Giving What We Can
Effective Giving Research & Advocacy
Giving What We Can — the nonprofit organisation behind this website and donation platform — is a community of effective givers. We provide the support, community, and information donors need to do the most good with their charitable donations. Donating to this program supports our core operations.
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 programs 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.
- Our giving pledges, connecting our community of effective givers.
- Our donation platform, enabling donors to support high-impact programs.
Since 2025, we’re working towards our Big Hairy Audacious Goal of 1 million pledgers donating $3B USD to high-impact charities annually.
We’re a nonprofit practicing what we preach, we’re funded mainly by philanthropic donations, and all of our programmes are free.
Why donate to Giving What We Can?
Evidence of Impact:
As of early 2026, Giving What We Can’s community has recorded over $500 million USD in donations with us1 and more than 10,000 people in 100+ countries have pledged to give at least 10% of their income to highly effective charities.
In our latest internal impact evaluation, we estimated that between 2023 and 2024:
- GWWC caused an additional $24 million USD in value for highly-effective charities.
- GWWC had a giving multiplier of 6x, meaning that for each $1 spent on our operations, we generated $6 of value to highly-effective charities on average. Please note that this isn’t a claim that your additional dollar will have a 6x 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.
- The average🔸10% Pledger will donate $100,000 USD over the course of their pledge.
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 USD GWWC spends on promoting pledging in 2025 would have an impact equivalent to generating $13 USD for GiveWell top charities.3 (Note that CEARCH acknowledges high uncertainty in their estimates.)
Need for funding:
In order to build towards our Big Hairy Audacious Goal, we’re planning to grow significantly in 2026. Our planned budget for the year is ~$4.2M, of which (as of February 2026) we’re still looking to fundraise ~60%, including ~30% from new donors. We hence very much welcome interest from engaged donors and pledgers who would like to support our operations with a donation, large or small. Please reach out if you’re interested and have any questions!
Read more about how we’re currently funded.