I'm excited about the way Giving What We Can is working to make effective giving a new cultural norm so we can build a movement that will change the world!
Giving What We Can (GWWC) is on a mission to create a world in which giving effectively and significantly is a cultural norm. With the opportunity for effective philanthropy to make a serious dent in the global challenges facing us today, our mission is as relevant as ever. We’re best known for the 10% Pledge, through which ~9,000 people have committed to giving at least 10% of their income to the most effective charities, helping inspire those who can afford it to give what we can to help others. We also do education and outreach about high-impact donations and how to concretely make a difference through effective philanthropy, leveraging thousands of hours of research to help donors find the highest-impact problems and identify the best charities working to solve them. Our community has already donated almost $400 million USD.
We grow the effective giving movement through our three key initiatives:
Our pledges, which inspire a global community of donors to give more significantly, more sustainably, and more effectively
Our advice, which helps donors make more informed giving decisions and guides them to high-impact giving opportunities across a diversity of worldviews
Our donation platform, which makes effective giving easy and widely accessible across multiple countries
Additionally, we support and provide coordination for the broader effective giving ecosystem, including by making our resources and tools available to other effective giving organisations, coordinating within the ecosystem, and helping incubate new projects to fill pressing gaps.
We have the hypothesis — informed by our impact evaluation — that our pledges will be core to GWWC achieving its ambitious vision. Not only are they immensely scalable and directly connected to our mission, we know that the GWWC Pledge is a powerful institution: we’ve seen more than 9000 people take this Pledge and generally stick to it, giving highly effectively and on average donating more every year. From the 12 years of data that we have, our best guess estimate is that each GWWC Pledger donates in the order of $100,000 USD to highly effective charities over their lifetime. This means that we estimate that our current 9093 pledgers alone will contribute close to 1,000,000,000 USD to highly effective charities, but more importantly, it means that there is potential for immense impact if we manage to find ways to bring the Pledge to a wider audience.
Therefore, we are looking to find out if we can achieve scalable pledge growth. We have set a tentative Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) of 1 million pledges to guide our thinking to be suitably ambitious, and have defined Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) that will help us learn about the pledger journey, experiment with various strategies — leveraging what we think of as our most valuable assets: our community and network — and lay the operational foundations for scaling the pledge in future years. We hope to see early signs of success this year — and celebrate the 10,000 pledger mark — but our focus is on finding the pathways that will help us scale to 1 million pledgers.
See our strategy documents for more details.
We’re fundraising for our general budget. With any funding received we would expect to continue with the delivery of our programmes, explore how we can continue to improve and grow them, and consolidate our org strategy and future plans.
We’re currently fundraising for ~1.5m GBP to ensure that Giving What We Can has sustainable funds for operating into 2025 and beyond.
Giving What We Can was launched in 2009 by co-founders Toby Ord and William MacAskill (philosophers at the University of Oxford), along with Ord's wife Bernadette Young (a physician in training at the time). Today, our team is managed by an Executive Director (Luke Freeman)
We recommend you check out our track record and 2020–2022 impact evaluation here.
GWWC is now in its 16th year. It seems like we’ll continue in our mission to create a world in which giving effectively and significantly is a cultural norm. While specific scenarios may vary, we've identified several general possibilities:
Our current approach may not be the most effective way to pursue our mission. Outcome: We would reassess and redirect our strategies to better align with our goals.
Certain aspects of our work may not justify their financial or opportunity costs. Outcome: We would de-emphasize or economize these areas, focusing resources on more impactful initiatives.
Inability to secure sufficient funding for planned activities. Outcome: We would significantly increase fundraising efforts, scale back growth plans, and potentially reduce overall operations.
Giving What We Can is funded through a combination of direct donations from members and other individuals, as well as grants from philanthropic foundations. So far our largest funder has been Open Philanthropy. In 2022, we received funding from the Future Fund. We don’t take any fees from donors who use our platform or from organisations we choose to recommend. See our transparency page here.
Eduarda Nedeff
3 months ago
I'm excited about the way Giving What We Can is working to make effective giving a new cultural norm so we can build a movement that will change the world!
Sasha Cooper
3 months ago
My partner and I made notes on all of the projects in the EACC initiative, and thought this was one a good one some really strong competition. It wasn't top tier for either of us (mainly because GWWC is so big our leverage is tiny relative to other projects on here), but we wanted to give a token of support - there were so many projects we would have liked to support on here that I hope you take this as a strong emotional positive support, even if it might not help much materially. I gave more specific thoughts in a comment below :)
<3
Sasha Cooper
3 months ago
I'm still going through the list, so can't allocate yet, though I hope to give some - and I wanted to observe that
a) I suspect you're being penalised slightly for requesting general funding (about which it's hard not to be scope sensitive) rather than project-specific funding, and
b) that I think if so this is basically unreasonable. Rethink's requesting funding specific projects says to me 'we basically think these are the least important things we'd spend money on, otherwise we'd spend it on them out of our primary budget (not relevant to the Rethink subsidiary project, which I assume doesn't get financial support from above). GWWC's request says to me 'whatever we think the optimal marginal value of your dollar is, we'll spend it on that'.
(if anyone from Rethink reads this, I'd be interested to hear if you think that's unfair)
Lucie Philippon
3 months ago
Signing the pledge was a transformative moment in my life, and I hope more people can get this experience too :)
I have a suspicion that the pledge is growing primarily because of increased EA membership. Does a part of the impact assessment address this concern? If increased number of EA is the main driving force, it would probably make it less likely that additional funding translates to additional pledges.
Nina Friedrich
3 months ago
Personally, I find it helpful to track my donations and it makes discussing effective giving with others much easier for me. Professionally, I'm thrilled about the Pledge Partnership between High Impact Professionals and GWWC!
Anton Makiievskyi
4 months ago
They helped me stay on track with my donations, and processed crypto donations which was personally very useful
Austin Chen
4 months ago
The GWWC pledge was one of my first touchpoints with the EA community, so I was very pleased to see them join EA Community Choice! Taking the pledge is almost synonymous with the original conception of EA and earning-to-give, and I really like their basic product of "have a public website listing everyone who pledged"; simple and transparent.
For an org started in 2009 - an eternity ago in EA-land - they're a surprisingly live player! This is kinda vibesy, but while some other EA orgs feel pretty predictable & set in their ways, I like that GWWC is out there trying things. Recently, I appreciated their work around the EA Forum giving campaign, as well as the rebranding to the 10% pledge. Making earning-to-give cool again is an important and nontrivial task; I wish them the best~
(also, would love to do a joint Manifund/GWWC thing at some point!)
Neel Nanda
4 months ago
I think GWWC is doing good work, and I value there being an org carrying the torch of effective giving (not more as I think they're far too large an org to get much value from EACC, and it's best spent on smaller orgs)