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¸
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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!
Loved this post!
Thanks so much for writing this up!
Love to see how far this has come!
See these papers on EA and effective charitable giving by Paul Bloom and Lucius Caviola.
Happy to help if I can! Hereâs some more info on me and my role as Effective Giving Global Coordinator and Incubator :)
Hey Ulrik!
GWWC has this advise about âwhy and how you should run a birthday fundraiserâ.
I hope that helps :)
A midpoint approach (working hypothesis) could be to offer a lower standard pledge for GiveHealth (1%-5%) to appeal to a wider audience, but also mentioning the GWWC 10% Pledge in a few places and provide a link to it, similar to what AAC has done.
Normalising the 10% pledge often involves showing that others are already doing it. Therefore, it is important to ensure that when people pledge 1%, they are aware that there is a community (GWWC) that they can join, which pledges a higher amount (10%). I am very excited about this project and the potential to encourage a large number of healthcare professionals to give effectively. However, I would like to note that in GWWCâs most recent impact evaluation, we found that a small but significant percentage of our Trial Pledgers have gone on to take the 10% Pledge. This likely represents the majority of the value we provide through the Trial Pledge. I believe this could also be true for people taking a GiveHealth pledge if you also were to promote a 10% pledge, although I am uncertain about this.
I also agree with Vaidehi Agarwallaâs suggestion to reach out to OFTW and learn from their experience with the 1% pledge, including churn rates and other factors.
Hey GiveHeath!
Iâm really excited about this new effective giving organisationâI think that youâve done a really great job of capturing the heathcare vibe with the website and promotional video (simialr to how HIA captured the sporty/âalthlete vibes on theirs). Feels a bit like an NHS explainer video (which I think is awesome!).
My name is Luke, and I work at GWWC as the Effective Giving Global Coordinator and Incubator where I support the global effective giving community and help with the development of new effective giving initiatives. Here are a few ways that I might be able to support your project. The most relevant of which is that I would love to jump on a call with someone from the GiveHealth team to chat about ways that GWWC and the wider effective giving ecosystem can support the work that youâre doing!
Iâm also curious if youâve been in contact with High Impact Medicine as I think they are interested in getting more involved in the effective giving space?
Great question.
We think that both strategies have merits, however we also think that there is less to the distinction than meets the eye. Different locations have quite different audiences and so getting new projects started which can target them seems valuable. But, to expand into new legal justifications (and get tax deductible status) itâs important to start a new legal entity so starting a new initiative in many of these new countries will need to happen anyway.
I also think that the expanding existing orgs vs starting new initiatives division is more of a spectrum. As mentioned in Appendix B, we think that itâs possible that in some of these countries the new initiatives wonât have to be completely independent. In many cases they can make use of tech infrastructure and branding from existing orgs like GWWC or Effektiv Spenden to cut down the set up work that theyâd otherwise need to do.
Ultimately it will be for the cofounders of these new initiatives to decide how much they want to make use of the existing brands and/âor tech infrastructures that have already been developedâand we will go into more detail on the pros and cons of adopting these existing resources during the program so that cofounders can make whatever choice that gives their initiative the best chance of success.
Having said all of that, many existing orgs are hiring country managers, e.g. we didnât include Austria as one of our target countries because Effektiv Spenden are likely to expand into that market. However, although GWWC, and other orgs, are expanding, we can only grow so fast and hire so many people in a year. As a result, getting new, more independent, projects started will accelerate the rate that weâre able to bring effective giving to new markets.
Hey Denis! Really glad to hear youâve appliedâplease also let people in your networks know about the program :)
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 :)