Congratulations on developing and launching this new strategy!
I'm Chief of Staff at CEA, and as we wrote in our own recently-published strategy post, we're making diversifying EA funding a central part of our efforts to steward the community in the coming years, and I'm excited about us exploring more ways to collaborate on making pledges a big piece of that puzzle.
This is cool, I like BHAGs in general and this one in particular. Do you have a target for when you want to get to 1M pledgers?
Thanks Ben! An earlier version of our strategy had a target timeline for achieving the BHAG, but we decided to delete it after receiving feedback that it's generally better for BHAGs not to have a specific timeline attached (e.g. given the large uncertainty and as it wouldn't really add much on top of the 1-3 year targets which we have set internally). However, if you pushed me, I'd personally say ballpark 10-15 years :).
Thanks for sharing! Are you planning to account for differences in cost-effectiveness across areas?
I would like to see a push towards increasing donations to x-risk reduction and longtermist charities. Last time I checked, only about 10% of GWWC donations were going to longtermist funds like the Long-Term Future Fund. Consequently, I think the x-risk and AI safety funding landscapes have been more reliant on big donors than they should be.
I like the new strategy! Being more focused and setting this audacious goal seems like a good idea. I must say I also like that you mention digital marketing in the post, and I would urge you to continue your short-form video content creation, as organic social media growth can be a huge source of growth these days. I think that in general, EA orgs have a lacking presence on social media (maybe because most EAs don't use it to that large of an extent?), but in general it is a great way to reach the general population and help incite value changes, IMO.
We are excited to share a summary of our 2025 strategy, which builds on our work in 2024 and provides a vision through 2027 and beyond!
Giving What We Can (GWWC) 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 cultural norm.
Based on our last impact evaluation[1], we have made our pledges – and in particular the 🔸10% Pledge – the core focus of GWWC’s work.[2] We know the 🔸10% Pledge is a powerful institution, as we’ve seen almost 10,000 people take it and give nearly $50M USD to high-impact charities annually. We believe it could become a norm among at least the richest 1% — and likely a much wider segment of the population — which would cumulatively direct an enormous quantity of financial resources towards tackling the world’s most pressing problems.
We initiated this focus on pledges in early 2024, and are doubling down on it in 2025. In line with this, we are retiring various other initiatives we were previously running and which are not consistent with our new strategy.
We are setting ourselves a long-term Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) of 1 million pledgers donating $3B USD to high-impact charities annually, which we will start working towards in 2025.
1 million pledgers donating $3B USD to high-impact charities annually would be roughly equivalent to ~100x GWWC’s current scale, and could be achieved by 1% of the world’s richest 1% pledging and giving effectively. Achieving this would imply the equivalent of nearly 1 million lives being saved[3] every year.
See the BHAG FAQ for more info.
Over the coming years, we expect to test various growth pathways and interventions that could get us to our BHAG, including digital marketing, partnerships with aligned organisations, community advocacy, media/PR, and direct outreach to potential pledgers. We think it’s likely that multiple of them will be needed to achieve our ambitious goal and that they will complement and strengthen each other if implemented well. Hence, rather than selecting only one or two interventions and doubling down, over the next few years we will iteratively build GWWC’s capacity to excel at various growth interventions to convert new audiences.
By the end of 2027, we aim to have built a portfolio of mutually reinforcing scalable pledge growth engines, and to have doubled our current pledge community.
To build such a portfolio, GWWC needs highly capable growth and operational divisions. In 2025, we will lay these foundations.
This includes recruiting top-tier Chief Operating and Chief Growth Officers with experience scaling similar products and organisations; preparing our operational, governance and grantmaking systems for scale; and improving our understanding of pledge funnels and target audiences.
We will also test various new pledge growth interventions, improving and expanding on our existing portfolio.
Last but not least, we will put in place tracking and guardrails to ensure we “scale responsibly”: maintaining the quality of the pledge in terms of pledgers giving effectively and significantly, and staying true to effective giving principles and our values.
GWWC celebrated its 15th birthday last year, but we’re only at the start of our journey: with our renewed pledge focus and BHAG, we’re looking to grow our annual impact 100-fold and make significant progress towards a world without preventable suffering or existential risk, where everyone is able to flourish.
Why 1M pledgers rather than just an amount raised? We could have chosen a $3B USD donated effectively as our sole BHAG, but we have intentionally included the 1M pledger number since our mission is to make effective giving a norm (with expected associated longer-term benefits), and to not solely to raise a lot of money for high-impact charities in the short term or among a small group of people.
Who are we counting as a “pledger” towards our 1M goal? In this case, we are defining “pledger” as someone who has taken one of our pledges – in other words, this includes anyone who has taken the 10% Pledge, Trial Pledge, Further Pledge, Company Pledge, or any other pledge(s) we might launch. Currently, our 10% Pledge makes up >80% of our pledges and pledge donations, and our hypothesis is that it’s the most promising path to scaling our impact, but this is something we intend to keep questioning.
How do we define high-impact charities? Very roughly, we define these as “among the highest-impact donation options by some plausible worldview”. Importantly, this leaves room to include highly effective donation options that are outside GWWC’s recommendations and/or aren’t in line with the worldviews of the GWWC team. As part of our regular impact evaluation, the GWWC research team determines the bar for what qualifies here and reports on associated estimates.[4]
Our 2023-2024 impact evaluation is forthcoming in May.
While the Pledge has always been an integral part of GWWC's mission, we've previously focused on pledge promotion to varying degrees, at times prioritising other ways of promoting effective giving.
This is just to illustrate the order of magnitude of the impact rather than the actual impact achieved, as (1) our pledgers give to many other causes than those saving lives and (2) the cost-effectiveness of interventions is likely to change significantly over time, and based on the amount of resources being invested.
Just wanted to say I really appreciate GWWC's focus on pledger count instead of just donation total; picking the right organisational "north star" metric matters a lot. In this vein I'd like to signal-boost abrahamrowe's A robust earning to give ecosystem is better for EA, and in particular this visual (just to clarify, the "too hard" distribution is ~$25 per person).
As a side note,
I'd be curious to learn going forward how you model growth pathway credit attribution and interaction effects (synergy vs cannibalisation) to figure out how to optimise the growth channel "portfolio mix". I used to work in e-commerce marketing analytics and this was both critical to budgeting and also quite nontrivial, and that was with far more granular data and quicker clearer feedback loops than I expect GWWC will need to work with.