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Luke Freeman

Giving What We Can

Announcing our 2022 strategy and how you can help (and we're hiring!)

After a few quiet years, Giving What We Can (GWWC) has been significantly ramping up its activities and has a lot planned moving forward, starting with a partial merger with EA Funds and a significant marketing push.

A lot has changed since we launched in 2009, but we still wholeheartedly believe in creating a culture where giving effectively and significantly is the norm.

We have ambitious plans to achieve this, and you can help.

Cast your mind back to 2009. Barack Obama is sworn in as US president amid a global financial crisis, mRNA vaccines haven't yet had a clinical trial, and Jeopardy! and Go world champions are still human. Though the term 'effective altruism' would not be invented until 2011, the movement had just begun.

That was the year Giving What We Can was founded as the first international community of effective givers, and it 

. At that time, Giving What We Can was almost exclusively focused on global poverty, and funding was scarce for both the movement and the organisations it supported. The idea that a single billionaire (or even a few multimillionaires) would join seemed like a far-off ambition.

Pictured: Our cofounder, Toby Ord, personally sending letters to people who signed The Pledge.

Fast forward to 2022: over 7,000 people from 94 countries have signed 

 significantly influenced their careers, and the community has 

 (primarily due to a small number of wealthy donors).

Another significant change is cause prioritisation. In 2009, Giving What We Can and the nascent effective altruism (EA) movement were almost exclusively 

. Today, we now also emphasise causes that 

These changes bring challenges. In a movement that values impartiality and a commitment to doing the most good, it can be difficult to coordinate among people with different worldviews, and potentially wildly different ideas of what "doing the most good" means in practice. As the movement has grown, so have problems with donor coordination (for example, of fungibility, timing of philanthropy, etc.), and the increase in funding from large donors changes the relative value of an individual's time versus their money.

But these changes also bring significant opportunities. Increased funding, movement growth, and worldview diversity allow us to be 

 in our efforts to be a force for good. This is exciting!

For us at Giving What We Can, it means we might just have a shot of achieving our mission to make giving effectively and significantly a cultural norm. We've gone from once being the biggest part of the Centre for Effective Altruism to being a smaller project with no full-time staff. But we're now reignited: we're back to publishing 

, we're conducting our first ambitious marketing campaigns, and we're directly processing donations

This post aims to provide an overview of our role, strategy, and plans in the context of our mission, the current landscape of effective altruism, and the future we are striving for.

We still believe in promoting effective giving in 2022

make giving effectively and significantly a cultural norm

We mean this quite literally: our goal isn't just to marginally increase the amount of money going to effective charities — we're aiming to make meaningful cultural change.

It's 2030 — Ted Bonne is with his family celebrating Thanksgiving, discussing where they were each planning to donate for Giving Tuesday. His uncle, slightly tipsy, interrupts the conversation: "Whoa, whoa, hold up — sure, in the past bed nets were pretty cost effective, but rates of malaria are so much lower now, and did you see the latest paper on the long-term effects of cash transfers?" Sofia rolls up her sleeves — here we go again!

It's 2050 — Entrepreneur Beth Bayseoff has just sold her startup for 10 billion dollars. Her friend suggests that she should keep the money for herself and her future lineage. Beth laughs, saying that sounds like something a monkey might do if it found a large stash of bananas.

It's 2070 — Yuvanna Noel Harare is a young historian looking to learn more about how the industry of impact-focused charity evaluators began. Like most people he knows, he and his family give at least 10% of their income to charity, and he's quite well-read about the current best donation opportunities. When he sees the early cost-effectiveness estimates from GiveWell, he wonders: "How on earth could it have ever been so cheap to save a life?"

It's 2200 — The concept of donating money no longer makes much sense, given the widespread rational compassion that means all our abundance is fairly distributed.

We're aware this is an extremely ambitious vision, but we think it's worth pursuing. Every step towards it has strong positive direct and indirect effects — and if we succeed, we believe the world will be a significantly different, and better, place.

We think that there is a strong case that working on this mission should remain a meaningful part of effective altruism's portfolio.

We believe we can make meaningful progress towards this mission.

This progress can have considerable direct impact through the money it moves to effective charities.

This progress can have considerable (though harder to measure) indirect impact — which likely outweighs the direct impact from a longtermist point of view.

We think Giving What We Can's promotion of effective giving is therefore a robustly good thing, which is valuable from multiple plausible worldviews.

Despite how ambitious our vision is, we don't see any strong, systematic reason putting it out of reach.

Though our goal is to have a cultural norm of giving effectively and substantially, we're not starting from scratch. There is already a significant culture of giving: 

Americans in 2020 donated $471 billion USD

, and increasing the proportion that goes to effective charities would be an enormous success in its own right.

What's more, we think we can affect this culture, in part because:

Somewhat arbitrary ideas around charity (like the overhead myth) seem like they have an outsized impact on giving.

Practices around giving seem like they vary significantly by culture — we think the world we're aiming for is within what's culturally possible.

One powerful idea in the charitable giving space is the 

. We couldn't find estimates of just how big an effect this idea has in dollar terms, but findings about donor's 

 (charity evaluators that use the proportion of overhead spending as a key metric of efficiency) speak to its impact. What if cost effectiveness was as influential? What if it was substantially more influential? And why couldn't it be?

The amount people give also seems culturally contingent. Consider 

: the practice of giving 10% of one's income away. Similar practices exist in other religions, such as 

, which involves donating 2.5% of one's wealth. These practices — though widespread — vary in their norms about how much to give. As one extreme, consider that Myanmar has a per-capita GDP of $1,400 USD and yet is the 

 — in large part due to a high population of Theravada Buddhists who have a strong norm of regular giving.

The fact that there are already examples of such generous cultural practices makes us think that Giving What We Can's vision, though ambitious, seems achievable. In fact, 

 was somewhat inspired by these practices, and we've already had success at secularising them and emphasising giving to high-impact organisations.

Active effective givers by pledge status (whether the giver has an active pledge or not) and year

Cumulative pledges over time, with “The GWWC Pledge” in green and the “Trial Pledges” in purple.

We're also not alone: we're part of a wider effective giving community with similar goals. Consider the success of GiveWell, which in 2020 

We believe that with good reasoning and experimentation, we can reach people who are already aligned with our mission (and just don't know it yet) and, more importantly, change hearts and minds.

Our success will increase the amount of money moved to effective charities, which we believe will have a significant impact.

Since 2009 our pledged members have donated over $250 million USD. Just last year, our pledged members reported donating $22.7 million USD (so far)

 and an additional $41.2 million USD was donated by non-members (under the EA Funds brand).

Even with big donors at play, this amount isn't negligible — the amount donated since 2009 to Against Malaria Foundation alone is estimated to have 

 — and we anticipate this amount growing significantly over the following years.

How much impact marginal donations have depends significantly on both your worldview, and where those donations go. From a neartermist worldview, donations can have a cost effectiveness on the order of 

. Our researcher, Michael Townsend, argued that, from a longtermist worldview, 

longtermists should expect their donations to be even more cost effective

Therefore, we think that from both longtermist and neartermist perspectives, the amount of money Giving What We Can can move to charity constitutes a significant part of our impact — but just how much of our impact might vary depending on your worldview. Our best guess is that it likely makes up the largest portion of our impact from a neartermist point of view, but that the indirect effects are proportionally bigger from a longtermist point of view

One of the distinguishing features of Giving What We Can is that we don't just aim to move money (although this is important) — we also want to promote positive values, advocate for effective altruism, and help spread information about the best ways people can improve the world.

Giving What We Can, and effective giving more broadly, has a track record of recruiting and retaining highly engaged effective altruists.

Donating to effective charities is a significant entry point into effective altruism. In the 2020 EA Survey, 21% of respondents reported that Giving What We Can was 

important for them getting involved in EA

Though we're excited about effective giving being an important part of effective altruism, we aim to be clear that that's not all it is. For example, in our new 

 we regularly highlight other ways people can be involved — whether through their careers (we're excited to send users to 80,000 Hours!) or change in lifestyle choices (such as encouraging plant-based diets).

We also aim for our content to be a great place highly engaged effective altruists can send their friends to. At its core, effective giving is pretty straightforward: there are problems in the world, and donating to the most effective charities can be an impactful way to help solve them. We think that message alone can be enough to get people interested in the details of effective altruism (which of course, are much less straightforward).

3.b. Improving effective altruism culture

We foster a culture of moral seriousness, action-orientation, and optimism. Our community demonstrates that effective altruism is tangible, it's something that most people can incorporate into their lives, it's a community that cares about taking action. We think this improves the health of the community.

Supporting effective givers improves EA community health

Elitism, inaction, and lack of growth are some of the 

 within the EA community, according to the EA survey. GWWC can help here because we are specifically focused on providing a way that almost everyone can take action and contribute to the project of EA. GWWC also has one of the 

 for involvement in EA (i.e. many more people found GWWC had a positive effect on their involvement than those who felt it had a negative effect and few other organisations had higher ratios).

We also think that the people who do get involved in the EA community through effective giving demonstrate desirable qualities — such as being genuinely altruistic and willing to take action, instead of only armchair theorising. This helps keep the community grounded.

It also demonstrates to the outside world that we are serious about doing good — donating significantly is a hard-to-fake signal that we care: it's putting our money where our mouth is. This seems especially important in the current environment — which, from an outside perspective, might seem focused on billionaires and project ideas that are less legibly about helping others. The fact that there's a significant part of the community doing something concrete, visible, and frankly, admirable, goes a long way in building goodwill.

And it's not just about how EA appears. Right now, EA is a movement of people who care, and care a lot. As the amount of funding the movement has increased, so too will the amount of attention it gets, and this can have some downsides. There is currently a lot of trust and goodwill within the community, which is in part possible because of how legible people's motivations to do good are — there aren't many highly engaged effective altruists who got involved for the money. We think we shouldn't take this for granted. We're not sure exactly how much risk there is to this current goodwill between EAs, but we hope effective giving can be a partial defence against future challenges.

Giving effectively can improve community epistemics

For many effective altruists, thinking about where to donate to charity was how they discovered effective altruism. Founding figures like Toby Ord, Will MacAskill, and Holden Karnofsky all grappled with the question: "Given how many problems there are in the world, where can my money do the most good?" It's an extremely difficult question, but it's an excellent example of why careful reasoning and evidence are needed if we're interested in helping others as much as we can.

Thinking hard about where your donations can do the most good can be a fantastic way to build the epistemic abilities of future (and current) EA community members. There are many difficult questions to answer, like:

Should I defer to this evaluator, or another one, or should I defer to anyone at all?

And there's something about actually giving your own money away that sharpens the mind, and makes you really care about getting the answer right. We want to provide guidance, but we also want to encourage people to think about these questions themselves, and provide them the tools to do so.

Retaining people in the effective altruism community

In addition to improving the health and enthusiasm of the community, we think effective giving is a way people can stay involved — regardless of where they're at with their career. This is reflected in some of the results from past EA Surveys:

~14% of respondents reported that GWWC was one of their three 

largest influencers for their ability to have a positive impact

The GWWC Pledge and donating 10%+ of income were 

38% of effective altruists were planning to earn to give

We think it's great to see more effective altruists pursuing direct work, but we also think it's important that those who donate as their main path to impact at any point are able to remain highly engaged in the community.

We see ourselves as part of the broader push within effective altruism to increase rational compassion. As we continue on our mission, we can see we're doing incremental amounts of good, but we also want to be ambitious. We think there's some chance that we can succeed in causing a significant cultural change, like the kind we described above, and that this could be extremely impactful.

The benefit of pursuing this ambitious goal is that there's value in incremental nudges in this direction. In general, we think that:

Involvement in effective giving pushes people to have higher levels of compassion for others who may be distant in time, space, or evolutionary history.

Effective giving involves taking action to improve the world, rather than adopting a culture of passive despair.

There's value in thinking about how you can best help, it is epistemically challenging, and requires the kind of rational thinking we want to foster.

And though this might sound intangible (raising the question how exactly will this translate to impact?), we think there are likely going to be tangible results. Given the history of GWWC, we're more likely to first succeed with people with influence: either those in policy roles or who are unusually wealthy. Consider that Sam Bankman-Fried (who, as of this update, is the wealthiest person who identifies as part of the effective altruism movement) was the 1,906th person who took The Pledge

. Promoting the above values for these people might be hugely valuable.

For example, it could be a very significant win if some significant proportion of politicians signed The Pledge — and those who didn't felt some pressure to do so. This could push towards more cosmopolitan policies, and an increase in politicians who think from an impact perspective (or at least purport to), rather than not even being in the game of making an actual difference.

Promoting positive values is the indirect path to impact we find hardest to measure, but it is something our team is very excited about.

3.d. Indirectly moving money to effective charities

Giving What We Can directly moves money to effective charities through our pledgers and on our website, but we also indirectly move money. This is very difficult to measure, and we suspect these kinds of second-order effects are smaller than the first-order effects. But just as an example, multiple people within our team report that they have (sometimes significantly) influenced the giving of others, in ways that can be somewhat causally traced back to GWWC, but would never show up in GWWC's reported metrics.

It is plausible that the vast majority of money moved to charities will be done by an extremely small fraction of extraordinarily wealthy people. This implies that the best thing to do, from the point of view of raising funds, is to directly reach out to these people. It probably is, and there are organisations like Founders Pledge and Longview Philanthropy that do a great job of that. But we also think the existence of GWWC — and the fact it's publicly supported by thousands of ordinary people — can help with those efforts. Just how much it helps is extremely unclear to us. But the idea is that, in a world where effective giving is a widespread concept and GWWC is more of a household name, we expect the pressure for extremely wealthy people to donate their money 

So far we've only focused on our positive impacts, but there are also ways we might accidentally cause harm if we're not careful.

Some of our key concerns include, but are not limited to:

Failing to have sufficient impact to make up for the opportunity cost of our work.

Poorly communicating ideas around effective altruism.

Inadvertently steering members away from direct work.

Julian Hazell

Effective giving is a long-term endeavour, not one that you have to maximise and optimise for over the course of a year. It shouldn’t be stressful or anxiety-inducing, and it should be something you can see yourself doing over the course of your life.

It's perfectly okay to be an imperfect effective altruist

For basically my entire life, I didn’t think I could make much of an impact on the world’s most pressing problems. That changed when I read Peter Singer’s 

In short, Singer argues that we are morally obligated to help others if we can do so without significant sacrifice on our own part. He illustrates this through his “drowning child” thought experiment, which asks: would you wade into a shallow pond of water to save a drowning child if doing so would ruin your clothes? The vast majority of us say yes, which leads to another question: why aren’t we as willing to sacrifice our resources to save lives that aren’t in front of us?

Singer stresses that it doesn’t matter if the child is in front of us — if we can save lives for comparatively little cost (the value of the clothes we are wearing, for example), why don’t we? Why are we motivated to be altruistic for the drowning child in front of us, but not the ones we don’t see?

“If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.” — Peter Singer

The simplicity, effectiveness, and elegance of the core argument made complete sense to me. Contrary to my previous belief that I was only a small fish in a big ocean, it turns out I can positively impact others’ lives, oftentimes quite substantially. There are drowning children out there (metaphorically, in this case), and I have an obligation to help them. Better yet, I’m in a good position to help a lot of drowning children over the course of my life if I follow the evidence and use careful reasoning. That’s both exciting and nerve-wracking.

The drowning child thought experiment was powerful enough to make me buy into the 

 project. Actually, I didn’t just buy in — I felt infused with a resounding sense of motivation that I can make a difference.

But that motivation soon turned into anxiety as I began grappling with the sorts of tricky philosophical and empirical questions that come with putting these feelings of obligation and fuzzy ideas into practice.

“Now, what can I do to help as many people as possible?”

, I would think to myself. Anything less would mean that someone might not ‌live a happy life. This sort of practical introspection quickly morphed into something like, 

Blog

Announcing our 2022 strategy and how you can help (and we're hiring!)

It's perfectly okay to be an imperfect effective altruist

Donating like a startup investor: Hits-based giving, explained

스타트업 투자자처럼 기부하기: 히트 기반 기부란 무엇인가

The value of small donations from a longtermist perspective

Why your charitable giving should be sustainable

Why you should mention the Pledge in your LinkedIn summary

Member Profile: Henry Howard

Member Profile: Adriana Saso-Graves

This design thinking technique can make you a more effective giver