Seeking founders for new effective giving initiatives

Giving What We Can is looking to help founding teams organise to grow effective giving around the world and wants to hear from people excited about helping new effective giving initiatives get off the ground. These are likely to be initiatives in new geographies, like Effektiv Spenden, but we are also open to hearing about ideas for projects seeking to promote effective giving to specific interest groups, like High Impact Athletes. At this point we will prioritise supporting projects which will fundraise for GWWC’s existing recommendations over helping with geographically specific research and making geographically specific recommendations, although we are interested in this as well.

Send us your expression of interest

Why?

Effective giving is an incredibly efficient way for us to convert resources into impact and moreover, there are many positive indirect effects from promoting effective giving; such as advocating for effective altruism and promoting positive values globally. However, there are significant regional gaps in the current effective giving ecosystem. As a result, donors from unrepresented regions or communities may be unable to make (tax-deductible) donations to effective charities and more importantly may not even come to hear about effective giving, as the ideas are not available in their language or cultural/community/social context. We think that this represents a huge missed opportunity — and one that we hope to help rectify.

What?

These new effective giving initiatives will likely be fundraising organisations which host funds and make grants to effective charities and other high-impact funding opportunities. These fundraising organisations will need to be able to accept donations (ideally tax-deductible) in their legal jurisdiction and be able to make grants to charitable programs.

Who?

We are initially interested in bringing together a working group that would set the strategy, secure funding, take the initial steps, and hire the executive director (who could be one of the original founding team). The types of roles that could be useful at this stage will be very varied and include e.g. volunteers, board members, an executive director and other team members, particularly those with expertise in the following areas:

Legal
Governance
Website design
Philanthropic advising
Marketing and communications
Accounting and finance
Community fundraising
Events
IT and information security

Support from Giving What We Can?

Giving What We Can can provide support to new initiatives in the following ways:

General advice and support
Sharing best practice and lessons learnt
An MVP starter-guide for new effective giving organisations
Access to shared resources and content within the effective giving community
Introductions to the broader effective giving network (potentially helping form mentorship relationships)
Assistance in accessing legal advice when needed
Help in finding funding for the project, and potentially spending some of Giving What We Can’s own budget on initial costs
In some cases, the use of the GWWC brand and donation platform

The level of support will depend on the specific project, its potential for impact, and the strength of the founding team.

Giving What We Can has previously provided support in various ways to different effective giving organisations, here are just a few illustrative examples:

Don Efficace: We provided some funding, governance and legal support, access to our donation platform, and mentorship for the founding team.
Ayuda Efectiva: We provided a brand partnership and Ayuda Efectiva acts as the community for our members in Spain with their Executive Director being an Ambassador for Giving What We Can.
Giving Green: We host a partner page, their funds, and recommendations on our donation platform.