"An Update to GiveWell's Grant Deployment Timelines" (Nov 25, 2024)

# The GiveWell Blog

GiveWell aims to save and improve lives as cost-effectively as possible. That mission has an urgency, and we put a lot of effort into finding and funding high-impact giving opportunities quickly. But we also want to maximize our impact over time, and have found that high-impact interventions can take years of investment to discover, vet, launch, and scale.

As a result, we’ve begun to deploy funds across a longer time period in order to (a) avoid a scenario where we want to make cost-effective grants but can’t due to lack of funds, (b) aid long-term planning for our research team, and (c) communicate consistent expectations to grantees and potential grantees about our cost-effectiveness threshold.

Specifically, we previously aimed to allocate all funds within the same year they were raised, targeting a year-end balance of zero. Now, we plan to enter each year with sufficient funds to fully cover our grantmaking activities for that year without accounting for new donations.1We don’t expect to fully spend down our starting balance at the end of each year. This approach creates greater financial stability, which we think will allow us to plan better and to achieve greater impact over time.

If you donate to our [Top Charities Fund](https://www.givewell.org/top-charities-fund) (TCF), nothing has changed. We still expect to commit TCF donations in the quarter after they are received. These changes will only apply to our unrestricted and All Grants Fund (AGF).2A note on fungibility: this year, we expect to grant more to top charities than we hold in the TCF. In that scenario, we’d use flexible funds (e.g., the AGF). Under those circumstances, additional donations to TCF, which would fill part of that gap, would have the effect of freeing up some of those AGF funds to be used for other grants. In other words, the literal dollars you donated would have gone to a Top Charities grant and flow in and out of our bank account quicker, but the impact of your donation may be felt further in the future. Our best guess is that this will also likely be the case in 2025. Of course, if we raise more money for TCF than we currently expect or find smaller funding gaps than we currently expect, this note on fungibility wouldn’t hold. We’re significantly more uncertain about how this will balance out further in the future.

While the timeframe over which we intend to spend funds has changed, our goal to raise more funds remains. **Raising more money is our top organizational priority, and the single most important lever to unlocking more impact over time. Huge needs remain and the more funds we raise, the more we’ll be able to help people in the future.**

## What’s the impetus for this change?

This is a fairly big change for us, but reflects GiveWell’s evolution over the past few years. We think it’s helpful to chart our organizational development to understand these shifts.

[![Bar with three sections describing GiveWell's history: from 2007 to 

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