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Giving What We Can is an international community of people donating at least 10% of their income to the organisations which can most effectively use it to help others.
We believe that if people are to do this, it is important that they know that there are many others out there doing the same and that there is information readily available about the best places and ways to donate. We therefore encourage people to make a long-term commitment through the Pledge to Give, put members in contact with each other, support people to set up in person meet-up groups and run the Giving What We Can Trust, which provides an easy and cost-effective way for people to donate. Using the data we’ve gathered over the five years since we started, we estimate that we have already moved around $6 to effective charities for every $1 we have spent, and that a realistic estimate of our impact in the long term is closer to $60 going to effective charities for every $1 coming to us.
This year is going to be an amazing year for effective altruism. The publication of four books on the topic mean that more people than ever before will hear about effective giving. It is crucial that that awareness leads to long-term impact. This will be our focus over 2015. We will be capitalising on the increased awareness to set-up and support chapters across the English speaking world and Europe (the main markets of the books). We will increase our one-on-one outreach to encourage people to take the Pledge and continue to keep in close contact with our members to ensure member retention. For more information on our activities and team over 2015, see our latest Fundraising Prospectus.
We would like to raise our 2015 budget this spring, in order that we can focus without distractions on our core activities over the rest of the year. In order to have our full budget for 2015, and end the year with 12 months of reserves, we need to raise £150,000. If you’ve previously donated less than £1,000 to Giving What We Can, this is a fantastic time to give because right now donations over £1,000 from new donors are being matched (up to £5,000 per person and with a total cap of £50,000). Our stretch goal is to raise enough so that we don’t have to do another fundraising round for a year - in order to do that we would need to raise an extra 6 months or reserves, meaning we want to raise a total of £280,000. You can donate now at our CauseVox page. If you have any questions please get in touch!
Thanks for the question Jon.
With regard to the pledged amount, this comes from members' predictions of their future annual salary, which we think are likely to be underestimates. We also use median wage as a stand-in if we're missing future salary data, which (given our members are in general likely to earn more than median wage) we also think is conservative. Accordingly, it's likely that the amount donated will be higher in reality.
We address this in more detail in our fundraising prospectus – see Appendix 2 for the full working.
From page 23 of the prospectus:
And the footnotes to the above:
The final $146m figure is arrived at by multiplying members' estimates of future salary by the number of years they have left in their careers. It therefore doesn't take into account any of this growth that you'd expect in reality. As such, it wouldn't make sense to go back and try to model growth based on the $146 million figure (say, $1.7 million in year one, growing to around $5.6 million/year by year 40, rather than a flat $3.7m per year)*.
Instead, you'd need to apply your model (say, fast wage growth in the first 10-20 years of a career, then slower growth until retirement) to the member estimates first to derive the final figure, and use the yearly amounts in your calculation. Given our assumption that member estimates of future salary err on the low side, this means that both the final pledged amount, and the per-year amounts are likely to be higher, and therefore our effectiveness would in fact be higher, notwithstanding that the discounting/attrition rate would affect the final number more aggressively.
* I've tried this calculation, assuming a 4% growth rate for years 1-20 and a 2% growth rate in years 21-40. With a year one pledge of $1.7 million, this grows to $5.6 million by year 40, for a total of ~$147 million donated. This drops the effectiveness estimate down to 44-1 - a significant drop, but still excellent return for a donation to Giving What We Can. To reiterate, I think this would be a significant underestimate of peoples' future incomes.
Also, sorry if this reply doesn't exactly address your rephrased question – I wrote it in response to your first comment :)
Here's a copy of the spreadsheet with the calculations added in as above if you want to play around with it.
Thanks again for the question, let me know if there's anything else you want clarified.