At Giving What We Can I work to support the global effective giving community and help with the development of new effective giving initiatives.
I also am the Executive Director of Impact Books.
Luke Moore đ¸
Karma: 862
Hey @huw! Thanks for the question. My answer below should be read as guidance from a GWWC team member on how to interpret the 10% Pledge, but not as a formal or final position on what it means to stick to it.
We often hear from high-impact non-profit founders or employees (particularly those connected to AIM) that they are excited about effective giving and would love to take the đ¸10% Pledge, but havenât done this (yet) mainly because they are already taking a lower salary at their organisation, and arenât currently in a position to donate 10% of their remaining income.
In many cases, the above conclusion is based on misunderstandings about the 10% Pledge which are resulting in opportunities for impact being missed by people like yourself not pledging. For example, pledging would allow you to more effectively and authentically advocate for effective giving and the 10% Pledge among your peers. People founding /â working at high-impact non-profits are often in a particularly valuable position to advocate, as their personal stories make them examples for others trying to live up to effective altruism principles and âpractising what they preachâ.
To help clarify some of these misunderstandings, letâs walk through a few options that could be worth considering for people like yourself founding or working at high-impact organisations:
Salary sacrificing: We think salary sacrificing can be perfectly in line with the spirit of the 10% Pledge if the following two conditions are both met:
You think your sacrificed money is best spent on the non-profit you are working for
I.e. you think you have at least as much impact by salary sacrificing as by taking the salary and then donating to any other non-profit (taking into account tax benefits and any other logistical considerations).
Some considerations here:This is a different question than asking whether your organisation is the highest-impact place to work for you.
E.g. most people would agree GiveDirectly is a high-impact organisation and for many employees it may be the highest-impact place to work, but they may still think that their marginal dollar is better spent donated to Malaria Consortium.
If your organisation is not currently as funding constrained as some others, your money may have a larger impact elsewhere (itâs worth thinking about funging in this case).
From a communications/âadvocacy perspective (for instance, âputting your money where your mouth isâ) it may sometimes be higher-impact donating (at least some money) to another organisation than your own (or vice versa).
You would have received the sacrificed money for the job you are currently doing, if you hadnât explicitly decided to sacrifice it, and are able to receive it at any point in the future if you wish.
For example, this condition is met when:
As an employee, you have it listed in your contract or in your organisationâs internal accounts that your salary is X, but then instruct your employer to only pay out 90% of X to you. At any point in the future, you could instruct your employer to start paying you X instead and they would do so.
As a founder, you have the explicit ability to pay yourself X (e.g. your co-founder, board and funders approve of you doing this), but then decide to only pay yourself 90% of X. At any point in the future, you are able to pay yourself X if you wish.
For example, this condition is not met when:
Youâve founded or taken a job at a high-impact non-profit, knowing that you could have instead taken a higher-paying job elsewhere.
Youâre confident you could have negotiated a higher salary with your employer, or paid yourself more as a founder, but havenât formally checked or arranged this in any way.
Donating less now but still taking the 10% Pledge: A common misconception about the 10% Pledge is that it would oblige you to give 10% every year. Instead, it is a lifetime pledge, so itâs fine if you donate a bit less in some years and more in others to make up for that.
We obviously only recommend doing this if youâre confident you can and want to make the 10% lifetime commitment, and where feasible we still generally recommend people to give at least 10% yearly as a useful rule of thumb. This holds you accountable, embeds a pattern of giving in your life and avoids you getting so far behind on your pledge that it becomes daunting or unachievable. But we think there are cases, e.g. for some very early stage non-profit founders and/âor when youâre having a particularly challenging year financially, where it may be worth diverging from this rule of thumb.
Taking a đšTrial Pledge: If youâre not ready to take a 10% Pledge but are excited to start giving effectively, consider taking a đšTrial Pledge (1-10% pledge for 6 months to 5 years), which still allows you to lead by example and additionally can serve as a helpful reminder to reconsider taking the 10% Pledge (or another Trial Pledge) at a later date.
Why I took the 10% Pledge beÂfore earnÂing an income
EarnÂing to Give (EtG) Pledge Club
Interesting view, but I have a different perspective based on my experience in the effective giving and AIM startup space. I havenât observed organisations being pushed toward premature scaling or unnecessary short-term funding growth. In fact, Iâve seen quite different dynamics at play often pushing in the opposite direction. Would be curious to hear specific examples from others where theyâve seen this pattern occur?
One concern Iâve got about this model for funding EA groups is about the incentive structure this creates. While member donations could provide useful feedback, this might lead community builders to optimise for member satisfaction rather than impact. A group running popular social events might receive more donations than one doing the harder work of developing peopleâs capabilities to tackle pressing challenges.
The ultimate measure of an EA groupâs success should be its ability to develop capable individuals who can contribute meaningfully to improving the world. This might require not running popular programs that increase immediate member satisfaction.
FWIW I completely agree that EA uni groups should be able to fund themselves a fair bit like most other uni groups and societies do. Definitely worth having âscholarshipâ options for those who request it, but the default should be that these EA uni groups do whatever is ânormalâ for socialites at their university. I also think that this would go some way to make EA seems less weird.
Thank you for raising this important point about double-counting, Ian! This is something we go to great pains to avoid when evaluating the counterfactual impact of fundraising efforts in the effective giving space. For example, weâre careful not to count donations that would have happened anyway or were primarily inspired by other organisations when accounting for our own organisationâs counterfactual multiplier.
Where I see it a bit differently is around the question of individual impact credit. Rather than worrying about dividing up credit between meta-donors and direct donors, I think what matters most is maximising our collective impact as a community. When you donate to an EG organisation, you might indeed be counterfactually responsible for 2x or more money going to effective charitiesâand so too are the people who choose to donate after learning about effective charities through your meta-donation. Since weâre all working toward the same goal of maximising good done, this isnât a zero-sum game where we need to divide up credit.
This accounting question really only becomes crucial when we need to make decisions about where to direct scarce fundingâwe want to fund the organisations that will be most effective at growing the total pool of donations to effective charities.
That said, I think your approach of allocating 15% to evaluators makes a lot of practical sense as a way to sustainably support the ecosystem. It aligns nicely with the thrust of Ollie Baseâs argument in his post âConsider donating to whoever helped youâ while avoiding getting too caught up in precise impact attribution. And as you note, GiveWellâs excess funds regranting policy makes this particularly straightforward in their case and this policiy is something we are working to put in place at GWWC too.
Hey @Henri Thunberg đ¸ really exciting that youâll be making a donation in this space. Happy to talk this through with you if youâd like :) Iâve DMâd you :)
Why you should alÂloÂcate more of your donaÂtion budÂget to effecÂtive givÂing organisations
In some ways this level of advising was what @Spencer R. Ericson đ¸ was trying to do with SoGive. Although, theyâve now pivoted as I think there was not sufficient interest or willingness to pay from this size of donor. See this post on SoGiveâs expanded advising and custom research service (I think now outdated).
Iâve already seen all the GWWC stuff (and think itâs awesome!), but seeing your more recent work on GCR visualisations reminded me how much we lost with you moving on from GWWC⌠and how much youâre now bringing to the rest of the EA space! Absolutely fantastic work :)
I completely agree that focusing on pledges for students over direct fundraising is a good idea! In our latest internal impact evaluation (2022) at GWWC we found that each new 10% Pledge results in roughly $100,000 USD donated to high impact funding opportunities over the lifetime of the pledge (and we conservatively estimate that ~1/â5 of that is counterfactual). Because of this, in my view focusing on promoting pledges is the more impactful path as one single 10% Pledge would raise more in the longrun as the most successful student fundraising campaign imaginable. It also has the added benefit of making a clear case for effective and significant giving which I think helps to promote positive values in the world and demonstrates the kind of principles that we care about in the EA community.
OTOH I think that often people feel like students might not feel able to make such a big commitment. However, I think that this is a little overcautious. I took the 10% Pledge as a student and found giving incredibly manageable. The 10% Pledge encouraged students to aim for about 1% of their spending money, which for me amounted to roughly ÂŁ100 a yearâless than the cost of a couple of pints each month. It was easy and, honestly, it felt really rewarding. Getting into the habit of giving early on has been very helpful as well. It became a core part of my identity, something I felt really proud of. Once I started working full-time, giving 10% of my income was easy. I simply was able to set it aside each month and hardly noticed it was gone. Since I had never been accustomed to that extra 10%, Iâve never felt like I was sacrificing anything.
Hey! Glad you want to bring more effective giving into your uni group. I myself took the 10% Pledge as student and still think it was amongst the best decisions Iâve ever made :)
I now work at Giving What We Can and weâve developed a guide for how we can support /â collaborate with EA groups to further our shared mission of spreading the ideas of effective giving, and effective altruism more broadly. Iâve DMâd you a link
Yield & Spread from Rebecca Herbst is the closet thing to this I know of. Not sure if sheâs tried anything else with the FIRE community.
Hey Squeezy! Iâm really sorry, but weâre not going to be able to do this right now as we donât have the data from these organisations or it would take too long to categorise it at this point. Here you can find out more information about Open Philanthropy and Manifundâs allocations. Unfortunately we donât have the data on other organisations.
UpÂdates on the effecÂtive givÂing ecosysÂtem (MCF 2024 memo)
You likely wonât be applying to the Meta Charity Funders for this project, but I think that they have pretty good general tips on how to approach writing grant applications. This forum post has some of the key points.
For a sense of what this might look like see what the GWWC research team found when they looked into how our donorsâ giving is distributed across cause areas in our recent 2020-2022 impact evaluation:
Cause area Proportion of pledge donations 2020â2022 Proportion of non-pledge donations 2020â2022 Improving human wellbeing 65% 43% Improving animal welfare 7% 13% Creating a better future 11% 15% Multiple/âUnknown 17% 29% *These results based on data from for both pledge and non-pledge donations, however, we analysed only donations to charities and funds for which we recorded more than $500,000 USD received over 2020â2022. See our impact evaluation for a complete picture of what the data shows.
I actually think that GWWC and AIM are exploring the possibility of setting up a new Fund which would make grants in the meta charity space (including to effective giving initiatives). It would likely have a similar focus to the meta funding circle. This is all very early stage, and there are lots of details to be worked out, but watch this space!
Great post! At GWWC weâre currently looking for pledgers excited to help us shape our new Pledge Advocacy Programme.
Weâve found that word of mouth is one of the best ways for people to learn about the pledge! But, weâve also heard from many pledgers that it can be difficult to bring up the pledge in conversation so weâre launching a new Pledge Advocacy Programme to support our community members to have thoughtful conversations about pledging with their friends, family, and colleagues.
Weâre still in the pilot phase, but if youâre keen to help shape this exciting new initiative then please sign up here!