After a successful 2025 laying the foundations, this year we're strengthening our foundations and starting to accelerate growth towards our Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG): 1 million pledgers donating $3B USD to high-impact charities annually.
Where we are
Giving What We Can is working towards a world without preventable suffering or existential risk, where everyone is able to flourish. We do this by making giving effectively and significantly a norm among those who can afford it.
Our community of ~20,000 pledgers and donors has already given more than $500M across a range of causes, from global health to animal welfare and from climate to AI safety, and currently records ~$80M per year in donations with Giving What We Can, either by giving through our donation platform or reporting on donations for their pledge. Even only counting donations to GiveWell recommended funds and charities in global health, our community currently prevents the death of a child every three hours.
Last year, we announced our BHAG and laid the organisational foundations for building towards it. Among other things, we recruited an executive team with experience scaling similar products and organisations, grew our team from 10 to 16 core staff, set up essential operational and grantmaking systems, and established an initial portfolio of growth interventions.
Additionally, we grew by 20-30% on our new pledges and pledge donations metrics (e.g. we had ~1100 new 🔸10% Pledges). This enabled us to reach two core milestones: 10,000🔸10% Pledgers and $500M in total recorded giving.
This year, we shift from laying foundations to strengthening them while starting to push more seriously on growth. We’re aiming to grow 40% on most of our key pledge and donations metric (e.g. aiming for roughly 1500 new 🔸10% Pledges). This puts us on a trajectory of achieving our BHAG by 2040.
What's changing in 2026
Our donation platform provides significant strategic value in moving towards our BHAG. It makes it much easier for pledgers to fulfill their pledge, allows us to maintain a high standard of effective giving through our research and inclusion criteria, and provides a source of sustainable funding as we scale (through our voluntary tipping function for donors). We're currently the only worldview-diverse effective giving platform in the US and UK, and we want to do an excellent job at this.
This means we'll be investing in user experience and functionality improvements, further improving the research supporting our recommendations as well as our communications around them, and strengthening the operational and finance systems needed for higher grantmaking volume.
For example, we plan to improve our GWWC Cause Area Funds offering. These funds are directly informed by our evaluating evaluators research, as a consequence we think they are among the highest-impact places to give, and they already attract a significant proportion of donations, particularly from new pledgers. In 2026, we'll develop these further and increase both the quality and quantity of reporting around Cause Area Fund grantmaking.
We’re making pledge fulfillment a priority
The power of the 🔸10% Pledge, and of our BHAG, depends on pledgers following through. Right now, we only have direct visibility on the giving of about 30% of our pledgers. We have some weak evidence suggesting this may be due to a large proportion of other pledgers currently not meeting their pledge, and some even weaker (anecdotal) evidence that there are also many who do meet it but don’t record their donations with us, because this isn’t a pledge requirement and there isn’t enough value for them in doing so.
We aim to increase pledge fulfillment by significantly improving the experience of the pledger journey. We also want to improve our visibility on pledge fulfillment by making it easier and more attractive for pledgers to record their donations with us.
For example, we’re planning to make upgrades to our pledger onboarding process, online pledge reporting experience, and impact communications, in addition to proactively reaching out to pledgers who aren’t yet recording with us.
We’re doubling down on what’s working while making new big bets
Our pledge booths at EAG(x) events and partnerships with various aligned organizations were two major growth successes of last year, collectively accounting for ~30% of new pledges. We’re doubling down on these, both by further improving them and extending their reach.
For example, we’re trialling pledge booths at non-EAG(x) events (e.g. Sentient Futures Summit) and are investing in new types of partnerships with high-profile advocates (e.g. José González) in addition to increasing support for our existing partnerships.
Additionally, we’re placing a few big and more speculative bets that could help accelerate growth further. The first example of this will be our new longform video content aiming to replicate the success of AI in Context for effective giving.
What stays the same
Several strategic decisions from 2025 remain in place:
- The 🔸10% Pledge remains our primary expected route to our BHAG.
- We focus our pledge outreach on those who can afford pledging, while remaining welcoming to anyone who is willing to give effectively and significantly (relative to their means).
- We prioritise the US and UK as our core markets for in-person and media engagement, while serving a global community of pledgers.
- We continue providing effective giving ecosystem coordination and development, including through hosting the annual Effective Giving Summit.
- And we continue holding ourselves accountable to high standards of cost-effectiveness, with a targeted average giving multiplier on our operational spending of 6x.
What we won't do
Being transparent about what we won't pursue is important, both to hold ourselves accountable and so other organisations can plan accordingly. In 2025, we retired 10 initiatives to improve focus on our BHAG, and those decisions generally still stand. Additionally, these are some directions we're choosing not to pursue in 2026:
- Geographic expansion beyond the US and UK (e.g. setting up new local entities or hiring staff elsewhere)
- High net-worth advisory services beyond a call or two and referrals to other organisations
- Non-pledge community building (e.g. organising groups around earning to give or specific causes)
- Significantly expanding the scope of our research (e.g. doing our own charity evaluations)
- Hosting or incubating non-pledge projects (e.g. giving games, charity elections, donor lotteries)
What GWWC could look like by the end of 2028
To give a sense of our medium-term trajectory, here's roughly what we're working towards — bearing in mind we expect to learn a lot along the way that will inform and likely change our precise targets and outcomes.
By the end of 2028, we have grown to 20,000+ pledgers who collectively record $100M+ USD per year in high-impact donations. Through our donation platform, our broader community of pledgers and donors supports $100M+ per year in high-impact grants — putting GWWC among the two hundred largest private philanthropic funders globally.
We have identified and built multiple scalable pledge growth engines with dedicated teams around each; continue to provide the highest-impact publicly accessible and worldview-diverse philanthropic recommendations in the world; and provide essential support and coordination for a growing global effective giving ecosystem moving multiple billions of dollars to high-impact charities annually.
And we do all of this while maintaining a robust impact measurement system that holds us accountable to our mission and demonstrates strong returns for our funders.
Get involved
Whether you've been a pledger since we began in 2009, or you're just learning about effective giving, there are many ways to get involved:
We're only at the start of our journey. Thank you for being on it with us!
Have questions or feedback on our strategy? We'd love to hear from you — get in touch.
Thanks for the update. I like your BHAG of reaching 1 million pledgers.
Below is the growth of the number of 10 % Pledges from 2009 to 2022. An annual growth of 40 %/year from 2025 to 2040 seems very ambitious relative to 2018-2022. On the other hand, you now have "16 core staff", whereas you only had a few during 2018-2022?
Thanks for engaging so deeply with this Vasco :)!
One clarification: the 40% YoY growth is on the metric of “New 🔸10% Pledges”. So in 2025, 1,080 new 🔸10% Pledges were signed. In 2026 we’re aiming for ~40% more: ~1,500.
The 40% YoY is not on the total number of 🔸10% pledgers. Although if 40% growth of the “New 🔸10% Pledges” is hypothetically kept up towards 2040, at some point the YoY growth of “total 🔸10% pledgers” approaches 40%.
In absolute numbers — the numbers we’re aiming to achieve this year on pledge growth will ~match the largest growth we’ve ever had. But to your point — in years ahead we are ambitiously aiming for growth numbers larger than that, whilst maintaining/improving average pledge quality.
A lot of staff time is going into programmes, systems, experiments and foundations that aim to make that future growth possible, not just on achieving the goal of this year. So yes — we’re investing in new staff so we can increase our growth rates such as a Partnerships Associate and a Head of Marketing :)
- Max (Chief Growth Officer at Giving What We Can)
Welcome to the EA Forum, Max. Thanks for the clarification, and additional context. I am rooting for your (GWWC's) success.