Transparency

Giving What We Can is a nonprofit with the mission of making giving effectively and significantly a cultural norm.

Part of that is promoting a culture of transparency. On this page, we outline - among other things - how we’re funded, potential conflicts of interest, and our approach to staff pay.

About us

Giving What We Can was launched in 2009 by co-founders Toby Ord and William MacAskill (philosophers at the University of Oxford), along with Ord's wife Bernadette Young (a physician in training at the time). Today, our team is managed by a CEO (Sjir Hoeijmakers) who is overseen by our Trustees and Boards of Directors.

As of May 2025, almost everyone in our team has signed the 🔸10% Pledge to give 10% of their income to effective charities throughout their lifetime. While this isn’t a requirement to join the team, it reflects our commitment to our mission. Read more about us.

How we’re funded

Giving What We Can is currently funded through a combination of:

• Grants from philanthropic foundations. This accounts for ~50% of our income as of early 2025, and is currently all from Open Philanthropy.
• Donations from members and other individuals. This accounts for ~30% of our income as of early 2025. In addition to direct donations to GWWC, this includes "tips" from donors using our donation platform.
• Accrued interest on funds. This account for ~20% of our income as of early 2025, and is mainly the result of GWWC holding funds until we are able to grant them out to our supported programs in our quarterly grantmaking cycle. This is part of what enables us to operate our donation platform and make grants globally at no costs to donors or recipient programs.

We don’t take any fees from donors who use our platform or from organisations we choose to recommend.

We have an excess funding policy to ensure we don't build up unnecessary financial reserves and only accept donations GWWC is best placed to spend cost-effectively towards our mission.

Our credibility

We have a commitment to being transparent and open to feedback. Here are some examples of this commitment.

We acknowledge our mistakes

We maintain a page outlining our mistakes. While we believe we have made significant progress towards our mission, we have sometimes fallen short of the standards we have set for ourselves and believe it is important to publicly acknowledge these mistakes so that we can do better in future.

We share the research that underlies our giving recommendations

One of the core ways we help achieve our mission is by providing charity recommendations to help donors maximise their impact. We publish all the research informing these recommendations on our website.

We make it easy to provide feedback on any aspect of our work or leave a complaint

Here's how you can submit feedback or make a complaint.

We evaluate our impact

Our last impact evaluation was published in 2023, and we are committed to publishing these periodically.

We acknowledge potential conflicts of interest

There are various trade-offs we need to make to ensure we are responsibly managing any potential conflicts of interest with furthering our mission to the best of our ability.

For example, our giving recommendations are informed by our evaluations of charity evaluators and grantmakers. Yet, for some of the evaluators we look into, we have potential conflicts of interest. We outline these conflicts in all our evaluations, and where possible, take steps to reduce them.

While we generally acknowledge potential conflicts of interest when and where relevant (e.g. in our research reports and on our website), the following documents some of our key ones:

• We receive significant funding from Open Philanthropy, who also fund many of the evaluators we rely on for our recommendations.
• Our founders and board members have close relationships to many of the other organisations we recommend and work with. For example, our co-founder, Will MacAskill, also founded 80,000 Hours.
• Our CEO, Sjir Hoeijmakers:
  • Formerly worked at Founders Pledge (one of the evaluators we've previously used to inform our recommendations and may use again in the future).
  • Is on the Management Committee of the Founders Pledge Patient Philanthropy Fund (a fund our donation platform supports).
• Two team members based in Australia are employed by Effective Altruism Australia (which our donation platform supports) on a grant from Giving What We Can for the purpose of growing effective giving internationally under the Giving What We Can brand.

We have a policy and procedures for removing members

Members may no longer be listed on our member page due to several reasons:

• Resignation: Members who choose to voluntarily resign from their pledge.
• Expiration: Trial Pledge members are automatically removed from the list after their Trial Pledge reaches its end date.
• Merge requests: Some members have accidentally signed up twice and asked that their accounts be merged which may result in one or more pledges being removed.
• Data deletion requests: In compliance with relevant regulations like GDPR, we honour requests for deletion of member information, which may not necessarily be taken to be a pledge resignation but does result in removal from our public members list.
• Member removals: In cases where members are identified as clearly fake accounts, or are nominated for removal due to actions significantly contradicting GWWC's values, mission or code of conduct.

Our member removal policy is available to view.

We are transparent about staff remuneration

We share how we approach pay and benefits and publish our salary calculator and policy, including our CEO's pay as an example.