Webinar: How to start an effective giving group at your company (1 Sep, online)

The Tien Procent Club (an effective giving org in the Netherlands, and one of our partners at EA Netherlands) is hosting a free webinar with the School for Moral Ambition on Tuesday 1 September, 17:00–18:00 CET. It’s about starting an effective giving group at your workplace, and it covers what effective giving means in a corporate context, three levers any employee can pull regardless of seniority or budget, and a first step you can take within 30 days. It’s online, in English, and they’re actively hoping for participants from outside the Netherlands — the model works anywhere. Register here.

Why I think this might be worth an hour of your time

I think workplace giving groups are one of the more underrated opportunities in effective giving right now.

More than 26 million people work for companies with donation matching programmes, including two-thirds of the Fortune 500, and billions in matching funds reportedly go unclaimed every year. If you redirect a colleague’s donation towards an effective charity and it gets matched 1:1, you’ve roughly doubled it before anyone gives anything extra.

There’s also proof of concept. Earlier this year, an EA group at a large corporation wrote up how they raised over $850k for effective charities in three years.

These groups are reaching new audiences. Many attendees at that group’s talks were in the global top 1% by income and had never encountered EA ideas before. That’s a different audience from the one our usual channels find, and they’re meeting the ideas through a trusted colleague rather than a stranger.

What you’re letting yourself in for

The Tien Procent Club is looking into making this their focus — they’re rebranding as De Geefrevolutie (“the giving revolution”) and, if this pilot works, will concentrate on helping people start these groups, including a toolkit based on cases like the one above.

Worth knowing: they’re deliberately doing movement building in a way that differs a bit from the standard EA playbook. It’s more corporate and, frankly, more normy — less philosophy, more practical framing pitched at colleagues who’ve never heard of expected value and don’t need to. I think this is a sensible bet, and it seems to be what worked in the $850k case, but if you’re expecting an EA intro fellowship in webinar form, this isn’t that.

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