Position: Content Editor
Salary: We will consider applicants for both full-time and part-time work (minimum 20 hours per week). Content Editors start at $31 per hour, equivalent to $65,000 per year for full-time work.
Location: Flexible. In Oakland, California if working from our office. Content Editors can choose to work from our office or to work remotely.
Visas: Please note that for this position we’re currently not accepting applications from candidates who need authorization to work in the U.S.
About GiveWell
GiveWell’s goal is to identify the giving opportunities which can most cost-effectively improve the lives of the global poor.
GiveWell started as a group of finance professionals trying to do as much good as possible with their personal donations. Since 2007, it has been a full-time independent research group. We publish our charity recommendations, research, and the full details of our analysis publicly at www.GiveWell.org.
We think our top charities accomplish a huge amount of good. The charities we recommend work in the area of global health and development and serve some of the poorest people in the world.
Our research has received accolades from Peter Singer (who featured it in his manifesto on giving, The Life You Can Save), Nicholas Kristof (who featured it in Half The Sky), and media including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, CNN and NPR, and many others.
Collectively, GiveWell’s donors are some of the largest private donors in international aid. In 2017 (the most recent year for which complete data is available), donors gave a combined $117.5 million in donations to our recommended charities as a direct result of our research. We also directed an additional $17 million in Incubation Grants to support work to strengthen our recommendations in the future.
GiveWell is expanding our team so we can broaden the scope of our research and look for charities that might have even more impact per dollar donated than our current top charities. By joining GiveWell, you will have the opportunity to influence and contribute to our approach and success in directing millions of dollars in funding to highly impactful charities.
Transparency is a core value of ours and we aim to publish as much supporting information regarding our conclusions as we can. The Content Editor team at GiveWell is key to enabling us to produce clear, informative, and well-supported public written materials that allow donors to decide whether to support our top charities.
The role
As a Content Editor at GiveWell, you will contribute to our research in a variety of ways.
Responsibilities include:
- Writing summaries of GiveWell’s conversations with experts in various fields.Conversation notes are an essential part of GiveWell’s research process; for more on why, see our 2012 blog post on this topic. Examples of completed conversation notes include:
- A conversation with Stefano Caria and Paolo Falco about job application workshops in Ethiopia
- A conversation with MiracleFeet about clubfoot treatment
- A conversation with the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids about its work
- Editing and fact-checking research reports on charities and interventions. GiveWell makes it a high priority to ensure that the reports we publish, which form the basis for our recommendations, are easy to follow and professional and that all factual statements are accurate and traceable to their sources. The Content Editor team provides the quality control for all published reports, editing for clarity and fact-checking our claims.
- Writing reports and other content for our website. Content Editors enable us to publish high-quality discussions of the reasoning behind our recommendations and free up time for the rest of the research team by turning rough, internal drafts into clear, complete, and well-sourced reports for publication. For example, Content Editors wrote pages on why we recommended a $5.1 million grant to Evidence Action Beta and a $300,000 grant to Fortify Health. In the future, Content Editors may also work with our outreach team to produce high-quality content aimed at explaining our research in ways that are accessible to audiences with different levels of familiarity with our work.
- Collecting and organizing information for research projects. Content Editors work one-on-one with researchers on our team to assist with projects that involve organizing large amounts of information from multiple sources, for example, David Roodman’s project to reanalyze a key study on the impact of dewormingand a project to track national policies on uses of lead paint.
About you
To be successful in this role, we expect you are:
- A skilled writer. You can turn informal communications into clear, concise, and professional writing.
- Highly attentive to detail. We rely on you to uncover errors that affect our decisions and establish the credibility of our research, and to produce materials that are close to error-free.
- A strong communicator. You are proactive about communicating and receptive to feedback and willing to provide feedback. You communicate productively with coworkers in both oral and written exchanges.
Other highly desirable skills, experience, or characteristics:
- Passionate about helping the global poor as much as possible. GiveWell is focused on programs that target low- and low-to-middle-income countries. You want to contribute to GiveWell’s mission and are passionate about maximizing what can be accomplished with the resources available to help the people in these countries.
- Excited by working at a growing, agile organization. GiveWell currently has approximately 25 full-time staff members. This means that we expect a lot from each person, and we often ask people to contribute outside their core area of focus. If you like trying and learning new things, we are potentially a great fit.
More information
GiveWell accommodates flexible and remote working. We support and encourage flexible working, including flexible hours, regular work-from-home days, part-time work patterns, and periodic remote-work stints. The majority of our staff, including senior management, work flexibly in one way or another. Our preference is for staff to work from Oakland, but working remotely (including internationally) is also possible.
As part of our dedication to the diversity of our staff, GiveWell is committed to Equal Employment Opportunity without regard for race, color, national origin, ethnicity, gender, protected veteran status, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, or religion. People of color, people with disabilities, women, and LGBTQ candidates are strongly encouraged to apply.
Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.