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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!
Ok this is all fair. I think, however, that a big fraction of the historical impact is due to on-going activity, of the kind that could continue, rather than being all due to the 'set up' generating the stream. And that would mean the historical ratio is a reasonable guide to the future.
This can be hard to see from the outside, but if you look at where new pledgers are coming from, it's often new press coverage or student group activity. Many also only take the pledge after being nudged by someone in person, even if they had heard about GWWC some time before, so there's an important role just talking to lots of people about the pledge. These kinds of activities can be scaled much further.
Moreover, GWWC tries to monitor the number of new pledges generated by new activities and will quit on anything that's not generating enough. You can see some estimates by Rob of marginal returns above.
Overall, you'd still have to be very pessimistic. Suppose GWWC's historical leverage ratio is 60. For the future leverage ratio to be less than one, you'd (roughly) need to think there was a 98% chance that marginal activities produced zero returns rather than historical rates of return.
Finally, I think it's helpful to bear in mind how tiny GWWC is. Suppose taking the GWWC pledge is as ethically demanding as vegetarianism, then it could one day reach 1% of the developed world. Since GWWC only has 1000 members, it has only reached 0.01% of its addressable market. Given such limited penetration, I think it would be surprising if there were no further returns to be had. It's not as if students at Cambridge (where ~100 people have taken the pledge recently) are radically different from those at other prestigious universities, so we should expect similar efforts to work elsewhere, so GWWC could already be 10x bigger even if just expanded among prestigious universities. If anything you might expect marginal costs per pledge to be dropping at this stage in GWWC's growth as you benefit from economies of scale and critical mass effects (and there's some evidence this is happening). Finally, given the chance that 99.99% of the value still lies in the future, it seems well worth spending a sizeable amount of resources now figuring out whether further growth is possible and how best to do it. In some ways, GWWC's marginal leverage ratio is besides the point: it's like looking at Google in its early days and deciding whether to invest or not based on whether it's already profitable.