We're renaming the Giving What We Can Pledge

For the better part of a year, Giving What We Can has been thinking more deliberately about how our brand choices could accelerate or hinder progress towards our mission of making giving effectively and significantly a cultural norm. One topic that has consistently surfaced is the name of our primary pledge.

While we think the “Giving What We Can Pledge” accurately captures the spirit we want to cultivate and the message we want to portray – that many people can afford to give more significantly – we’ve also identified some issues. We’ve noticed people referring to the Giving What We Can Pledge by all sorts of names (the income pledge, the lifetime pledge, the pledge, the giving all we can pledge, and the give what you can pledge, to name just a few) which leads to confusion and reduces “stickiness.” On that note, we’ve noticed people confusing the Giving What We Can Pledge with other similarly named pledges (like the Giving Pledge for billionaires, for example). We’ve also realised that having our organisation name in the title of the pledge can make it difficult for other organisations to easily promote it.

Above: An internal slide from our name-change deliberations

We considered several alternate names, had many healthy debates within our team, and surveyed over 30 key stakeholders from across the world and the effective giving ecosystem. The result? We are delighted to announce that the Giving What We Can Pledge is now the 🔸10% Pledge!

What will this help us achieve?

As we announced at EAG London, we’re aiming to reach 10,000 active 10% pledgers in 2024 and we have ambitions to grow to 100,000 and eventually, to 1 million pledgers and beyond.

To achieve these ambitious goals, we need a name and a brand that can achieve saturation. We think the 10% Pledge could get us there because:

• It’s short
• It’s easy to say, remember, and understand
• It can be hosted by partner organisations (more on this below!)
• It has the potential for “stickiness” and increasing awareness, especially with the addition of the 🔸orange diamond symbol!

Above: 1. Benefits of renaming to the 🔸10% Pledge 2. Our vision of the diamond logo at work

How can you help?

If you’ve taken the 🔸10% Pledge (formerly known as the Giving What We Can Pledge), we’d be grateful if you could add the 🔸“small orange diamond” emoji to your name on your social media accounts.

(If you’ve taken the Trial Pledge, you can instead add a small blue diamond 🔹 emoji.)

Above: An example of adding the diamond and 🔸10% Pledge line in bio!

We’re hoping that seeing several 🔸’s across social media will cause people to be curious about what this signifies and lead them to learn more.

It would be ideal to also add a statement like “🔸10% Pledge #XXXX with @GivingWhatWeCan” or “I’ve taken The 🔸@10percentpledge) to give to effective charities” to your bio (as pictured above) so those who do want to learn more can easily find out about it! (Note: You can look up your pledge number on our updated members page)

And if you want to help the diamond emoji be even more visible for launch week, consider posting with the phrase "I've taken the 🔸#10PercentPledge because..." It would be exciting to see social media light up with these types of posts!

More broadly, whether or not you’ve taken a pledge, you can sign up to help us reach 10,000 pledgers. If you’re keen, fill out this form to let us know in which ways you might be able to help out!

More about our new partnerships

Several effective giving aligned organisations have expressed interest in raising awareness about the Pledge to their audiences. We’ve heard from some of these organisations that it would be helpful if they could provide a way for their audiences to take the Pledge without introducing Giving What We Can as a new brand, which could be confusing for users, especially if they have to be directed to the Giving What We Can site to sign the Pledge!

The 🔸10% Pledge rename allows us to more easily work with partners to integrate pledge signing (for both the 🔸10% Pledge and Trial Pledge) into their website. Partners will either have a custom co-branded pledge flow, or be able to host our pledges directly on their website using an API. When someone signs a pledge with a partner organisation, both Giving What We Can and the partner organisation will be notified of the new pledger and be able to send follow-up communications.

We’re excited to announce that we have already launched partnerships with Animal Advocacy Careers, Ayuda Efectiva, Effective Altruism UK, Effektiv Spenden (EN and DE), One for the World, Ge Effektivt and Gi Effektivt with several more planned in the coming weeks and months. You can see an active list of our current partners on our updated pledge page.

What’s staying the same?

Everything except for the name of our primary pledge and the launch of our new partnerships! We will continue to operate in the same way as before and with the same mission. We are NOT renaming the organisation (which will remain Giving What We Can) and we are NOT renaming our other pledges (which will remain the Trial Pledge, the Further Pledge and the Company Pledge).

Additionally, the 🔸10% Pledge, formerly known as the Giving What We Can Pledge, still works in the exact same way. You can still pledge more than 10% of income, and you can also pledge to give the greater of 10% of income or a custom percentage of wealth.

Questions?

If you have any unanswered questions about this change or want to share your ideas for how we can grow pledgers now and into the future, you can reach us at community@givingwhatwecan.org

A big thanks

Finally, we’d like to thank Alex Savard, who initiated a large part of the renaming proposal while he was an employee at Giving What We Can.