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.
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.
Giving What We Can is currently funded through a combination of:
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.
We have a commitment to being transparent and open to feedback. Here are some examples of this commitment.
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.
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.
Here's how you can submit feedback or make a complaint.
Our last impact evaluation was published in 2023, and we are committed to publishing these periodically.
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:
Members may no longer be listed on our member page due to several reasons:
Our member removal policy is available to view.
We share how we approach pay and benefits and publish our salary calculator and policy, including our CEO's pay as an example.