A List of EA Donation Pledges (GWWC, etc)

I was researching on EA pledging strategy and had a lot of difficulty finding less popular EA pledges. Often, I chanced upon them in EA Global talks, and Google searches weren’t very helpful for discovering new ones. I intend for this post to act as a comprehensive list of EA pledges (especially less popular ones). I hope to keep this post updated with time.

Target Engagement Level

Target Income Group

Name of Pledge

Pledge Amount

Notes

LowAll?OFTW1%
Low-MediumAll?GWWC’s Try Giving1%+Pledge for a user-set time period
Medium-HighAll?GWWC10%
TLYCSDifferentiated (average ~5%)
Medium-HighHighREG2%For poker players
Founder’s Pledge2%For startup founders
Generation Pledge10%+For inheritors
Very highAll?GWWC Further PledgeEverything above a certain income

A very notable non-EA pledge is the Giving Pledge. It is probably the most popular pledge among billionaires and requires pledging atleast 50% of one’s wealth.

Miscellaneous

Isn’t the GWWC Pledge too simplistic to fit everyone’s specific situation?

Making the Pledge better in some ways makes it worse in others. A plan that accounted for every possible consideration in a person’s life would be more equitable, but would also end up reading like a tax code. We believe that the ability to succinctly explain the Pledge to others has great value, and that adding all conceivable loopholes and caveats would diminish that value. In the end we trust members to abide by the spirit of the Pledge, which is using a significant portion of one’s income to benefit others.

Source.

There is good reason to focus on very rich people (say the top 0.1%) of the world’s population. This is because donations follow a fat-tailed distribution. For example, the 2019 EA Survey says that 1.3% of donors accounted for 57% of donations. New “effective giving” pledges targetting niche segments of millionaires/​billionaires would probably be very high-impact and generate millions of dollars.

Further Reading