Funds platform — e.g. single tax receipt (donating to one org instead of 3-4), easy recurring donations, the ability to change your donation preferences later, allocating to causes outside of global health, donation tracking etc. etc.

However, we do think there's a good chance of getting higher returns. Givewell recommendations skew towards what makes sense for an average, individual donor with a particular risk profile. By having access to a larger pool of funds, you could seed new high-expected-value charities that wouldn't necessarily make it onto Givewell's recommendation list, but are nonetheless potentially high impact (examples of recent things in this space — New Incentives, Charity Science Health etc).

[jefftk]

    single tax receipt (donating to one org instead of 3-4)

GiveWell offers this as well: https://secure.givewell.org/

You can donate to GiveWell for distribution to their to charities, and you can either choose the breakdown or ask them to allocate it as they think best.

[tmacaulay]

That's true. You can donate to GiveWell's top charities directly through GiveWell. For many donors, especially those who only want to donate to proven charities with a good track record, this is a great choice.

With our Global Health and Development Fund, we hope to also make small, seed grants to promising new initiatives, to help them build evidence to support their program, or to replicate a promising intervention in a new geographic region, to figure out if the program can scale. Many of these donation opportunities are small, and individual donors won't necessarily hear about them. With Elie managing this fund, we hope to be able to quickly fund promising new projects, so they spend less time on PR and fundraising, and more time doing good work.

[colophonemes]

Good point — a nice feature but not a point of differentiation from Givewell's donation page... I think the others still stand – in general you gain additional flexibility with the Funds without compromising effectiveness.