CharitiesHigh Impact Athletes
High Impact Athletes
Charity

High Impact Athletes

Effective Giving Advocacy

HIA seeks to maximise philanthropic impact by guiding athletes and their supporters to highly-effective donation opportunities

Effective giving and/or effective altruism

What problem is High Impact Athletes working on?

Athletes have one of the most powerful cultural voices in the world today. That voice is currently being used to sell things to billions of sports fans around the world. HIA wants to use that voice to promote giving back, and to make effective giving so ubiquitous within the sporting world that aspiring pro athletes see altruism as a part of the athlete lifestyle.

High Impact Athletes (HIA) aims to create a groundswell of positive impact in the world, driven by the generosity and social influence of successful athletes.

What does High Impact Athletes do?

High Impact Athletes connects professional athletes with "the most cost-effective, evidence-based charities in the world" and harnesses the power of the collective athlete voice to educate the world about the outsized benefits of giving effectively.

HIA tracks its impact based on calculations from charity evaluators GiveWell, Animal Charity Evaluators, The Life You Can Save, and Founders Pledge, and calculates the ratio of donations influenced to HIA expenses to determine its impact ratio of 2.5:1.

As of October 2024, HIA reports that it has:

  • A community of over 230 world-class athletes.
  • An audience of more than 29 million people.
  • Influenced over $1,500,000 USD in donations.
  • Improved the lives of more than 350,000 humans and more than 5.5 million animals.
  • Advised more than 400 donors.

High Impact Athletes maintains a list of top charity recommendations in three key cause areas and runs a Maximum Good portfolio for donors who want to spread their giving across multiple cause areas. HIA also runs a giving portfolio for each of their three key cause areas (see below).

What are High Impact Athletes' giving portfolios?

In addition to maintaining a list of top charity recommendations, HIA runs four giving portfolios for donors that want to spread their giving across multiple charities. These are:

What information does Giving What We Can have about the cost-effectiveness of High Impact Athletes?1.

The impact-focused evaluator Founders Pledge previously conducted an evaluation highlighting the cost-effectiveness of Giving Multipliers in general. We don't currently have further information about the cost-effectiveness of High Impact Athletes beyond it doing work in a high-impact cause area and taking a reasonably promising approach.

Please note that GWWC does not evaluate individual charities. Our recommendations are based on the research of third-party, impact-focused charity evaluators our research team has found to be particularly well-suited to help donors do the most good per dollar, according to their recent evaluator investigations. Our other supported programs are those that align with our charitable purpose — they are working on a high-impact problem and take a reasonably promising approach (based on publicly-available information).

At Giving What We Can, we focus on the effectiveness of an organisation's work -- what the organisation is actually doing and whether their programs are making a big difference. Some others in the charity recommendation space focus instead on the ratio of admin costs to program spending, part of what we’ve termed the “overhead myth.” See why overhead isn’t the full story and learn more about our approach to charity evaluation.