2025 Impact evaluation

Aidan Whitfield
3 min read

Below, we've pasted the executive summary of our 2025 internal impact evaluation. For more about our key results and calculations, see our full report.

Executive summary

Giving What We Can (GWWC) is working towards a world without preventable suffering or existential risk, where everyone is able to flourish. We do this by making effective and significant charitable giving a norm among those who can — primarily through our flagship program: the 🔸10% Pledge, a lifetime commitment to give at least 10% of income to highly effective charities. Annually, our growing community of roughly 20K donors and pledgers records over $80M USD in charitable donations with GWWC.

As an organisation that advocates for effective giving, we think it is important to hold ourselves to the same standard. This report is our third impact evaluation of this type and examines the cost effectiveness of ourselves as an organisation in 2025.

Our headline findings and estimates:

  • Our 2025 giving multiplier was 7x — GWWC produced $16M in value for highly effective charities in 2025, at a cost of $2.3M to our funders — meaning for the average $1 spent, we caused $7 in donations to highly effective charities. This is up from 6x in our previous evaluation.
  • This improvement was driven by significant growth — in 2025, new 10% Pledges grew 24% and new Trial Pledges grew 43%. The volume of pledge donations GWWC caused to go to high-impact charities increased by 35%.
  • The 🔸10% Pledge remains a strong driver of effective giving — the average new 10% pledger will donate roughly $100K over their lifetime. After adjustments, we estimate $15K of this is impactful giving attributable to GWWC's work — broadly stable from our previous estimate, despite major updates to our modelling.
  • 🔹Trial Pledges are more valuable than we previously thought — our estimate has more than doubled to $5K per Trial Pledge, driven by our finding that trial pledgers who go on to take a 10% Pledge exhibit much higher retention rates than average 10% pledgers.
  • Pledger retention is a significant lever for increasing our impact — 10% Pledge attrition is faster than we previously estimated, and pledgers who stay give more over time, making retention efforts more valuable.
  • We have updated our guidance on Trial Pledge acquisition value — we now recommend that GWWC and pledge partners attribute $2K to the work of acquiring a new Trial Pledge (up from $1K). Our 10% Pledge acquisition guidance is unchanged at $10K.
  • We have growing evidence that GWWC influences some very large pledge donors — while the largest volume of donations comes from donors in the $10–100K bracket, several pledge donors now giving at the $1M+ level report that GWWC affects the amount they give.

These estimates have important limitations: our multiplier measures average historical cost effectiveness, not future or marginal returns; we do not capture all of our impact; and our analysis relies on modelling and survey data that is inherently uncertain. We discuss these limitations throughout the report.

Our full working sheet is publicly available. We welcome feedback at research@givingwhatwecan.org.