Giving What We Can is a community of effective givers – an international society that helps people commit to giving more, and giving more effectively. Our members donate at least 10% of their career incomes to the charities they believe will help others the most.
Over the last year, our community has doubled in size. Our members have now collectively donated more than $10 million, and pledged over half a billion dollars! We have been testing out a range of ways to attract and retain new members, and seem to have found some to be really successful. Amongst these are setting up new local chapters and engaging in individual outreach. We would like to capitalise on this by scaling up some of the most promising avenues for attracting and retaining new members. To do so, we need to increase our team size. We've been lucky enough to have had really excellent applicants in our recent recruitment round. In order to carry out our plans — detailed in our fundraising prospectus — we need to reach our fundraising goal.
We think that the most relevant considerations for choosing whether to donate to us are our strong track record, and our plans for growth. But we also regularly calculate our effectiveness, to ensure that we are providing a substantial leverage ratio for our top charities. Our most up-to-date estimate for this indicates that for every $1 spent by Giving We Can, around $103 (counterfactually adjusted and time-discounted) will be moved to top charities.
Our budget for 2016 is £475,000, of which we already have £193,000 pledged. We therefore need to raise a further £282,000. You can find a full breakdown of our budget, along with details on our plans and our cost-effectiveness estimates on our fundraising page — you’ll also find a link with instructions for how you can donate. If you have any questions, please get in touch with me at michelle.hutchinson@givingwhatwecan.org.
If you decide to support us, I’d like to extend a huge thanks on behalf of the whole team — your generosity means that we can continue to help make the world a better place as effectively as possible.
Hey Michelle,
In the past we've discussed how desirable it would be for GWWC to release cohort data to allow potential donors to properly evaluate how much value GWWC creates. Without it its hard for us to estimate the lifetime value of new members. While it seems clear GWWC is positive value, we need to be able to compare it to other effective charities. At the time it was suggested that you would release this data; any chance we could see it in time for this giving season - or if not, in the new year?
Hi, Just to add to this, here is a link to a document I made with the sort of data you suggested sharing in the conversation earlier this year about cohort data. (Some of this is already contained in the Giving Review but I've presented it by cohort to hopefully make it easy to read). I agree that it's useful to collect and share, so thank you for the prompt!