Project summary

Giving What We Can (GWWC) is on a mission to create a world in which giving effectively and significantly is a cultural norm. With the opportunity for effective philanthropy to make a serious dent in the global challenges facing us today, our mission is as relevant as ever. We’re best known for the 10% Pledge, through which ~9,000 people have committed to giving at least 10% of their income to the most effective charities, helping inspire those who can afford it to give what we can to help others. We also do education and outreach about high-impact donations and how to concretely make a difference through effective philanthropy, leveraging thousands of hours of research to help donors find the highest-impact problems and identify the best charities working to solve them. Our community has already donated almost $400 million USD.

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

We grow the effective giving movement through our three key initiatives:

• Our pledges, which inspire a global community of donors to give more significantly, more sustainably, and more effectively

• Our advice, which helps donors make more informed giving decisions and guides them to high-impact giving opportunities across a diversity of worldviews

• Our donation platform, which makes effective giving easy and widely accessible across multiple countries

Additionally, we support and provide coordination for the broader effective giving ecosystem, including by making our resources and tools available to other effective giving organisations, coordinating within the ecosystem, and helping incubate new projects to fill pressing gaps.

Our strategy in 2024

We have the hypothesis — informed by our impact evaluation — that our pledges will be core to GWWC achieving its ambitious vision. Not only are they immensely scalable and directly connected to our mission, we know that the GWWC Pledge is a powerful institution: we’ve seen more than 9000 people take this Pledge and generally stick to it, giving highly effectively and on average donating more every year. From the 12 years of data that we have, our best guess estimate is that each GWWC Pledger donates in the order of $100,000 USD to highly effective charities over their lifetime. This means that we estimate that our current 9093 pledgers alone will contribute close to 1,000,000,000 USD to highly effective charities, but more importantly, it means that there is potential for immense impact if we manage to find ways to bring the Pledge to a wider audience.

Therefore, we are looking to find out if we can achieve scalable pledge growth. We have set a tentative Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) of 1 million pledges to guide our thinking to be suitably ambitious, and have defined Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) that will help us learn about the pledger journey, experiment with various strategies — leveraging what we think of as our most valuable assets: our community and network — and lay the operational foundations for scaling the pledge in future years. We hope to see early signs of success this year — and celebrate the 10,000 pledger mark — but our focus is on finding the pathways that will help us scale to 1 million pledgers.

See our strategy documents for more details.

How will this funding be used?

We’re fundraising for our general budget. With any funding received we would expect to continue with the delivery of our programmes, explore how we can continue to improve and grow them, and consolidate our org strategy and future plans.

We’re currently fundraising for ~1.5m GBP to ensure that Giving What We Can has sustainable funds for operating into 2025 and beyond.

Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?

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 an Executive Director (Luke Freeman)

We recommend you check out our track record and 2020–2022 impact evaluation here.

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?

GWWC is now in its 16th year. It seems like we’ll continue in our mission to create a world in which giving effectively and significantly is a cultural norm. While specific scenarios may vary, we've identified several general possibilities:

1. Our current approach may not be the most effective way to pursue our mission. Outcome: We would reassess and redirect our strategies to better align with our goals.

2. Certain aspects of our work may not justify their financial or opportunity costs. Outcome: We would de-emphasize or economize these areas, focusing resources on more impactful initiatives.

3. Inability to secure sufficient funding for planned activities. Outcome: We would significantly increase fundraising efforts, scale back growth plans, and potentially reduce overall operations.

What other funding are you or your project getting?

Giving What We Can is funded through a combination of direct donations from members and other individuals, as well as grants from philanthropic foundations. So far our largest funder has been Open Philanthropy. In 2022, we received funding from the Future Fund. We don’t take any fees from donors who use our platform or from organisations we choose to recommend. See our transparency page here.