You Should Donate To EA Fundraisers or Community-Builders rather than GiveWell’s Top Charities
Otherwise known as: Effective givers should bankroll more effective giving infrastructure
Do you donate a significant amount to GiveWell’s Top Charities, perhaps because you have pledged money and you want to end preventable childhood death? Would you like more money to go to GiveWell’s Top Charities? You should instead consider donating to:
A professional effective giving fundraising organisation, that employs staff to fundraise on behalf of GiveWell’s Top Charities. There are a load of them around with 3x or greater multipliers and real funding gaps. I’d actually like to see someone do a proper public analysis of this space to work out where the reasonable multipliers and consistent funding gaps are.
Your local EA community-builder or local EA group’s operations costs, or other small EA thing happening in your local area. Tell them you would like effective giving towards GiveWell’s Top Charities to be a more visible and valued part of the EA movement and that is the purpose of your donation. There are many EA community-builders who are able to use extra money to expand the EA movement in such a way as GiveWell’s Top Charities get extra money at at least a 1x multiplier. They are very probably not as good as an organisation entirely dedicated to doing that. But you do also get the personal benefit of having a more well-funded local EA group that is less vulnerable to changes in the allocation criteria of central EA community-building money, and anything else the community-builder does as a result of being better funded.
You don’t have to entirely switch. You can still give money directly to GiveWell’s Top Charities. But there are ways you can do a bit more with your money while still supporting exactly the causes you care most about.
If you disagree, I am curious about your thoughts about who should be paying for effective giving infrastructure and what its purpose should be. I have made this post after having seen various large and small effective giving organisations and community-builders be denied infrastructure funding that would stabilise support and expand their operations. There’s just not enough infrastructure funding to go round to meet every reasonably good effective giving infrastructure funding ask, and the most impactful ones with the highest multipliers or best early-stage potential are prioritised by grantmakers (fair enough).
Which leaves a massive gap of things that are stably and verifiably ‘better’ than GiveWell’s Top Charities through the simple fact that they verifiably move extra money to GiveWell’s Top Charities, plus a bunch of people who care about effective global health and development and direct their donations to GiveWell’s Top Charities.
Thanks for writing this!
At EA Australia (Australia’s effective giving fundraising and community building org), our recent impact evaluation found that in 2025 for every $1 spent on operations, we counterfactually moved $9 to effective charities ($5 was a conservative estimate).
You can read more about this in our blog post, which links the google sheet calculations and detailed reasoning for our model. It’s been based on GWWC’s impact evaluation toolkit.
At the moment, my belief is that we are quite constrained by funding, and would be growing much faster with more resourcing over the next few years. Happy to talk with larger potential donors on this if anyone is interested and will be publishing a summary of our 2026 strategy on our website soon.
One of the reasons to have community members contribute to funding our operations, is the stability that having many smaller donors over few major funders. This makes us much less vulnerable to a major donor shifting direction in future.
We would love to be able to support more of our operations and growth from smaller donors and a variety of sources, and additional funding now would be spent on increasing our staff capacity (currently 4.5 FTE across effective giving and community building) to enable further growth!
In case I’ve convinced anyone, our donate form is here.
Great to hear about the work you do!
I’m a big effective giving fan, but my instinct had previously been that one should expect the multiplier on marginal funding to EG orgs to be about 1. My thinking was that CG gives both direct grants to global health charities and meta grants to EG orgs, and a reasonable model of how they might approach grantmaking is to equalize the cost-effectiveness of the marginal dollar given to each. This post made me think more about that assumption, and looking at CG’s writing on effective giving, they say
GWWC’s transparency page fits with that
So we can’t assume that CG is filling EG organizations’ budgets until their multiplier is about 1. Moreover, if EG orgs’ multipliers are >1, then giving to them has the double impact of both directly raising their budgets and unlocking more funding from CG.
The one thing I’m still having trouble with is why, if EG orgs’ marginal multiplier >1, non-CG large donors haven’t filled the gap. There are a number of donors to GiveWell giving $5m+/yr, and presumably GiveWell’s donor relations team has engaged closely with all of them. If GiveWell was confident they could raise more money total for their top charities if donors gave to EG orgs instead, why haven’t they advised some of their top donors to shift to meta giving? Disagreements about time discounting might play a key role here. GWWC uses a 3.5% annual discount rate for their best-guess impact evaluation that found a 6x multiplier, and a 5% discount rate for their conservative impact evaluation that found a 0.9x multiplier (note that the conservative impact evaluation had more differences than just the change in discount rate). At an even higher discount rate (to e.g. account for concerns about AI), it might be very hard to achieve a >1x multiplier via EG orgs. Other possibilities could be that GiveWell is risk averse, that these kinds of candid conversations aren’t really possible to have in practice, or that it’s just hard to find donors who are willing to give to meta orgs even when asked to.
An alternate way to square this is that maybe EG orgs’ marginal cost-effectiveness just isn’t >1, even accepting a relatively low discount rate. GWWC’s impact evaluation only assessed the average giving multiplier, and the marginal giving multiplier could be at or below 1x due to diminishing returns, even while the average was 6x.
To confirm, CG doesn’t fund EG orgs down to a 1x multiplier. Roughly, CG has a fixed budget of “EG org funding”, and then uses that to fund the ones with the highest multipliers. (see also https://coefficientgiving.org/research/reflecting-on-our-recent-effective-giving-rfp/ for more details).
It’s a solidly great question why the gap hasn’t been filled by other larger GiveWell donors. I think some of it is to do with reputational considerations—it’s seen as a little bit off to pay someone to fundraise for you, if you’re rich.
But I am on a bit of a mission to let the “everyday EA” know that multipliers above x1 are absolutely available as places to put their GiveWell Top Charities money these days.
In case it helps, the best estimate of GWWC’s forward-looking marginal giving multiplier is 10x by CEARCH (exec summary, full report, calcs & sources).
Yep, Giving What We Can is a great place to donate money, and you can do it really easily from GWWC’s website!
I have written this post to reach someone who wants to know, with great certainty, that if they put $1k somewhere that at least $1k extra goes to GiveWell’s Top Charities (very specifically those). The point is to let people who are of the persuasion to donate their money to GiveWell’s Top Charities (lots of those people around) know that such organisations exist and have plenty of funding and scaling gaps.
I haven’t attempted a comparative analysis of multipliers, other than convincing myself that there’s a lot of things currently not funded that are definitely above 3x, even if you apply various downward adjustments. I’d be interested in seeing a comparative analysis, though I imagine it might be tricky to equalise the methodologies.
Very briefly, it’s unclear to me how much of the claimed impact of meta and community building orgs is counterfactual. The incentives created here are quite solidly against any impartial analysis. Also, as I’ve argued before, as an almost deontological point, I’m uncomfortable with people funding their social circle and community and putting what would otherwise be considered spending on dues in community organizations as their 10% giving to effective charity.
That is a great deontological point for why you might wish to avoid paying your local EA community-builder out of pledge money. (I could counter that I think it is deontologically quite inappropriate that EA’s growth strategy currently expects its local community-builders to do a bunch of free work).
And I understand your hesitancy about counterfactuality. I’m not sure I believe organisations with very high multipliers that brand themselves as fundraising from EAs, because of counterfactuality issues (I think EAs are precisely the kinds of people who might have otherwise given effectively anyway).
A professional fundraising organisation such as One for the World will likely never meet you, and is a slightly safer bet on the deontology part. And because they fundraise from outside of the EA community, there’s not so much of a counterfactuality problem.
I should also point out that if you are the type of person who cares about “best”, not just “better”, and you have $10k or more to give each year, then you should sign up to the Expression of Interest form for Meta Charity Funders to receive details of effective giving donation opportunities. https://www.metacharityfunders.com/
Last I was aware, the threshold for this was about $10k donations a year, though I think they are flexible.
Let’s say I (or anyone else) read this post and am convinced, but am below the 10k/year bar to talk to meta charity funders.
Is there a place where I could know where to donate and how much room for funding at which multiplier they expect? I’m happy to put some time on the analysis but don’t even know where to start.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dm2uawLLeLbY8WNKM/updates-on-the-effective-giving-ecosystem-mcf-2025-memo found this summary which has more!
There isn’t a neat document monitoring all this, as far as I know. There’s just a bunch of scattered stuff around the place. If you would like two to compare:
* I know that One for the World always has funding gaps. They run in-person events and coordinate student and young professional volunteers in the fields of business, law, and finance. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Re3D8rt8TaWWDaKSa/oftw-early-results-from-new-growth-strategy—I think that at about $400k org costs and $1.5m money secured in 2025 they’re at a roughly 3.5x multiplier. (They’re implementing a strategy to raise this multiplier). They’re personally a favourite of mine because I am pretty sure their multiplier is an undercount as they genuinely reach people outside of the EA-sphere with their effective giving asks.
* Effective Altruism Australia has a comment on this post saying they have funding gaps and a 9x multiplier. They’re run by someone who used to do marketing at Giving What We Can. See also https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/c2JxgQfb36NhMjkeZ/3-recent-posts-from-effective-altruism-australia-about-our
I certainly believe that both of these organisations are a better place to put your money than GiveWell’s Top Charities, if your aim is to move money to GiveWell’s Top Charities.