Curating a list of charities for our 30-day daily-giving journey - which charities are we missing?

TLDR: We're a giving app that is buiding a 30 day journey in which users give to 30 different pre-selected highly effective charities. We want feedback on our initial list and ideas for additional charities we should consider.

Hi everyone,

I'm Joe, founder and Chair of EveryDrop SCIO. I've spent the last year and a half building a daily-giving app, and early last month we were finally awarded official charity status by the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR).

Who we are

EveryDrop was founded on the concept that giving effectively can be a source of joy and fulfilment for everyone. Through the app, our users are presented with a daily learning journey which introduces them to the scale & importance of a new impact area and the incredible impact and progress being made by the day's spotlighted charity. If you're curious, you can see a 2-day demo of the platform here: https://everydrop-app-demo.pages.dev/ or check out our website here to join the waitlist: www.everydropapp.com

For our launch, we have decided to frame the app as a 30-day challenge.

Why we've taken this approach

Our app is built to integrate education, effective giving and positive psychology to build a habit of giving in everyone. We believe that daily giving can:

1. Do the giver good. Giving to others lifts our wellbeing more than spending on ourselves, it restores a sense of agency to people who feel powerless, and renews our faith in the ingenuity and dedication humanity brings to its hardest problems.
2. Generate real, transformational impact, too. Guiding donations, even small ones, to the world’s most effective charities generates real impact.
3. Resets the perception of what £1 is worth. When offered a daily reminder of the tremendous impact of the world’s most effective charities, a pound stops being a snack or coffee upgrade and becomes a course of vitamin A or a day of clean water.
4. Open a door to more. Daily giving challenge can serve as a gentle on-ramp to effective altruism's bigger asks (e.g. the 10% pledge, high-impact careers) and an easy thing for committed givers to share with friends and family to share the positive aspects of effective giving.
5. Make giving shared, not solitary. The app will serve as a community of givers, with features that track collective giving to demonstrate that plenty of others care enough to give, too.

The risks we've mitigated (or at least tried to)

Inefficiency of small payments. We haven’t built EveryDrop to address donation efficiency. This obviously matters a lot, and there are already great organisations across the EA universe optimizing the delivery of funds to the impact areas that need it most.

We see ourselves as filling a different need. Our main objective is to help our users discover the feeling I had when I first learned about and engaged in effective giving:

• that we mustn't give in to the belief that the world is falling apart and that there's nothing we can do about it;
• that behind most bleak headlines are a bunch of people making real, measurable progress, persevering despite the structural barriers;
• and, importantly, that there is a real, immediate, and effective way to contribute.

Of course, I wouldn't be here if I thought effectiveness and efficiency didn't matter. Effectiveness remains the overarching criterion we have selected our featured charities on. But the spark I'm chasing with our users is agency and empowerment: the sense that a person can do something to make the world better, stronger, kinder, safer. And in doing that action, they are joining a wider community of committed givers.

The micro-donation structure comes with an obvious trade-off on payment-processing fees. We're working hard to keep the operation as efficient as possible, and we've already received an initial commitment from a private funder to cover transaction fees on the first £10,000 moved through the platform.

We're exploring several ways to minimize processing fees further: a shift from daily settlement to a pledge-then-settle model, where in-app payments are aggregated weekly; integration with PayPal Giving Fund infrastructure, which can substantially reduce UK processing costs; and a Direct Debit / bank-transfer (Faster Payments) set-up to move money at little cost.

While the ultimate payment method is still under consideration, we're confident that even in the worst case - where EveryDrop covers our users' processing fees on their behalf - it remains worthwhile: spending roughly £0.17 in fees to activate £1.20 of net-new donations to effective charities is about a 5x impact lever rather than just donating our own money directly to the charity.

Moral licensing. Studies show that acts of generosity increase the probability of future generous acts. We keep the daily amounts small precisely to avoid a sense of "having done enough". And the capped 30-day journey gives us a natural moment, at the conclusion, to present further action rather than closure. As the journey ends, the invitation is to go and do more, through GWWC or other long-term giving and community resources; resources from the School for Moral Ambition, 80,000 hours, and Probably Good are also considered for inclusion.

Crowding-out. "Crowding-out" here I meant that this habit displaces more, or better, giving that the user would otherwise have done were it not for this activity. Because we act as a pure conduit to vetted, effective charities and because our users are mostly people who weren't giving effectively, or at all, beforehand, we feel the risk is low, and our net impact will be toward more and better giving, not away from it. 

Our principal target audience

New givers (by far our main targets). The target user is Gen-Z, mobile-first, at university or early in their career. They feel the weight of the world's problems, care about positive outcomes and they're looking for a way to actually do something about it, but they haven't yet found a foothold in effective giving or other morally ambitious output. They're digitally connected and influenced by what their peers do. 

Large donors tied to passive, DAF-like structures who don't feel connected through the year to the causes they support. For them the donation itself is trivial, but the daily habit affirms their identity as a giver and can broaden their understanding of the different challenges we face.

Founders Pledge members who've committed to give big later in life but, in the meantime, don't have an outlet to stay connected to effective giving.

Effective altruists looking to share their priorities and passion in an accessible way with family and friends. EveryDropApp can serve as a low-cost, low-commitment conversation starter, rather than a competitor for long-term committed action.

Main Objective of this Post:

The objective of this post is to solicit feedback on the charities we have selected to feature on our 30-day journey. The utility of every pound we move depends entirely on which charities we choose to feature. That's where we need your help. While we want to prioritize the effectiveness of every dollar, we also want to expose our users to a full range of inspirational charities that are doing tremendous work. Instead of trying to optimize every dollar, we are trying to curate a list that has the highest probability of having an ‘Aha!’ moment for users that discover a cause area and charity that awakens a sense of agency, urgency and action in our user. Our main ask in this post is to help us refine and expand our initial curated list.

Charity Selection

One thing worth flagging: we're a UK-registered charity, so we can only fund charities that fall within a specific set of pre-determined charitable purposes — poverty, health, education, environment, animal welfare, human rights, and community development. Which means, frustratingly for this audience, that most longtermist and AI-safety giving is off-limits to us (we actually had to drop planned days on both). So anything you suggest needs to fit within those seven areas.

Here's the current line-up:

Poverty

• GiveDirectly — Unconditional cash transfers straight to people in extreme poverty
• One Acre Fund — Seed, finance and training for smallholder African farmers
• BRAC — Asset + coaching "graduation approach" to get world’s poorest out of ultra-poverty

Health

• Against Malaria Foundation — Insecticide-treated bednets to prevent malaria
• Helen Keller Intl — Vitamin A supplements preventing child blindness and death
• Deworm the World (Evidence Action) — Mass school-based deworming
• Dispensers for Safe Water (Evidence Action) — Chlorine dispensers at rural water points
• WaterAid — Clean water, toilets and hygiene via local systems
• New Incentives — Small cash incentives for infant vaccination
• mothers2mothers — Mothers with HIV mentoring other mothers
• Days for Girls — Reusable menstrual kits and health education
• StrongMinds — Group talk-therapy for depression in Africa
• Sightsavers — Cataract surgery, eye care and disability inclusion
• Fistula Foundation — Free surgery to repair childbirth injuries
• CEPI — Racing to develop vaccines against future epidemics (pandemic preparedness — the global-catastrophic-risk edge of the health bucket)
• Cochrane — Systematic reviews of medical studies that tell clinicians what works

Education

• Camfed — Funding girls through school across sub-Saharan Africa
• Lively Minds — Training mothers to run play-based preschools
• Mary's Meals — A daily school meal that brings children to class
• Pratham — "Teaching at the Right Level" foundational literacy and numeracy
• Worldreader — Digital books and reading on low-cost phones

Environment

• Clean Air Task Force — Policy advocacy on the biggest climate levers
• Eden Reforestation Projects — Paying locals to plant and protect forests
• SolarAid — Affordable solar lights for off-grid homes (energy access — spans environment, poverty and health; we file it under environment)
• 5 Gyres Institute — Research and advocacy against ocean plastic

Animal welfare

• The Humane League — Corporate campaigns ending the worst factory-farming practices
• Compassion in World Farming — Campaigns and legal advocacy to end factory farming
• The Good Food Institute — Advancing alternative proteins to replace industrial animal farming

Human rights

• Anti-Slavery International — Advocacy and partnerships to end modern slavery
• Justice Defenders — Legal training for prisoners and prison staff in Africa

Community / effective giving

• Giving What We Can — Championing effective giving and the giving pledge (our Day 30 conclusion story)

What are we missing? I'd love to hear which charities you find most compelling, the ones that made you think "more people should know about this". I've got a soft spot for organisations that would make a brand-new giver feel that spark of what's possible — Justice Defenders is my touchstone there — not only the ones that top a cost-effectiveness table.

Thank you.