Giving Compass' Take:

• Catherine Hollander explains how GiveWell uses incubation grants to create a pipeline of new, high-impact philanthropic opportunities. 

• Are incubation grants a viable model for your organization? What are the unique demands of incubation grants? 

• Learn how to be an extraordinary grantmaker.

GiveWell, as many of you might know, is a nonprofit that's dedicated to finding and recommending outstanding giving opportunities. We publish a short list of top charities every year that represent some of the opportunities that we think are extremely evidence-backed, cost effective, transparent and in need of additional funding. We think that our top charities are great opportunities for the many donors who are interested in using our research.

We started to think, are there things that we could be doing to help develop the pipeline of potential future top charities? One thought that we had was, as a recommender and as a funder, we're really stepping in at a fairly late stage in charities' life cycles. We're looking for things that are extremely strongly evidence-backed, which means that by the time they're getting to GiveWell's recommendation, someone has probably already funded them, such that they could develop the track record that we need to see in order to make our recommendation. Someone has already funded the program research that we rely on to decide that a particular program is very evidence-backed, and that therefore we're interested in finding charities that support that program.

The incubation grants program is us at GiveWell stepping in as that earlier stage funder and trying to specifically develop the types of charities and the types of program research that we think will ultimately make it to our top charities list, where we can recommend them to a large number of donors and direct a significant amount of funding to support their work.

These are the goals for our Incubation Grants program: developing the pipeline of future top charities, and also improving our understanding of our current top charities since, particularly as GiveWell has grown, we're directing a significant amount of funding to the groups that we recommend. And so, we want to make sure that we answer questions that we have about them, and the Incubation Grants program is one way that we can do that.

Read the full article about incubation Grants by Catherine Hollander at Effective Altruism.