Overview

The mission of the Effective Giving & Careers fund at Coefficient Giving is to support people to have a greater positive impact through their donations and careers.

We launched the program in 2022. Since then, we’ve made over 60 grants totaling >$30m across four main areas:

Effective Giving: Raising funds for highly cost-effective global health and development programs
Talent: Helping people transition into impactful careers
Incubation: Launching new high-impact nonprofits
Research: Improving how we evaluate impact in giving and careers

Our early results have been encouraging. In the effective giving area alone, organizations we support have collectively moved hundreds of millions of dollars to cost-effective charities.

Over the past year, we’ve updated toward a broader view of impact. In addition to direct ROI, we’ve seen how this ecosystem can contribute to larger wins by influencing major funders, strengthening policy relationships, incubating organizations that later secure large-scale funding, and building a talent pipeline for high-impact work.

These wins have made us more ambitious about what this program could become.

2025 highlights

We grew our Effective Giving portfolio by running our first Request for Proposals (RFP) for Effective Giving organizations. Following that process, we funded 10 organizations. Based on 2025 reported data, these 10 grantees collectively moved ~$14m. After incorporating quality and counterfactuality adjustments, we obtained a weighted average ROI of ~5x for the portfolio. Most grantees are meeting or exceeding both our bar and original forecasts. Overall, the RFP appears to have been a success: it surfaced high-performing opportunities, maintained portfolio-level ROI well above our bar, and helped us determine which grants warranted renewable support. We expect to repeat and refine this model.

More generally, our full effective giving portfolio is strong, having moved ~$300m in 2025, at an average weighted ROI of ~5–6x.

On the incubation side, our main incubation grantee, Ambitious Impact, launched eight new global health and development charities in 2025. Additionally, several of their relatively early stage organizations (2–3 years old) have already gone on to receive funding from leading evaluators, a promising signal for the quality of the pipeline.

On the careers side, our talent grantees had a strong year. Collectively, they exceeded expectations across key metrics, including career changes, career plan changes, and even 10% pledge acquisition. We also meaningfully expanded our work in two new talent niches:

Policy: We made our first grants targeting policy-focused talent, which supported policy students at top US universities (through the NEED network), professionals seeking EU government placements (through Impactful Policy Careers), coordination for public consultations (led by the Global Policy Research Group), and flexible funding for policy entrepreneurs already close to levers of influence (through Renaissance Philanthropy’s PEN network).
Research: We began supporting research-focused students at the undergraduate and graduate level, funding programs that help them identify high-impact thesis topics, access mentorship from leading researchers, and build career capital toward applied research roles in our priority areas. The two programs we’re currently supporting in this space are Effective Thesis, and The Fulcrum Project (a fellowship led by Paul Niehaus and Heidi Williams for impact-driven economics PhD students).

Our strategy for 2026

Due to top-ups and rollover funds, we have nearly 3x as much funding available in 2026 as in prior years. We also have more capacity, because Kearney Capuano joined the team earlier this year! This creates a meaningful opportunity — and responsibility — to scale what’s working and experiment more deliberately.

At a high level, we plan to scale the program in the following ways:

1. Scale up existing high-performing grantees

Many of the organizations we fund are lean. Some are moving large amounts of money or helping to place significant talent with very small teams.

We’re excited to:

Provide multi-year support to top-performing organizations and expand successful programs
Provide top-up grants to existing grantees to experiment with approaches they don’t want to use their current operating expenses for

We think that even our most mature grantees haven’t hit a ceiling. While marginal returns on additional dollars may be lower than in early stages, the absolute gains from investing more in these proven models remain large, and we believe these organizations can continue performing well above our ROI bar even as they scale.

2. Run 2–4 focused RFPs

In 2025, we ran our first Effective Giving RFP. We received ~40 applications and ultimately recommended 11 grants. It helped us:

Attract co-funding from other donors
Map the landscape more systematically
Compare opportunities side by side
Surface new organizations we wouldn’t otherwise have seen

As mentioned above, the initial update suggests promising results.

In 2026, we expect to run 2–4 targeted RFPs, including RFPs focused on:

Effective careers/talent organizations. We are now accepting applications!
Effective giving organizations (tentatively planned for April–May)

3. Seed new efforts

To date, much of our grantmaking has supported existing opportunities. However, we think there are significant opportunities for new organizations to fill gaps in the ecosystem. Some examples of ideas we’re excited to explore:

Effective Giving

New country-level organizations in promising markets (e.g. higher-income Asian countries)
Professionalized marketing support for effective giving organizations
Growth and donor advisory capacity, especially for high-net-worth donors
More ambitious partnerships with mainstream philanthropy
Targeted outreach to high-influence audiences (e.g. celebrities, public figures)
Engaging corporate social responsibility arms of companies currently directing funds to less effective charities
Partnering with donor-advised fund (DAF) platforms to nudge donors toward cost-effective giving at the point of allocation
Workplace giving campaigns and payroll giving integrations to reach donors earlier in their giving journey

Effective Careers

High-impact career accelerator/entrepreneurship programs
Career coaching programs for experienced/senior professionals
Volunteer or internship placement programs at a network of impactful orgs
Country or demographic specific focused talent efforts, especially in certain LMICs where many impactful charities (could) operate
Career counseling partnerships with universities
Programs targeting policy students, or people aspiring to work or already working in government
A talent discovery program using prizes/grants to surface and empower high-potential individuals
Headhunting/talent matching services
Action-oriented networks for professionals in high-leverage positions
Media pushes to promote effective careers

4. Support the ecosystem in additional ways

We see an important role for ourselves beyond individual grants, acting as a coordinator and capacity builder for the broader ecosystem. Some things we’ve started and want to expand:

Effective Giving Ecosystem

Expanding the number of events we support to strengthen connections across the field
Commissioning research to improve counterfactuality estimates across the ecosystem
Funding shared tools (e.g. impact calculators, donor tracking infrastructure) that multiple organizations can use

Effective Careers Ecosystem

Building out our shared Slack space as a hub for coordination and peer learning
Funding a flagship event to bring the ecosystem together and support information sharing
Supporting organizations to strengthen their M&E practices
Embedded support for smaller or newer orgs that lack operational infrastructure

We also want to recommend more grants to organizations providing shared services across the ecosystem. Our main grant in this category is to Good Impressions, which provides growth and marketing support to a range of aligned organizations. We see real demand for more of this kind of external support and plan to fund additional providers.

Why fund a service provider rather than giving more money directly to organizations and letting them purchase services themselves? In an ideal world, organizations would identify and pay for the external support they need. In practice, some organizations may not recognize the value of certain services until they’ve experienced them. Furthermore, even when organizations are open to it, the uncertainty of whether a service will pay off can make them reluctant to spend scarce operational funds on it, especially for very lean orgs. Providing pro bono support upfront can overcome both barriers, and might lead organizations to invest in these services independently once they’ve seen the results. An added benefit of funding providers like Good Impressions directly is that they support a broader range of aligned organizations beyond our direct grantees, extending the reach of our support.

We do not expect to pursue all of these. But with more funding and capacity, we want to deliberately test the most promising of these ideas rather than remain overly conservative.

A note on incubation and research

Beyond the four areas above, we want to briefly address where incubation and research fit into our 2026 plans.

On incubation, we remain enthusiastic supporters of this space and currently fund two incubation-focused efforts, the largest of which is Ambitious Impact. That said, we don’t plan to run dedicated RFPs here. The landscape of credible incubation organizations is considerably smaller than in other areas, and we think the bar for building a successful incubator is high enough that broad open calls are unlikely to surface strong new opportunities. We are, however, actively exploring ideas at the frontier, including the possibility of launching an incubator focused on specific geographies of interest, such as India.

On research, we expect to fund it primarily where it directly supports our other work — for example, research that strengthens the M&E practices of our grantees across both effective giving and careers. We have deliberately deprioritized a broader strategic focus on cause prioritization research so far. Our reasoning is that the theory of change for research of this kind is harder to evaluate, the bar for quality is very high, and we need to be selective given capacity constraints. This is not a permanent position; we are open to revisiting it in the medium to long term.

Key uncertainties

As we scale, there are some important questions we’re still working through:

How much should we value different types of career shifts?
How much further can effective giving in different target demographics scale before facing steep diminishing returns?
Are we appropriately balancing the shorter feedback loops of scaling donation flows against the longer-term, harder-to-measure impacts of shaping careers, or are we being drawn too much toward what’s easier to evaluate?
Are we underinvesting in media and narrative compared to their importance?
How much should we shape this ecosystem versus respond to it?
If we had 3x the funding long-term, where would we hit real bottlenecks: talent, absorptive capacity, founder supply, or something else?

We don’t have final answers to these yet. We expect 2026 to involve deliberate exploration alongside continued support of high-performing organizations.

What success could look like in 3–5 years

Looking ahead, we think this ecosystem has the potential to grow substantially in both scale and sophistication. With increased resources and a more coordinated field, we believe the next 3–5 years could mark a real inflection point, in terms of how much funding flows to cost-effective causes, how many people find their way into high-impact careers, and how mainstream effective giving becomes. Here’s what an exciting version of that future could look like:

Multiple effective giving organizations each moving >$10m/year at strong (>5x) ROI, with the portfolio collectively directing >$500m/year to cost-effective causes
A wave of major donors and mainstream foundations moving beyond ad hoc engagement with cost-effectiveness, toward it becoming a routine part of how they evaluate and make giving decisions
Stronger career support ecosystems reaching tens of thousands of people annually, including through research mentorship, policy pipelines, and professional networks
- ~1000+ career changes annually across the portfolio, plus thousands more people taking meaningful actions toward high-impact careers through our supported programs each year
- Alumni of careers programs holding positions in development agencies, government ministries, and multilateral institutions across multiple countries
30+ new high-impact nonprofits seeded through incubation, with a growing share receiving funding from leading independent evaluators within their first few years
A more durable, intellectually vibrant community engaged across a range of high-priority cause areas

We don’t expect to achieve all of these. But with increased resources, we believe we can meaningfully increase the program’s ambition.

We want your feedback

We’re publishing this update because we’d like outside input. We’re especially interested in:

Gaps we may be missing: Are there important opportunities, organizations, or communities we’re overlooking?
Views on where additional funding would (or wouldn’t) have outsized impact: Which of the ideas we’ve outlined seem most or least promising to you?
Feedback on our overall strategic direction: Does our approach make sense given the landscape, or are there higher-level shifts you think we should consider?
Which specific ideas or initiatives to prioritize:With more funding available, we face real choices about where to focus; we’d welcome views on what deserves more attention.
Risks or downsides we may be underweighting:Are there ways our plans could backfire?

You can comment publicly or fill out this form. Please note that this is not a call for proposals. If you’d like to flag a specific organization (including one you’re involved with), you’re welcome to mention it briefly in the form, but we won’t be using responses to assess funding applications. If you’re interested in applying for funding, the best route is through one of our upcoming RFPs, which will be posted on our fund page and announced in our newsletter.

We read all comments and feedback carefully and will take them into account as we refine our strategy. However, given the volume of responses we expect, we may not be able to reply to most comments directly. Even if we don’t respond, please know that your input has been heard.

Going Bigger: How We’re Scaling Effective Giving & Careers in 2026