For most people, we think there’s a strong case for giving through grantmaker-led philanthropic funds rather than donating to specific organizations.
Examples of public philanthropic funds include:
GiveWell’s All Grants Fund (see July 2025 report)
EA Funds’ Animal Welfare Fund (see June 2025 report)
Longview’s Emerging Challenges Fund (see Q4 2025 Report)
If you are looking to develop a significant philanthropic portfolio, we’d recommend contributing to private funds instead. We list some more popular funds below.
This post is based on Longview’s experience directing over $140M of donations through advising dozens of philanthropists and operating funds in AI safety, digital sentience, nuclear weapons policy, and global catastrophic risks.
Executive Summary
Why give to a fund? By giving to funds, you delegate your decision-making to expert grantmakers, which presents several benefits over donating directly to organizations:
Grantmaker-led funds have several advantages over individuals when selecting grants, thanks to their dedicated focus on grantmaking in a given area, their ability to spend time gathering and analyzing information, tracking all the details, proactively sourcing opportunities through active grantmaking, and acting quickly.
Funds can solve donor coordination problems by pooling resources among contributors to the fund and coordinating with other large donors, reducing the number of actors who need to spend time on coordination to fill fund gaps optimally.
Funds make giving easy for donors by providing an end-to-end giving service, requiring donors to make one decision a year: which fund(s) to contribute to.
Why donate directly to an organization? Direct grants can still make sense if:
Your donor identity (e.g. nationality) adds unusual value to the grantee
You have strong, divergent inside views on funding priorities
You have access to specific opportunities that aren’t on others’ radars
You’re interested in supporting political campaigns for elected office (which non-profit funds legally cannot advise on)
See more below.
What next? Unless you meet these criteria, you may want to choose 1–3 funds aligned with your goals and donate through them. You can pick funds by considering your alignment with their strategy and focus areas, past grants, and donation size (to ensure they can effectively absorb your donations). We list some popular funds below.
1. Grantmaker-led funds have an edge over individuals when picking grants
Key point: It’s easy to make ineffective donations when evaluating organizations quickly, once a year, with limited information.
We see a few reasons that donating to grantmaker-led funds can be massively more effective than donating to individual organizations:
Investing time and expertise in grantmaking. Professional grantmakers have the time and experience to thoroughly evaluate organizations. A single grant investigation may involve reading and deeply reflecting on tens of pages of written materials and speaking with many members of an organization, as well as references who have worked with them. This level of due diligence is difficult for individual donors to replicate. Additionally, dedicated staff who make many grants can more easily assess their track record and improve their decision-making over time. Longview, for example, has 10 full-time grantmakers.
Keeping track of the details. Effective grantmaking requires not only good takes on the field, but also a lot of legwork, sustained attention to detail, and coordination across many moving parts. Many individual donors do not have up‑to‑date answers to basic but crucial questions: cash on hand, burn rate, who else is likely to fund and on what timeline, what references say, and the details of an organization’s budget. Grantmaking organizations do this work full-time and keep these details up to date.
Proactive sourcing, Requests For Proposals (RFPs), and seeding new projects. Funds can attract new talent and shape fields by running open rounds backed by pre-capitalized funds. For example, our Hardware‑Enabled Mechanisms RFP supports early engineering work on chip design, geolocation, access controls, and auditing for AI verification and governance. Similarly, funds can identify gaps in the field, scope new projects, headhunt for leaders to run them, and support these organizations getting off the ground. This helps catalyze new work and bring new people into the field in a way that ad hoc giving rarely achieves.
Acting during short windows. Urgent requests often determine whether a critical hire is secured or whether civil society groups can contribute to a live policy process. Funds with discretionary capital can evaluate projects, move within days, and report back later. Individual donors might never become aware of these urgent funding needs if they do not have deep, pre-existing networks within their areas of donation.
2. Funds can solve donor coordination
Key point: Donating to funds that prioritize organizations that aren’t on track to be fully funded is a lot more impactful than displacing major donors’ funding.
Coordination between donors is a difficult and important problem in grantmaking that funds can help resolve.
One problem is “funging” other donors. If a donor doesn’t know who else is considering funding an organization, they might make a donation that displaces another donor’s funds, causing the other donor to contribute less and resulting in no net improvement in the grantee’s funding situation. Funds can help track other potential donors to avoid funging risk.
Another problem is the “waiting game.” If many donors would like to see a grantee funded, but they don’t want to funge each other, they’ll often wait around to see who’s going to fund it first. This leaves the organization in a state of financial uncertainty, despite a widespread belief that its work is worth funding. Pooled funds can split a gap across many contributors and fill it on time, rather than leaving each donor to guess whether someone else will step in.
3. Funds make giving easy
Key point: Instead of making lots of decisions on various organizations each year, make one decision—which funds to support.
Funds provide an end-to-end service. They investigate organizations, track the evolving ecosystem, update continuously as circumstances change, periodically check in on grantees’ fundraising, find founders for new projects, run active grantmaking processes, and maintain teams to handle legal, compliance, and due diligence work.
Individual donors rarely have the time to make optimal decisions on their own. Instead, individual donors can investigate a small number of funds by reviewing past disbursement reports and, when making large gifts, meeting fund managers and speaking with peer philanthropists. Then, they can make one decision per year, and let fund managers do the legwork. Donors can periodically re-evaluate with new reports in hand and enjoy a streamlined donor experience.
4. Why might this be wrong? When might direct giving be better?
We think direct grants can be the right tool if one or more of the following hold:
When your donor profile adds unusual value. For example, some EU policy organizations prefer European donors; some right-leaning US policy efforts look for right-of-center donors.
You have strong, divergent inside views. If your strategy or priorities differ from existing funds, direct grants may better reflect your views.
You want to support political campaigns, PACs, and super PACs. Non-profits cannot make or advise on such donations. We’re not aware of any currently existing funds that will fully handle these questions for you. (We can and often do make or advise on grants to 501(c)(4) policy advocacy organizations.)
You see opportunities others will likely miss. If you have specific domain expertise or relationships and can spot a neglected project—for instance, a person you know could pilot a promising idea with $30K—direct grants can fund opportunities that grantmakers miss.
Unless these considerations apply, we expect grants made through a strong discretionary fund to be materially more impactful on average than ad hoc direct grants (with the specifics depending on which funds you’d choose and which grants you’d otherwise make).
5. Next Steps
Unless you meet the above criteria, you may want to choose 1–3 funds aligned with your goals and donate through them. You can pick funds by considering your alignment with their strategy and focus areas, past grants, and size (to ensure they can effectively absorb your donations).
These are some popular funds you can consider:
Global Catastrophic Risks:
[general] Longview’s Emerging Challenges Fund
[general] EA Funds’ Long-Term Future Fund
[bio] Sentinel Bio
[nuclear] Longview’s Nuclear Weapons Policy Fund
[AI, private] Frontier AI Fund
[AI, private] AI Safety Tactical Opportunities Fund by JueYan Zhang
[AI, public] Manifund’s AI Safety Regranting
Global Health: GiveWell
Animal Welfare: EA Animal Welfare Fund
Longview’s Digital Sentience Fund (private)
A few other funds you could consider:
FarmKind (public)
Air Quality Fund (public)
Global Health and Development Fund (public)
EA Infrastructure Fund (public)
Ultra Philanthropy (major donors, global health)
Lead Exposure Action Fund (major donors, global health)
Bloom Wellbeing Fund (major donors, global well-being)
Cooperative AI Foundation (major donors)
Renaissance Philanthropy funds (including AI for education and math, scientific R&D, high-skill immigration, and more).
We have not investigated the vast majority of these funds: including them in this list is not an endorsement. Feel free to list more funds in the comments!
How Longview can help:
We operate a public fund: the Emerging Challenges Fund. It is focused on global catastrophic risks from emerging technology such as AI. We recently released our 2025 ECF Annual Report, which you can read if you’re interested in donating to global catastrophic risk reduction.
We also operate private funds and advise major donors. If you are a philanthropist looking to donate over ~$100K per year to AI safety or nuclear security, get in touch! We are happy to provide access to our private funds (in AI, digital sentience, and nuclear weapons policy) and give you personalized advice based on your situation. Please email advising@longview.org.
Note: As a non-profit, we cannot advise on donations to political campaigns, PACs, or super PACs. The advice in this post does not account for such donations. (We can and often do make or advise on grants to 501(c)(4) policy advocacy organizations.)
Thanks for posting this! I’m a fundraiser, and I work with both funds and individual donors. From a charity perspective, I’ve noticed a few potential advantages of direct donations that might be worth considering alongside the points you raised:
Direct gifts help diversify funding and build organizational resilience. When most funding comes through a few large funds, charities can become more reliant on those sources, which may increase financial instability if priorities shift.
Direct gifts sometimes unlock matching funds or time-sensitive opportunities, which can amplify their leverage.
Donations made directly to charities can often be deployed more quickly and help sustain longer-term donor relationships, while funds might distribute on fixed schedules.
Some of the efficiency gained through coordination might be offset by the extra layer of infrastructure and decision-making.
That said, I think many of the arguments for funds carry weight. I’d love to hear examples where coordination through funds clearly improved outcomes to help me calibrate my own bias toward charity-side concerns.
And this may be particularly true if the funds significantly rely on each other—e.g., GWWC Global Health and Wellbeing Fund and EA Funds Global Health and Development Fund seem very heavily dependent on GiveWell’s work.
If you’re an AI safety donor, the value of different donation opportunities can depend a lot on your worldview; every grantmaker (except Survival and Flourishing Fund, which doesn’t take donations from small donors AFAIK) has a worldview in a particular cluster*; many individuals don’t share that worldview; and if you don’t share that worldview, most of the grants that big grantmakers make don’t look ideal.
At one point the same was true in animal welfare where grantmakers didn’t make grants to “weird” stuff like wild animal welfare or shrimp welfare, but that’s becoming less true lately because grantmakers have been branching out more (which IMO is a positive development).
*my best attempt at concisely summarizing it is on the spectrum from Eliezer Yudkowsky to Paul Christiano, all the grantmakers (except for SFF) are much more on the Christiano side.
For what it’s worth, I found this post kind of jarring/off-putting, and I’m not sure whether I should up- or downvote it, even though I agree with many of the points you’ve raised.
I think what’s making it feel off to me is that the framing suggests you’re giving an impartial take on the general question of “should you donate through funds?”, but the overall vibe I get is more like “we want to do some promo for Longview, and we’re using this broader question as a starting point to do that.”
It’s hard to point to any individual main cause of this impression, it’s mostly my gestalt impression of the piece and its emphasis on Longview’s funds and grantmakers and advantages, etc.
(People might think I’m guilty of similar things in posts I’ve written — which I would feel bad about if so, sorry — and I don’t think it’s a huge sin or anything, just wanted to flag that this is the reaction I had.)
Some of the rationales here seem stronger for mid-size+ donors than for small ones. For example, the “waiting game” (a/k/a donor chicken) doesn’t strike me as a major concern with small donors.
On the other hand, if you dig into more specific smaller-donor profiles, I think you’re more likely to see opportunities for added value from direct donation. One important thread is that several of these theories of impact may require the donor to spend a fair amount of time.
Three-figure donors: A large part of a three-figure donor’s value may lie in their ability to influence others—and that may be easier to do if they can talk with particularity about their chosen organization’s work rather than at a level of abstraction. I also suspect that donors may find it easier to stay motivated if their donation has some degree of particularity, and promoting future expected motivation may be disproportionately important here (e.g., if one is a university student who expects to earn much more later).
Low to medium four-figure donors in the US: Donors at this level are not likely to be itemizing their taxes in the US, which makes them potentially well-suited to give to things that don’t qualify for tax writeoffs. Funds—which are usually nonprofits—can give (e.g.) nanogrants to small animal-rights organizations in developing countries, but they are going to incur significant operational overhead relative to grant size for due diligence / compliance issues.
High four / low five-figure donors: These donors are large enough to be systematically important to smaller organizations. They may be in a position to deeply engage with their intended smaller organization in a way that may be inefficient for a professional grantmaker.
Mid-size or below donors outside the US: Tax reasons may strongly favor direct giving, depending on the availability of funds that can offer deductions in the relevant country. For instance, given that most money in GiveWell All Grants ends up with top charities, and AMF is a top charity, I am skeptical that the marginal extra dollar for All Grants (without a tax advantage) overperforms AMF (which is tax-deductible in a lot of places). That’s especially true if you think GiveWell will adjust its own funding to some extent for the direct donations each top charity receives.
Does anybody know if there is a fund for effective giving organizations? Something like meta charity funders but for smaller donors? I‘m interested in funding effective giving organizations but it‘s difficult to know which ones are currently most promising and most in need of funds.