Effektiv Spenden—Fundraising and 2021 Plans

This post has two aims:

  • To raise money for Effektiv Spenden through the EA community.

  • To provide some updates as to the successes and 2021 plans of Effektiv Spenden, both to motivate the case for donating but also to update the community on the organization.

About Effektiv Spenden

effektiv-spenden.org (ES) (which roughly translates to effective giving in German) is a dedicated donation regranting platform for Germany that was founded in close coordination with the Effective Altruism Foundation (EAF) in early 2019. The main goal of ES is to expand the appeal of donations to effective charities beyond the EA community to the general public by offering a curated set of effective charities for a selected subset of broadly appealing cause areas, namely, global health and development, climate change, and animal welfare.

You can find a more thorough description in our previous forum post.

Fundraising

The Ask

Effektiv Spenden is currently fundraising for 2021 and has a funding gap of €130,000. Thanks to generous donors, we are able to match donations up to €50,000 for a total of €100,000, but we are quite far from our goal and could very much use the support of the effective altruism community. We believe our recent successes, outlined below, make a strong case for EAs to have leveraged impact with their donation to Effektiv Spenden over other object-level donation choices.

To donate, please go here: Donate to Effektiv Spenden (Swiss donors can do so through the EA-Foundation).

People who want to donate outside of Germany should contact us so that we can figure out a way to do so in a tax deductible way.

The (Short) Case

With a total budget of €140,000 for 2021, we expect to raise between 2.5 and 4 Million Euros for EA charities. Although the counterfactual calculation would be quite complicated, this would have a maximal multiplier of 17.8x − 28.5x in terms of Donations/​OpEx.

Since our founding in April 2019, we have been able to raise more than 1 Million Euros for Top EA organizations and we have seen a steady increase in this amount over time (see chart). In fact, in October 2020 we raised €40,000 from recurring donations alone. This makes our multiplier to date 6.7 (including startup costs).

Monthly recurring donations

Not only do we expect the trend of increasing monthly donations to continue, but we will be taking over the donation processing and website of the former Effective Altruism Foundation, which should generate another €1 Million in annual donations, given historical data. We discuss this acquisition and other plans for 2021 in the following section.

2021 Objectives

This section outlines the upcoming objectives for Effektiv Spenden for 2021. It is not meant to be comprehensive, but an overview of the most important projects currently planned.

Running of Effektiveraltruismus.de and the corresponding donations

As mentioned above, Effektiv Spenden is in the process of both taking over operations of the website effektiveraltruismus.de and taking on the donation processing previously administered by the Effective Altruism Foundation, which should generate €1 Million in annual donations. In addition to pure donations, the site is also a great marketing tool for Effective Altruism and community building in the German speaking countries more broadly and already has for example > 4,000 subscribers on its mailing list.

Relaunch of effektiv-spenden.org website

We have been graciously offered pro bono support to update our brand identity and asset design from a marketing agency to give our organization a modern look and feel and to set it apart from more old school German charities.

Founding of an Effektiv Spenden Charitable Organization in Switzerland

On the heels of the success we’ve already seen in Germany, we believe there is a strong case for founding a similar charitable organization in Switzerland. This will allow Swiss donors to get tax write offs on their donations just as Germans are currently able to do.

Increased Marketing Efforts

Up until now, we haven’t put a significant focus on marketing Effektiv Spenden, so we expect there to be some significant gains to be had by doing some basics:

  • Expanding our Newsletter

  • More utilization of Social-Media channels

  • Content Marketing

  • Working with media in Germany

We also plan to hold more events to raise awareness of effective giving. An example of this is the upcoming Effective Giving Day on November 30th which we are co-hosting with other EA organizations.

Keeping the Lights On

The day to day operations of running Effektiv Spenden will also take effort, especially as the number of donations increases over time. To make Effektiv Spenden truly scalable we will have to invest in expanding our giving infrastructure.

Final Call

We hope you’ll consider donating to Effektiv Spenden.

It goes without saying that I’d like to be as transparent as possible about my plans. If you have any questions, suggestions, or critiques I am happy to receive them here on the post or through email.