Giving What We Can (GWWC) is on a mission to create a world in which giving effectively and significantly is a cultural norm.
We believe that charitable donations can do an astonishing amount of good. However, because the effectiveness of different charities varies wildly, it is important that we donate to the most effective charities if we want to have a significant impact.
At its core, Giving What We Can is participating in the project of effective altruism: trying to use our resources to do the most good. Giving What We Can specifically focuses on one particular resource: money, in the context of charitable donations.
We are focused on increasing the number of donors who prioritise effectiveness, helping them to maximise their charitable impact throughout their lives, and introducing them to the broader effective altruism movement.
In all our work, we strive to take a positive and collaborative attitude, be transparent in our communication and decision-making, and adopt a scout mindset to guide us towards doing the most good we can do.
We grow the effective giving movement through our three core products:
Additionally, we support and provide coordination for the broader effective giving ecosystem, including by making our products available to other effective giving organisations, coordinating within the ecosystem, and helping incubate new projects to fill pressing gaps.
Giving What We Can has considerable impact through the money it counterfactually moves to effective charities. Our 2020-2022 impact evaluation (executive summary) goes into detail on how well we’ve done on this recently. We estimate that we counterfactually generated $62 million of value for highly effective charities in 2020-2022, leading to a giving multiplier of 30x for the average donor, though - as we highlight in the report - these results need to be interpreted with care by prospective donors.
We can also have considerable (though harder to measure) indirect impact through promoting positive values, advocating for effective altruism, improving effective altruism culture and indirectly moving money to effective charities. We wrote more about this in our 2022 public update about our strategy, and we aim to find ways to include this in future impact evaluations.
In addition to tracking our direct and indirect impact, a core guiding metric of ours is “active effective givers”. We are currently measuring just those we can track directly (unique donors either donating via our platform or reporting donations using our pledge dashboard) — but ultimately we are interested in measuring (and increasing) the size of the effective giving community at large. This measure closely captures our mission and we believe it is a core driver of both our direct and indirect impact.
We are looking for both one-time and ongoing funders to support our activities to expand our reach and impact. If you are interested in providing financial support, you can donate directly or get in touch with our executive director to discuss in more detail.
You can also support us by: