Donate
In the past, we have been contacted by several people who were interested in donating money to Giving What We Can. Their reasoning was that because we are capable of encouraging more than £1 in donations to effective charities, for every £1 of our own budget, donating money to Giving What We Can could have even more impact than donating it directly to these charities. Last March we undertook to investigate this. We estimated that $170 000’s worth of volunteer time had been invested into Giving What We Can. In that time, Giving What We Can had raised $1.7 million in realised donations and $68 million in pledged donations. Taking into account the facts that some proportion of this would have been given anyway, there will be some member attrition, and not all donations will go to the very best charities (and using data for all these factors when possible), we estimate that we had raised $8 in realised donations and $130 in future donations for every $1’s worth of volunteer time invested in Giving What We Can.
Partly on this basis, we decided to grow and take paid staff, and we are now therefore accepting donations. This page will explain a little more about this. If you have any further queries, please contact Will Crouch, Giving What We Can’s Vice-President, at will.crouch@givingwhatwecan.org.
Can I see your calculations?
Of course! Please e-mail Will for the relevant documents.
Do you have room for more funding? What will additional money be spent on?
Most of our current expenditure is on staff: our Executive Director, and our part-time Director of Operations and Research Director. In line with the policy of similar organisations, we aim to raise enough funds to be secure in our basic activities until December 2013. If we raise above this basic amount, our principal additional expenditure would be to hire a staff member full-time to work on developing our on-line marketing and local chapters.
How do you know that additional donations will be as cost-effective as resources spent so far?
Given how effective resources have been at generating funds so far, we expect marginal donations to have a considerably lower cost-effectiveness than our past average. However, we still expect $1 to generate considerably more than $1 for the very best charities. According to our best (highly uncertain) guess, an additional $1 invested in Giving What We Can will generate something in the range of $25-$61 to the best charities.
Why do you have employees?
For exactly the same reasons that we think it morally important to give proportions of our salaries to the very best charities, we think it’s morally important to fundraise for the very best charities. Growing Giving What We Can is the best way that we know to do this, and by the time we took paid staff, we were already beyond the size that could be run well on a voluntary basis.
Can donating to GWWC be part of the 10% pledge?
We do allow donations to Giving What We Can to be part of the 10% pledge, though we encourage members to give to other charities as well. It’s of course in no way a requirement of membership in Giving What We Can that one donates any amount to Giving What We Can.
How do I donate?
US
If you are a US taxpayer and wish to claim tax-deductibility, you can donate through our fiscal sponsor, the Tides Foundation. You can send cheques by postal mail to:
Tides Foundation
The Presidio
P.O. Box 29903
San Francisco, CA 94129
Or via FedEx or UPS to:
Tides Foundation
1014 Torney Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94129
Please address the cheque to "Tides Foundation" but write “Centre for Effective Altruism” on the 'Memo' line. If you are US tax-deductible and wish to donate by bank transfer, please e-mail Will Crouch for details.
UK
If you are not a US taxpayer, you can send a cheque, addressed to ‘Centre for Effective Altruism’ to Centre for Effective Altruism, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, Littlegate House, St Ebbes Street, Oxford OX1 1PT, UK, and include ‘Giving What We Can’ in the memo line. (Note that Centre for Effective Altruism is the legal entity that comprises Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and The Life You Can Save.) The above account now has UK tax-deductible status, please let us know if you pay tax in the UK and would like to claim gift aid.
Other ways to donate
We are now set up to accept money via
- bank transfer
- credit card
- and direct debit
