History of Philanthropy Case Study: Pew and Drug Safety Legislation

Editor’s note: Coefficient Giving was formerly a part of GiveWell under the name “GiveWell Labs,” and later operated as Open Philanthropy. This post originally appeared on the GiveWell Blog; uses of “we” and “our” in the below post may refer to GiveWell. Some content may be outdated; you can see our latest writing here.

Tamara Mann Tweel, who has been working for us on our history of philanthropy project, has completed a case study of a Pew Charitable Trusts (“Pew”) program focused on drug supply chain safety legislation in 2012.

The report concludes:

“Pew put drug supply chain safety concerns on the legislative agenda in 2011 and actively built the coalition that ensured its passage in 2012. The team also assisted with and vetted the language of the 2012 bill and made sure that weak policy proposals did not supplant strong ones. Pew accomplished these goals largely by capitalizing on their expertise and by deploying the multi-pronged strategy [explained in this report]. Pew did not act alone. It had the assistance of strong industry partners, FDA officials, and key congressmen and senators… [Pew] became the single most important non-government and non-industry player in the field. They brought the stakeholders together, gave them the necessary information to pursue the topic, and demonstrated the viability of actual policy.”

Our impression is that Pew has had fairly concrete impact on policy in a variety of areas (note that we’ve separately investigated its work on public safety performance, in the context of a $3 million grant we made to Pew). While its model is not the only or necessarily best one for policy-oriented philanthropy, we believe it is one example of a generally well-executed and impactful model, and that Pew is a group we can learn from. We chose to do a case study on its work in order to examine our beliefs on this point, and we believe that the case study has generally been consistent with our views on Pew’s work.