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Founders Pledge

Founders Pledge

Founders Pledge empowers entrepreneurs to do immense good by conducting rigorous charity research and advising its members on how to maximise their impact through strategic philanthropy.

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Cause area: Multiple cause areas
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What problem is Founders Pledge working on?

Founders Pledge is a global community of entrepreneurs committed to finding and funding solutions to the world’s most pressing problems. On joining, every member makes a legally binding pledge to commit a chosen portion of their personal wealth to charity. This sends a powerful signal to the startup ecosystem: impactful giving should be the norm, not the exception.

What does Founders Pledge do?

Founders Pledge champions evidence-led and thoughtful approaches to impact. It equips members with charity research, streamlined giving infrastructure, and a global network of experts to learn from — empowering them to bring their resources to the global problem-solving table.

Specifically, Founders Pledge provides:

  • Community: Entrepreneurs can explore the issues they care about in the company of world-leading experts and members from 28 countries. Founders Pledge’s intimate events gather the voices at the frontier of social change to educate on evidence-driven impact strategies.
  • Research into high-impact giving: Founders Pledge’s charity research team provides bespoke guidance to identify the most transparent, high-leverage giving opportunities around the world, tailored to members’ unique values.
  • Support: Founders Pledge is the only zero-cost, end-to-end solution for charitable giving, with complete administrative support and a Donor Advised Fund.

What evidence is there of Founders Pledge’s effectiveness?

Founders Pledge is one of our trusted evaluators and therefore meets our criteria to be listed on our donation platform. Our trusted evaluators are charitable giving experts who focus on impact — their research into the best charities means your donations can do even more good. Learn more about charity evaluators we trust and why.

As of 2022, Founders Pledge reports that since launching in 2015, its community has collectively pledged over $8 billion to social causes, with over $890 million already donated to high-impact charities. Spanning 37 countries and over 1,700 members, its membership includes the people behind industry-leading companies such as DeepMind, Skype, Spotify, Uber, and Planet.

At Giving What We Can, we focus on the effectiveness of an organisation’s work, which considers much more than just the administration costs of the organisation. Learn more about this common “overhead myth” and our approach to charity evaluation.

Why donate through the Giving What We Can donation platform?

Your donations through our portal are tax deductible in the UK, US, and the Netherlands. Giving What We Can does not take any fees from donors using our platform or from charities listed on our platform. We are independently funded to promote our mission of making giving effectively and significantly a cultural norm. Read more on our transparency page.