In our effort to put our fund-raising impact on a more quantifiable basis, we have significantly reworked our website backend (the parts that aren’t so visible) and slightly adapted our fund-raising strategies. In particular the projects that we have personally vetted or helped devise according to our list of requirements on the updated About us page are now marked with a Your Siblings seal while further projects—one so far, fund-raising for the Against Malaria Foundation—are marked with a GiveWell seal, indicating that GiveWell has recommended these projects as outstanding giving opportunities. The decision to fund-raise for these charities is of course still ours; the seal merely indicates that the research that has led to our decision was conducted by GiveWell. From their About page:

GiveWell is a nonprofit dedicated to finding outstanding giving opportunities and publishing the full details of our analysis to help donors decide where to give.

Unlike charity evaluators that focus solely on financials, assessing administrative or fundraising costs, we conduct in-depth research aiming to determine how much good a given program accomplishes (in terms of lives saved, lives improved, etc.) per dollar spent. Rather than try to rate as many charities as possible, we focus on the few charities that stand out most (by our criteria) in order to find and confidently recommend the best giving opportunities possible.

We put great trust into the detailed, in-depth research that GiveWell conducts, trust that is wholly redundant given that they go to great lengths to be as transparent as possible about every element of their reasoning.

The first project that carries this new seal is our project for the Against Malaria Foundation. From our project description:

Half the world’s population is at risk of malaria. In 2012, about 627,000 people died of the disease, the equivalent of four Boeing 747 crashing every day with no survivors. On average, one person dies of malaria every minute. And these numbers are even conservative estimates. (WHO 2013)

LLINs are mosquito nets, usually bed nets, that not only physically protect against malaria-infected mosquitoes but are also treated with an insecticide that lasts for several years and in that time kills any mosquitoes that may otherwise be able to find possible gaps or tears in the net. Since most mosquitoes bite during the time from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., bed nets are a highly effective means of protection against malaria. Depending on the region they also protect from other diseases transmitted by the same vector species, such as dengue fever, yellow fever, and forms of encephalitis.

The Against Malaria Foundation (AMF), founded in 2004, is one of several organizations that support local distributors by funding the hundreds of thousands of nets that are needed in LLIN distributions, but AMF stands out because of its strong commitment to transparency and self-evaluation.

Please read the full description and welcome our new project—preferably with a donation!