Giving What We Can

What problem is Giving What We Can working on?

There are millions of charities to choose from when donating. And the choice matters — because lives are on the line. Depending on the charity you pick, you could do a little good, or a lot of good (or in some cases, even do harm). How can people know that their donations will have the impact they want?

Giving What We Can was one of the first in a growing network of like-minded organisations focused on effective altruism — the project of using evidence and reason to figure out how to best contribute to helping others, and taking action on that basis.

What does Giving What We Can do?

Giving What We Can (GWWC) inspires donations to the world’s most effective organisations by creating a culture in which people are encouraged to give more, and give more effectively. We do this through:

• Our research and resources, such as our recommended charities, informed by our evaluations of evaluators.
• Cultivating a community of effective givers through events, newsletters, and our giving pledges.
• Hosting this donation platform to help donors support high-impact charities.

We’re a nonprofit funded by philanthropic donations, and all of our programmes are free. Find out more about us.

Why donate to Giving What We Can?

Evidence of Impact:

As of 2024, Giving What We Can has inspired over $375 million USD in donations¹ and more than 9,000 people in ~100 countries have pledged to give a significant portion of their income to effective charities.

In our latest internal impact evaluation, we estimated that from 2020 to 2022:

• GWWC generated an additional $62 million in value for highly-effective charities.
• GWWC had a giving multiplier of 30x, meaning that for each $1 spent on our operations, we generated $30 of value to highly-effective charities on average. Please note that this isn’t a claim that your additional dollar will have a 30x multiplier, even though we think it will still add a lot of value. Read more on how to interpret our results and see the CEARCH estimate below.
• Each new GWWC Pledge generates >$20,000 of value for highly-effective charities that would not have happened without GWWC.

Additionally, a 2024 external evaluation of GWWC by the Centre for Exploratory Altruism Research (CEARCH) that did attempt to estimate the value of an additional dollar (it looked at marginal cost-effectiveness while our internal impact evaluation looked at average cost-effectiveness²) estimated that every additional $1 GWWC spends on promoting pledging in 2025 will have an impact equivalent to generating $13 for GiveWell top charities. (Note that CEARCH acknowledges high uncertainty in their estimates.) When CEARCH’s model is adjusted to show average cost-effectiveness in the 2019–2024 period, it yields a similar estimate to the 30x we estimated in our internal impact evaluation, with an estimated multiplier of around 40x.³

Need for funding:

Our largest funder is Open Philanthropy; however, to encourage the cultivation of a diverse donor base and to help support a wider variety of organisations, Open Philanthropy aims to fund no more than 50% of our budget. This makes the importance of individual donor contributions very important to the success of our operations. We've raised our baseline budget for 2024 but are still looking for funding for our expansion budget (which includes plans that we think would significantly increase the reach of effective giving, but that we won't be able to fund with our baseline budget) as well as our baseline operations in 2025.

Indeed, a recent Open Philanthropy blog post suggests that individual donors support Giving What We Can, due to both its evidence of impact and funding gap.⁴