This Giving Season, we're spreading the norm of significant and effective giving together.
Personal recommendations are one of the strongest drivers behind the 🔸10% Pledge and 🔹 Trial Pledge . Each 🔸 10% pledger donates an average of $100,000 over their lifetime and as a pledger yourself, you're uniquely positioned to inspire your friends and family.
Together - we're inspiring a cultural norm of giving effectively and significantly.
On this page, we'll provide you with some resources for talking about pledging and effective giving with those you care about. We'll also provide you with templates on how you can write engaging social media posts about your pledge experience.
Talking about your pledge can be both exciting and scary. To help you, we'll share with you a couple of pointers that helped us and other pledgers have conversations about the pledge.
First off: keep any conversation a conversation. We also strongly believe a lot more people should take a pledge (😉) but "hard selling" or "shaming" someone "into it" never works. From a place of excitement and curiosity, lean towards asking and learning more about the other. Seek to understand what excites the other, so that you can connect pledging to their ambitions and worldview.
Once you've learned about someone's passions and worldview, you can share about what led you to pledging. Just share why and how you came to the 🔸 10% Pledge or 🔹 Trial Pledge. We've often found that sharing your personal doubts and how you overcame them, to be a great way to address some of the ambitions and doubts that you might have discovered in the first "listing and asking" part of the conversation.
Finally, the most important part, ask - without pressure - "Would you like to take a 🔸 10% Pledge or 🔹 Trial Pledge?". At first this can be scary, but really; it's fun! Ask it without expectation, or the expectation of a no. That's great! Ask more questions and address doubts, again not selling, but genuinely trying to understand. If it feels right, you can ask again if they are interested in pledging. If they say yes: great! Our suggestion is to help them set it up then and there. If they say no: great! This is the default and expected outcome of any conversation, and you've just had a "conversation that counts". You might have planted the seed that leads to a pledge in the future!
Have fun! And expect a lot of people to not want to or be ready to take the pledge ☺️. A 🔸 10% pledge leads to an average of $100,000 donations, of which $10,000 counterfactually. If it takes you 100 conversations of 30 minutes to inspire one 🔸 10% pledge, that's still $200 of counterfactual donations per hour 🤩!
How to talk about effective giving
Coming Soon
Coming Soon
We’ve identified some common reasons people may be hesitant to pledge. Below you’ll find some ways to respond to various misconceptions.
You can find more in-depth examples of ways to respond to common objections on our ‘5 things you've got wrong about the Giving What We Can Pledge' page.
Old templates
Canva templates: Instagram post, Instagram story, LinkedIn 1:1, LinkedIn banner
New templates
Coming soon (in approximately one week)
Whilst the greatest reward is the impact itself – knowing you've inspired others to give more effectively, we want to thank advocates who help grow the effective giving community.
We'll send a Giving What We Can t-shirt to everyone who:
After someone has pledged, they can add your name as the reason they were inspired. Those that mention you will then be manually added to your “score”.
If someone pledged but forgot to mention you, please reach out at amalie.farestvedt@givingwhatwecan.org and we’ll ensure it's added to your “score”.
You can also self report the amount of conversations that count you’ve had here.
coming soon
coming soon