Our impact

One of the core priorities of the Giving What We Can research team is understanding and improving our own impact. As an organisation, we aim to encourage effective giving, and we believe that we should hold ourselves to the same high standards we promote. That’s why we conduct internal impact evaluations: to assess how cost-effectively we move money to highly effective charities.

This page explains why we evaluate our impact, how we approach these evaluations, and what we have found so far. You can also explore the full results of our most recent evaluations.

Why we evaluate our impact

Broadly, we evaluate our impact to hold ourselves accountable, make data-informed strategic decisions to help us better carry out our mission, and ensure we're continuing to cost-effectively move money to highly effective charities. Our impact evaluations:

  • Inform our strategy: We want to know which of our activities are most cost-effective, so we can better allocate our time and resources. We also want to identify any weaknesses and correct them.
  • Ensure accountability: We want to be confident that the value we create justifies the funding we receive.
  • Support donor decision-making: We want prospective donors to Giving What We Can to have credible, transparent information about the value we generate — so they can weigh supporting us alongside other donation opportunities.
  • Contribute to positive norms: We believe that serious impact evaluation is part of the bedrock of effective giving and we want to help normalise this practice.

Our approach

Giving What We Can’s value comes from increasing the volume of donations we cause to flow to highly effective charities. To estimate our cost-effectiveness, we use a metric called a giving multiplier. This metric asks the question:

For the average dollar spent by Giving What We Can, how many dollars do we cause to be donated to highly effective charities?

For example, if for every $1 we spend, we estimate that we cause $5 in additional donations to highly effective charities, then our giving multiplier is 5x.

If our multiplier were below 1x, we could be doing more good by redirecting our funding to highly effective charities directly — and would need to reconsider our work.

Of course, estimating counterfactual impact (i.e., the impact that wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t exist) is complex. We face difficult conceptual and empirical questions — for example, how should we value donations we cause to happen today compared to donations we cause to happen in 5 years? While many of these questions don’t have definitive answers, we aim to make justifiable assumptions, generate useful estimates, and be transparent about our reasoning and results.

Our most recent results

In our most recent evaluation, we estimated that between 2023 and 2024, Giving What We Can caused an additional $24M to be donated to highly effective charities at a cost of $4M. As a result, our best-guess giving multiplier for the period was approximately 6x. The majority of our impact for this period came from our work to grow and support pledgers. We estimate that the average 🔸10% pledger will donate $100K over the course of their pledge. After applying various discounts — for time, effectiveness, and counterfactuality — we estimate that, for each 🔸10% Pledge, GWWC generates, on average, about $15K in counterfactual donations to highly effective charities.

These results are subject to a number of caveats and limitations — for example, our giving multiplier estimate is average, not marginal. We provide guidance on how to interpret our results in light of this and other limitations in our full report.

Past impact evaluations

We have published two formal impact evaluations to date:

Going forward, we aim to continue to publish impact evaluations every one to two years.

We’re committed to improving our methods over time. To share feedback, please reach out to us at research@givingwhatwecan.org.