Our mission at Giving What We Can is to create a culture of giving significantly and effectively. As part of this, we provide information and infrastructure for donors to find and fund the most impactful charities.
Here’s how we decide which charities we recommend, feature on our website, and support through our donation platform .[1]
Giving What We Can has three categories of supported charities, nonprofit organisations, and charitable funds:
To fit in any of the above categories, the donation option must be capable of receiving funds from private individuals, and fit within Giving What We Can’s charitable purpose. Below is more detail about each of these categories, the purpose they serve, and their inclusion criteria.
We list our current top-rated funds, charities, and nonprofits on our giving recommendations page.
We generally recommend that donors give to funds, because they are managed by experts who work closely with charities to ensure they receive funding in proportion to their need and expected cost-effectiveness. To be a top-rated fund, its grantmaking must be managed by one of several trusted evaluators — read more about the charitable giving experts we trust and why we trust them.
To be a top-rated charity, that charity must meet the requirement that we or one of our trusted evaluators has conducted an investigation into the charity and found it met a very high standard of expected cost-effectiveness.
Our goal in making these recommendations is to provide donors with an overview of some of the highest-impact donation opportunities we know of across a range of worldviews. These are organisations that are highly cost-effective in expectation and generally have publicly available research supporting their cost-effectiveness.
Notably, this excludes charities that may well be extremely cost-effective but simply haven’t been investigated by one of our trusted charity evaluators.
We do not process requests from organisations looking to receive top-rated status.
As well as providing recommendations, our donation platform lists other very promising funds, charities and nonprofits that we think are worth listing publicly so that donors can more easily consider them. These fall into three categories:
Due to the research team’s limited capacity, we do not aim to be comprehensive in which organisations we add as listed. We generally only consider whether an organisation should be listed if either:
In addition to the above, when choosing whether to add or retain a listed organisation, we consider the amount of funds we expect the organisation to receive by being on our platform. This is because maintaining our donation platform is expensive, so we want to make sure that listed organisations are receiving enough benefit to justify our operational costs.
In addition to providing advice on how to give effectively, Giving What We Can also supports the effective giving community more broadly. Our donation platform supports donors by providing many impactful donation options in one place, and it helps organisations receive donations from many donors across the world.
In some cases, there are organisations that don’t yet meet the criteria to be listed prominently on our website, but meet our criteria to be supported by our donation platform. These organisations can be found using a direct link from the organisations’ own websites, but do not appear on our giving recommendations or donations pages.
Generally speaking, the following would be sufficient for an organisation to be added as an unlisted donation option:
We actively monitor whether charities should retain their unlisted status.
We have stopped accepting applications for new unlisted charities for now, barring exceptional circumstances (such as when the Giving What We Can research team believes a project looks exceptionally useful and would derive exceptional benefit from being on our platform). Organisations can express interest here.
We do not process requests from organisations looking to receive listed or top-rated status. We have also stopped accepting applications for new unlisted charities, but still maintain an expression of interest form for exceptional cases (see above).