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Donating to Giving What We Can Is Higher Impact Than Donating to GiveWell-Recommended Charities - 80,000 Hours
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3/5
Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
Rating inherited from publication venue: 80,000 Hours
This 2015 piece is an early example of effective altruism meta-charity arguments; tangential to AI safety but relevant to understanding how the EA funding and movement-building ecosystem reasons about leverage and impact, which influences AI safety funding decisions.
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Importance: 22/100blog postcommentary
Summary
A 2015 argument from 80,000 Hours that donating to Giving What We Can (GWWC) is more impactful than donating directly to top GiveWell-recommended charities, based on GWWC's estimated leverage ratio of ~$60 in value added per $1 spent. The post uses historical cost-effectiveness data and growth metrics to support the case for funding movement-building organizations over direct charity.
Key Points
- •GWWC's historical leverage ratio was ~$60 of value to top charities per $1 spent, suggesting meta-charity giving can outperform direct giving.
- •GWWC's growth rate was increasing (42% in 2013, 117% in 2014), arguing against the claim that diminishing returns had set in.
- •The marginal leverage ratio was estimated to be higher than the historical ratio, possibly due to economies of scale and word-of-mouth effects.
- •The post acknowledges author bias due to 80,000 Hours' affiliation with GWWC, but argues the case is strong enough to publish anyway.
- •This illustrates a broader EA principle: funding movement infrastructure and pledge organizations may multiply impact beyond direct program funding.
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| Giving What We Can | Organization | 62.0 |
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[Giving What We Can is fundraising](http://givingwhatwecan.causevox.com/). When I last checked, they had only reached £70,000 of their £150,000 target.
Last year, [more than $28m was donated to Give Directly, AMF, SCI and Deworm the World](http://blog.givewell.org/2015/04/13/givewells-money-moved-and-web-traffic-in-2014/) – the charities recommended by GiveWell and Giving What We Can. [1](https://80000hours.org/2015/06/donating-to-giving-what-we-can-is-higher-impact-than-donating-to-givewell-recommended-charities/#fn-1 "") In contrast, Giving What We Can (GWWC) spent under $200,000. My claim in this post is that if you donate to these top recommended charities, you’ll have even more impact (at the margin) if you donate to Giving What We Can instead.
GWWC is closely affiliated with 80,000 Hours, so I’m likely to be biased in GWWC’s favour. However, I feel strongly enough that I think it’s worth writing on the topic anyway.
Here’s three reasons why to donate to GWWC.
## 1\. It’s very likely that $1 donated to GWWC yields more than $1 of value to top recommended charities.
GWWC recently released a [new evaluation of their cost-effectiveness](https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/fundraising-prospectus-2015). They found that GWWC has spent about $440,000 as of the end of 2013, while GWWC members had donated an extra $2.4m to GWWC recommended charities which wouldn’t have been donated otherwise. Moreover, at the end of 2013, GWWC had raised a further $146m+ of pledged future income (today the figure is over $400m!). After adjusting for drop out from the pledge, money that would have been given anyway, and time-discounting, GWWC estimates that these pledges have a net present value of $26m to top recommended charities. So GWWC’s overall historical leverage ratio is about $60 of value added to top recommended charities per $1 spent. Moreover, there’s plausible arguments the leverage ratio is well over 100.
If the leverage ratio remains this high, then each dollar you give to GWWC now represents about $60 going to high-impact charities, so it’s 60 times higher-impact to donate to GWWC than directly to top recommended charities.
Of course, whether the leverage ratio will remain this high as GWWC continues to expand is a difficult question. At some point we expect all the good opportunities to convince people to become members will be exhausted and the ratio will go down. However, I think that’s a long way off.
Some have suggested GWWC may already be at the point of strongly diminishing returns. The version of this argument I hear most often is that all the pledges comes from the initial impact of setting up GWWC (i.e. making the website, defining the pledge, getting press coverage) and that activity created a stream of benefits that’s being collected today.
If that were true, however, we’d expect the growth rate to be decreasing. Instead, the growth has _increased_ – [over 2013 it
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