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.
Hi Michelle,
Thank you so much for answering questions like this. I think it’s really worthwhile :). When you have a free moment it would be great if you could answer these questions. Unlike Peter I have only 6 questions:
1.) Should GWWC’s realistic impact estimate include the % of people each year who fulfill their pledge? For instance, the summary of the 2014 Giving Review states that 20-55% of people who pledged from 2009-2013 didn’t fulfill their pledge in 2014.
2.) On what information is the ratio of actual donations to pledged donations used in GWWC’s most recent realistic impact estimate based upon?
3.) Is the current technique that GWWC uses to calculate counterfactuals more likely to overestimate or underestimate GWWC’s impact given that the counterfactual percentage of all future donations is estimated when people initially take the pledge rather than when they make their donations in subsequent years?
4.) In Nick Beckstead’s 2013 quantitative performance review of GWWC he noted:
What is your response to this?
5.) Around 6 months ago GWWC’s realistic impact estimate was a ratio of 60:1 and it’s now 104:1. Why has this number changed and do you expect it to change that much in another 6 months?
6.) It seems that GWWC’s comparative advantage is in generating and maintaining pledges for effective charities. Given that there is a large overlap between GWWC’s and GiveWell’s charity recommendations and GiveWell being in a better position to continue charity evaluations, why is it worth GWWC continuing charity evaluations?
Also on Nick Beckstead's review, the reason he made that comment is that in 2013, it looked like growth was linear (2011 and 2012 both added 100 members), which made it more unclear whether marginal activities were helping.
The situation is different today - growth is definitely faster than linear.
There's now been two new impact evaluations after Nick wrote his, with much more in-depth and up-to-date figures.