Stay up to date with Giving What We Can's blog. Featuring the latest news about our community, how to donate effectively, charity evaluation, community events and more!

Blog

Giving What We Can's blog, featuring the latest news from our community.

footerNavigation

About us

Contact us

Our team

Our values

Our members

Our events

Transparency

Our mistakes

Our impact

Donate to Giving What We Can

Careers

About

Our best charities

Take a giving pledge

Get involved

Make a bequest

Videos, books, podcasts

FAQs

Sitemap

Learn more

Press kit

Media coverage

Case studies: People who pledge to give

Media

Footer Navigation

topNavigation

Recommended charities

High-impact causes

Why give to funds

How much to donate

Why donate publicly

Recommendations

Comparing charities

Choosing a cause

Inclusion criteria

Trusted evaluators

Our approach

Videos, books, podcasts and essays

Hesitations about charitable giving

How rich am I?

Can money buy happiness?

Resources

Research

Team

The Pledge

Trial Pledge

Further Pledge

Bequests

Why pledge

Pledges

Newsletter

Podcast

Videos

Connect with our community

Sharing our ideas

Events

Giving games

Charity elections

Pledge drive

Fundraisers

Community

Donate now

Best charities

Manage my donations

Tax deductibility

Donate

My pledge

My donations

My income

My impact

Pledge

My giving

Top Navigation

Grace Adams

GWWC's new community strategy

I’m extremely excited to announce the launch of a new community initiative that aims to connect our existing community better, and inspire more people to join us – I’ve been working on this for the past few months and am thrilled to finally share it!

Over the almost two years I’ve been working with Giving What We Can, I’ve seen how important our community is — whether it’s a supportive network to ask questions, a friendly face in a new city, or a shared sense that none of us are alone in wanting to do what we can to make a better world, I’ve personally taken much-needed inspiration, motivation, and comfort more times than I can count, simply by hearing from you!

I want to make it easier for you to do the same.

We are launching some new spaces for you to meet, connect, and chat with each other. 

: whether you just subscribe to our newsletter, have taken the pledge, have donated through our platform, or are simply interested in meeting like-minded people who care about making a difference in the world:

In brief, Giving What We Can’s new community strategy includes:

 in key cities like London, NYC, Berlin, and Sydney; we plan to launch in other cities as well

 for you to connect, no matter where you are located

A directory of other (non-GWWC) effective giving groups,

 to better connect the effective giving community more broadly

I firmly believe that community and connection are an integral part of working towards a society where giving significantly and effectively is a cultural norm. We’ve heard from many of you that one of the best things about having found Giving What We Can is learning that there are other people with similar values. We hope this makes it a little easier to connect!

You can read more about each of our new initiatives below:

Since its founding in 2009, Giving What We Can has been connecting people through their commitment to effective giving. Our mission isn't just to marginally increase the amount of money going to effective charities; we’re aiming for meaningful cultural change — with a goal to make giving 

 a global norm, in service of a better world. The community we’ve built (and are continuing to build) is instrumental to reaching that goal.

The way that GWWC has engaged with the community has changed a lot over the years. It all started as small local groups bound by a common thread of pledging 10% back in 2009 through “Giving What We Can Chapters”.

One of the biggest changes that occurred was GWWC Chapters transitioning to become EA Groups several years ago.

Since then, we’ve worked with EA groups to promote effective giving, had volunteers host monthly virtual meetups, and run an ambassador program where our ambassadors ran events too!

PISE (Positive Impact Society Erasmus) has hosted pledge celebration events…

An ambassador John Yan has hosted Giving Tuesday after-parties in New York…

Grace (Head of Marketing) ran a community event in Melbourne earlier this year…

Since GWWC was revitalised in 2020, we have often received requests to restart local groups, given that some of its strongest growth historically came from our former Chapters. Many of our smaller initiatives (e.g. one-off events, working with EA groups, and running the ambassador program) have shown a desire for this too.

We’ve also been excited to see successful communities around effective giving start to grow and adapt to local cultural contexts i.e. in London and in the Netherlands with their successful 

We are excited to announce that we are revitalising our global giving community at the local level by relaunching GWWC Groups!

GWWC groups are local or virtual groups of community members who connect over a desire to do good effectively through giving. As part of a group you might: discuss how to give effectively, fundraise for effective charities and spend time with people who have similar values. We’re also excited to see groups sharing resources, opportunities and advice with one another, as well as their broader community.

All GWWC Groups will have a volunteer Group Leader (or leaders), who will welcome new members, connect the community and organise ~quarterly events that are aimed at engaging new and existing community members in effective giving. The quarterly events might be a mix of fundraising, speaker, and social events, and we provide guidance and support in planning and running them.

GWWC Group events are relaxed, friendly events that bring people who care about doing good through their donations to come together.

They are aimed at growing the community of effective givers by helping people to connect around their shared values and aspirations to make the world much better through consistent, significant, and effective giving. Ideally, these events would attract people across a wide age range, and across a variety of backgrounds. We aim to create an environment where community members feel excited to invite their friends and family who may share similar interests along to these events and encourage them to get involved.

We want to ensure that we’re providing enough support to the local groups we start as we trial this program. Therefore, we are committing to support 5-10 local groups around the world in the next 12 months.

The following places have been locked in:

 (with Gemma Paterson, Denise Melchin and Chris Rouse)

There are also several other locations we’d really like to see groups launch, and for which we hope to find volunteer Group Leaders. In particular, we’d be very excited to see applications to lead groups in the following places:

We think the most important part of a successful group are enthusiastic Group Leaders, so if you’re excited about the idea of a group in your city even if it’s not on the list above, please consider applying to run a group! 

See current numbers of pledges by city/metropolitan area

We would ideally have 2-3 co-leaders for each GWWC Group so if there’s already a group in your area, please still apply!

What if we already have a local group focused on creating community around effective giving?

If you’re already organising local events, why not apply to become a GWWC Group Leader so you can access the support and resources we provide?

If you’re interested in promoting effective giving in a different format, we think that’s great too! We’d encourage you to submit your group to our new 

Effective Giving Community Groups Directory

, so we can let people know about your group and the events you host!

If you’re passionate about effective giving — and growing the community through organising events and meeting with community members — we’d love you to apply.

Organise 4 (quarterly) community events in a 12-month period (with the option, but not expectation, to host more if you’d like)

Welcome new members to the community via email or call if they reach out

Be active on the relevant group channel in our new community slack workspace

Work with other local members and relevant groups (EA groups) to coordinate fundraising activities or other events in your city

Congratulate members and donors on milestones (e.g. pledge anniversaries)

Work with your co-leaders to divide up tasks and manage the group

Guides on running community events, including what to organise, how to find speakers, etc

Regular check-in calls with staff who can help you troubleshoot problems and provide guidance

Support when leaders have questions about how to run events ormake things happen

Training on supporting new members, such as how to make them feel welcome, talking points about GWWC

Opportunities to present at workplaces, or for other aligned groups etc

Coordination of regular calls with other leaders in the region

Public acknowledgement on our website that you’re a Group Leader

Applications for GWWC Group Leaders will be assessed on a rolling basis.

Please note that we currently have limited capacity and we want to be able to support all our Groups and Group Leaders well as we test and scale this program, so we may not be able to accept all the submitted applications. We are planning to run this program in a maximum of 10 regions for the next year.

Can I run events about effective giving if I’m not part of a group?

 to run your own giving game, introductory talk about effective giving, and more!

We are excited about our community taking initiative to run their own events, utilising the resources we make available. In some cases, i.e. for giving games, we are even able to sponsor donations to help your event run smoothly.

Always feel free to get in touch with us at community@givingwhatwecan.org if you have any questions about running an event.

Please note that while you are welcome (and encouraged!) to self-organise events using the resources we make available on our website, we cannot allow people to launch official GWWC Groups without our support or permission (See more info in the FAQs, below.)

We’d also like to emphasise the importance of being mindful of creating events that are safe and inclusive to all, and strongly encourage you to read our guide before planning an event.

One for the World is helping to support our groups

When we were running the idea for GWWC local groups by stakeholders, our friends at 

 generously offered to use some of their staff time to provide support to our new Group Leaders over the next 12 months. They’ve also offered to share their resources with us, and publicly.

We are extremely grateful and excited to be working with them and for our groups to have support from experienced organisers at One for the World.

This is the kind of partnership that demonstrates how we can pool our resources to achieve more together!

We’re planning to trial this engagement strategy over the next year, and if we find that we’re reaching a meaningful number of new people who have attended at least one event and are also seeing a portion of people take a significant action (like starting recurring donations or taking a pledge), as well as group members being relatively more engaged than non-group members, then we’d consider the model successful and look to scale to many more locations.

If we’re not finding enough traction, we’ll investigate why this might be the case and look to either substantially improve outcomes within 12 months or to rethink our strategy.

Anyone can attend our GWWC Group events! We’d love people with a range of experiences around giving and doing good to come to our group events. You do not need to have taken a pledge with Giving What We Can to join.

If it’s difficult to attend group events near you, 

 to connect with the community online, or look for other groups in our 

Effective Giving Local Community Directory

If we’re able to start a group in your city in this first phase, groups should launch in October this year.

Can I launch my city on my own!? (Please!)

You are welcome (and encouraged!) to self-organise events using the resources we make available on our website, but we cannot allow people to launch official GWWC Groups without our support or permission. This is so we can monitor the quality of official GWWC Groups, and people attending events know that they’re being run by official volunteers who GWWC has onboarded.

Adam Steinberg 

Learn about Highgate School's first ever Charity Election!

Compassion at scale: Bringing effective giving to high schools

It’s a great success when secondary students come away from a school event feeling it brought meaning to their lives. With a myriad of distractions and an excess of energy, sometimes maintaining their attention is hard enough—especially late in the school year when, in many locales, the weather turns balmy and thoughts turn to exams or summer vacation.

To see them, then, take advantage of a meaningful opportunity in sunny June to stop and reflect, think critically about their own personal values and have meaningful conversations with their peers about major world issues—that would be something very special.

These were among the thoughts of Jenny Chapman, Biology teacher at Highgate School, London, as she read through the post-event reflections from her students after running a Giving What We Can Charity Election event at her school in June 2023.

One student explained that the event ‘made me more compassionate about helping people more distant from me.’ Another wrote, ‘My view on my own impact has changed. Improving the world seems more possible.’ Says Chapman, ‘The reflections really made me think this program was so worthwhile—that this is what it’s all about.’

Other school staff also approached Chapman to praise the event. She remembers one teacher saying, ‘This was sort of a lightbulb moment for me. It made me think about how I gift and how I think about charities.’

Only about a week long and often held across a set of classes like social studies or history, the charity election is an experience in 

: It puts students in the position of directing a pool of funds (in this case, sponsored by international charity Giving What We Can), and then challenges them to consider three worthy charities with very different approaches and causes.

To make a decision about which charity they believe should be supported, they consider the cost-effectiveness and evidence base of each charity through a brief process of discussion, reflection and guided research.

They are then invited to use the evidence and their reasoning to make their decision and vote to direct their ballot, each worth $2 (or its international equivalent), to just one charity. The school decides how the combined results of all student ballots will be allocated: winner-take-all, 70%-20%-10%, or in proportion to the vote. No matter what they decide, since the funds are sponsored, there’s no cost to the school.

In the run-up to the event, Chapman used 

 to estimate that if all her eligible students voted, the Highgate cohort could:

🌤 remove 2407 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere;

🧒🏼 help protect 6017 children from schistosomiasis; or

🤝 provide 96 months of basic income to someone in Uganda.

Part of the reason Highgate’s event was so successful was that Ms. Chapman put extra effort into its preparation. Though the program can be run straight out of the box with minimal preparation (through a provided slideshow, videos and worksheet), Giving What We Can encourages teachers to adjust it to their student cohort and teaching style. Wanting to make the experience deeper for her students, Chapman dove in and added her own activities to the ones provided, including one in which she had students list issues that were important to them in their everyday lives at school, like the quality of food in the dining hall or issues around school uniforms. For each, students then estimated the importance of the problem, its room for more attention or funding (‘neglectedness’), and how solvable they thought it would be. They then discussed how these factors could also be used to help them decide where to aim their efforts most effectively to 

The influence of this event is likely to carry on in another important way: At the beginning of each Highgate school year, the students propose causes that are important to them, and from these are chosen the school’s charities for that year: All fundraisers and volunteering support that year’s selection. Chapman explains, ‘As a result of the election, the person in charge of Charity and Partnerships at our school said they want to start getting students to include ideas about charity impact in student proposals about who to raise money for. So, in addition to their proposals, he will ask them to include a metric of charity impact.

‘This is massive, because it changes the ethos of how we decide where we will give—in this case, in school—and will become part of their decision process’—hopefully creating a lasting impact on students’ giving decisions later in life.

To learn more and apply for sponsorship at your school, visit the Charity Elections 

. If you have questions or want to support the programme financially, as a volunteer, or in some other capacity, please shoot us a quick note at charityelections@givingwhatwecan.org.

Charity elections are part of Giving What We Can. Giving What We Can is a fiscally sponsored project of 

 (UK) (England and Wales registered charity number 1149828 and registered company number 07962181). Giving What We Can can receive tax-deductible donations in the US, UK and Netherlands, 

July Newsletter: Why people pledged + businesses donating effectively

Hello and welcome to our July newsletter!

There are some exciting things brewing at Giving What We Can, which I'll share in next month's newsletter, but this month I wanted to highlight some of our company pledgers, who are demonstrating that effective giving can take many forms!

 who have pledged to give at least 10% of profits to high-impact charities… and here are a few of them:

 is an educational publishing company that sells around 250,000 books a year and they've been able to raise £1 million GBP for effective charities by donating 50% of their profits. They are also raising awareness about effective charities through messaging in the front of their books.

What an incredible effort from Tom Greenway and the team at 3D Total!

Give Industries, a registered non-profit in Australia provides commercial electrical services. Their organisation gives 100% of their profits to effective charities!

 has proven that this is a sustainable business model and is continuing to grow.

Fluffy Torpedo in Melbourne creates some of the most unique ice cream flavours (including a Honey & Soy Sauce flavour) and donates 50 cents per scoop to a high-impact charity.

 is also spreading the word about effective charities in their store and provides copies of the book The Life You Can Save by Peter Singer for people to take home! (They even have our logo on the menu!)


I'm excited about businesses' ability to donate their profits to help others and advocate for a more generous society that seeks to make effective changes to some of our biggest problems.

Remember to check out why people pledged with Giving What We Can, upcoming events in London and New York, and lots of news below!

- Grace Adams & the Giving What We Can team

I'm going to try a new section of the newsletter, where we share some of the responses we received from people who took a pledge during the previous month about what motivated them to

Reading these answers always fills me with hope and fulfilment, knowing that thousands of people are motivated to give significantly to help others.


What motivated you to take a pledge with Giving What We Can?

"I believe in positive change caused by radical kindness. I am privileged and loved in my current position, and, because of that, I have enough to share. Thus, I will share it."

"I have been given much, and so there is much to give."

"I want to have the biggest possible impact that I can in the world, and this is something that I want to continue valuing for the rest of my life."

"I believe the money I make can do far more good for others in desperate need than it could ever do for myself."

The picnic is open to anyone interested in GWWC, whether you have already signed a pledge or are simply curious about effective giving. Bring some food and maybe a blanket for a lovely social afternoon in the sun! (fingers crossed).

Date: Sunday, July 30th, from 12:30pm onwards

Come picnic with the kindest, most interesting people in New York City at Giving What We Can's first meetup in 2 years! Meet us in Battery Park for some great conversation, some great nibbles, and a lovely summer evening.

Blog

GWWC's new community strategy

Compassion at scale: Bringing effective giving to high schools

July Newsletter

June Newsletter

Rapid progress in AI: A call to action and what you can do

Che bello! Charity Elections continues to go global

Where to give Zakat effectively during Ramadan 2023

Member Profile: Michael Scott

February 2023 Newsletter

Turkey and Syria earthquake: Effective donation advice