Donating Effectively

Donations can change lives. But in the U.S. alone there are over 1.5  million registered nonprofits. Which ones are the most impactful?

The Effective Altruism movement presents effective donation options across four main cause areas (poverty, animal welfare, existential risk, and EA community-building).

Fast Facts

• GiveWell is the leading evaluator of charities focused on helping the global poor.

• GiveWell measures how many lives are saved or the most per additional dollar donated.

• GiveWell top charities can save a life for about $4,500 (2022).

• GiveWell spends over 30,000 hours annually researching charity and is open to evidence-based Christian aid charities.

• To date, they have assessed hundreds of promising charities, and currently recommend just nine. You can read about here.

Fast Facts

• Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) was founded in 2012 for finding effective animal welfare charities.

• ACE-recommended charities improve conditions on factory farms, encourage vegetarian diets and promote alternatives to animal-based meats.

• ACE finds that every $1 to corporate campaigns affected 9 - 120 years of hen life (2019).

• ACE recommends three top charities.

• Vox covered their charity recommendations which you can read about here.

Fast Facts

• There are now over a dozen orgs working on longtermist and AI-risk related causes.

• MIRI - One of the first groups to start working on AI safety, Miri published a number of papers on safety issues and how to resolve them.

• Ought - a non-profit that does research on using machine learning to support human deliberation to help address the alignment problem.

• AI Impacts - works on forecasting progress in machine learning and predicting its likely impacts.

Fast Facts

• Centre for Effective Altruism - the primary organisation that aims to grow and support the effective altruism community. Their work covers a number of areas including running the EA Global conferences and supporting local and student Effective Altruism groups.

• 80,000 hours - one of the founding EA organisations that conducts research into careers that do the most good and then helps people pursue them.

• EACH is a global community of Christians who care about EA. EACH aims to help Christians to give more effectively and pursue high-impact careers.

Giving effectively is hard. EA funds are a simple solution for anyone interested in outsourcing effectiveness research to a team of experts in EA. It is like a mutual fund that aims to maximise the effectiveness of your donation. The funds are currently focused on Global Health and Development, Animal Welfare, Long-Term Future and Effective Altruism Infrastructure.

The main reasons to donate to the funds are

• Donate with confidence — by drawing on the expertise of grant managers at trusted, highly-effective organizations like the Open Philanthropy Project.

• Get economies of scale — by pooling your donations with the community, you can contribute towards opportunities that aren't open to individual donors.

• Maximize leverage — the Funds can move faster than big foundations, so can be more responsive as new funding needs emerge.

A good way to stay committed to giving is to pledge to give a proportion of your income to effective charities. Giving What We Can was one of the first EA organisations. They encourage you to pledge to give 10% of your income to effective charities. The pledge has been taken by over 8,000 people who have collectively donated over $200,000,000 so far.

Wherever you are in your faith and your altruistic commitments, you can have a massive impact with even a 1% giving pledge.