How to actually give money away

This was originally posted here. It's written for an audience that's not deep in the weeds of EA giving theory/culture, but a few people suggested I post here as there's much that's additive to or divergent from some common EA practices. Feedback / disagreements welcome!  Also my first time posting here. Hi!

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Most people who intend to give large amounts of money away never actually do.

The money sits. In donor-advised funds, in "someday" plans, in good intentions. This is the default pathway - not an edge case - and if you don't design against it, it will happen to you too.

I've watched this from every angle. As CEO of Change.org we processed 5M+ donations. I now run GiveDirectly; 160K people have donated, dozens regularly give $1M+, and some give $50M-$100M+ at a time. I've advised two of the biggest philanthropic institutions in the world (Coefficient Giving and GiveWell) on donor engagement and growth, and sat on half a dozen nonprofit boards. I've also been giving away 10-20% of my annual income for 17 years; I grew up low-income, so this started as a very modest amount but has added up.

Across all that, there are patterns and common mistakes. I increasingly get asked for advice on how to give very large amounts of money away - this post captures what I most commonly share.

It'll be most useful for people giving at significant scale, especially those who've come into serious money from tech, AI or finance, where the combination of concentrated equity, compressed timelines, and limited counterfactual time makes deferring your giving especially common. But the ideas apply to anyone aiming to give thoughtfully.
 

1. The default pathway is to delay. Fight this.

Here's what happens: You care about giving. But you don't have expertise or dealflow in the areas you care about. You don't have much time to build that expertise, because you're running a company, working hard, or raising kids. So you don't feel confident enough to commit.

Underneath the structural reasons, there's an emotional one. I grew up without much money, and there's a part of me that still expects it all to disappear at any moment. Most people I talk to have a version of this, regardless of background. It makes giving feel like loss, even when you can clearly afford it.

So you defer. Your wealth grows, which makes the stakes of each decision feel higher, which makes you more cautious, which means you give less as a proportion of what's possible. It's a flywheel that runs on good intentions.

If you only take one thing from this post, make it this: failing to follow through on your intention to give is the default pathway. It has happened to many people who signed the Giving Pledge, and it will happen to you unless you take it seriously.

I've lived this. A few years ago, I set aside about 40% of my annual giving budget for what I thought of as "systems-changing" ideas; bets with extremely high upside and high risk. I believed in the commitment. But I didn't have the dealflow, or a process for choosing between opportunities when they did come along. I had the intention but not the system. The money just sat.

Accept that no matter how well intentioned you are, the default pathway is to delay, forever. The more you appreciate the structural incentives, the better you can design to combat them. The rest of this post is about how.

Finally: set your annual giving budget high enough that it matters. If you're still earning, 10-20% of income is the classic anchor. If your wealth is primarily in assets, treat 5% of net worth as the floor, not the ceiling. Don't wait for an exit - there are well-worn paths to give equity directly, often with far better tax treatment than giving cash after a liquidity event, and it gets capital to work now rather than at some hypothetical future date.

Notice what 5% actually means: on $100M, that's $5M a year. Your investments are still compounding at 7–10%, and if you're not retired, you're still earning. So even at 10% giving, your net worth and ability to give more almost certainly keeps growing. The givers who inspire me go even further: they define the number they need to live very comfortably for life (and leave to any kids), then plan to give everything above that line away before they die.

2. Pick a few causes and write them down.

The causes you direct your money toward are perhaps the most consequential decision you'll make; far more than any individual donation. And yet most people put all their effort into evaluating individual donation opportunities, not deciding what causes to support.

Should you give to global health? Animal welfare? AI safety? Protecting democracy? Girls' education?

The right answer will be some function of your values and what you think your donation could achieve. Some considerations that have been influential for me:

• Luck. I feel extraordinarily lucky to have been born in Australia. Even though my parents were low-income by Australian standards, compared to most people globally and throughout history my access to health, income, security and opportunity is incredibly high. I feel a responsibility to pay that forward.
• Value for money. I want my dollar to have as much impact as possible. That means I skew toward opportunities that support the world's poorest, where $1 USD can stretch 250x further. If impact per dollar matters to you, the case for directing a significant share of your giving to the world's poorest is very strong.
• Humility. The older I get, the less black and white (and more grey) I see. I have uncertainty about what values are most important or what's most likely to work. I've also become more skeptical of my ability or right to make decisions on behalf of others. This is why a meaningful portion of my giving goes to unconditional cash transfers that (in addition to being highly evidenced and cost-effective) let people in poverty decide what's important themselves.
• Motivation. Giving is a marathon, not a sprint. Giving in a way that nourishes you and gives you joy is a win/win. For you and for the world.

The end result for me: 90% of my giving aims to raise the floor of the human experience by reducing needless suffering. The other 10% is for people I care about and believe in, even if their work reflects a different worldview - a friend starting a nonprofit, a cause someone I trust is passionate about, an ask that moves me. I think of this as the human part of my giving. Not data-driven, but humble, and important for keeping me connected and motivated.

It's completely legitimate to pick other things. Whatever you choose, write it down. The people who struggle tend to be open to everything, which in practice means they're committed to nothing.
 

3. Build a portfolio across causes and risk/return.

Once you've picked your causes, treat giving like an investment portfolio — not just what you're investing in, but what risk/return profile you want across your bets.

Some people work backwards from a specific goal: end lead poisoning globally, replace factory farming, or end poverty in a specific country. If you have that kind of conviction, the goal dictates the portfolio - you donate to whatever combination of research, advocacy, and delivery gets you there.

If you don't have a single goal, construct a portfolio across causes and risk/return profiles. My own split, for every $100 I give:

• $45 to high-risk, high-return bets: R&D, policy change, technology, people trying something new that could be transformative but might not work. Think of this like venture capital investing.
• $45 to high-confidence, modest-return giving: interventions with strong evidence behind them, where I know the money will do good even if the upside is capped. More like bonds or index funds.
• $10 personal and relational: people I care about, causes that move me, asks from friends.

Your portfolio can look very different. Many I talk to give a large share internationally but reserve some portion for local community or politics. The framework is flexible. What matters is that you've pre-committed to some structure, so when an opportunity arrives you already know which bucket it's in and how much room is left. Decision costs drop immediately.

A warning on Donor Advised Funds. When you give to a DAF you get the tax deduction, which creates a psychological sense of completion - you've made the sacrifice, the money feels "committed" - and the actual giving recedes into the future. Most DAF providers also earn from holding your balance, not from getting money out the door. If you need a DAF for tax-timing reasons, newer flat- or low-fee options like Daffy, Charityvest and Every.org are worth looking at. But the deferral risk is the same regardless of provider. 

4. Use the index funds of giving.

In investing, the index fund has basically won. Most professional stock pickers can't consistently beat the market; after fees, the majority of actively managed funds underperform a cheap S&P 500 tracker. For most investors, the smart move is to stop trying to be clever and put your money where decades of evidence says it'll do best.

The same logic applies to giving. Most people who want to give well try to become experts in the problem they care about; evaluating organizations, comparing methodologies, reading impact reports. For a few with unusual time and skills, that might be the right approach. For most, it's hubris and a recipe for indefinite delay.

There are institutions that function like the index funds of giving. 

• GiveWell was the first one I chose to regularly give to, more than a decade ago. If you align with their values (heavily weight saving lives; value evidence and certainty), they're unmatched in research and rigor.
• Direct cash transfers also fall into this category for me (giant caveat: I run GiveDirectly, so weigh this accordingly - but it was a major part of my portfolio for years before I joined).
• For those more focused on the US, Robin Hood Foundation and Blue Meridian Capital Partners are worth a look; Robin Hood pools donor capital to fight poverty in New York City with rigorous benefit-cost analysis, and Blue Meridian makes large concentrated bets on organizations that can scale nationally.
   

Your comparative advantage is having capital and willingness to deploy it - not replicating analysis others have spent careers building. If you give outside the index funds, be clear on why: unusual dealflow, personal insight, higher risk tolerance, ability to move faster than institutions can. That's why $45 of my $100 goes to higher-risk bets. But it's so tempting to make these decisions from ego, so I recommend a meaningful portion goes to the index funds.
 

5. For the love of god, don’t over-staff.

When people get serious about giving at $10M+ scale, the first instinct is to hire: a philanthropic advisor, a program officer, maybe a small foundation team. I'd push back hard.

The more institutional infrastructure you build around your giving, the slower the money moves. There's an incentive problem at the heart of it: nobody on your foundation staff gets fired for not having enough impact. But they could lose their job over a grant that goes sideways, or for moving too fast without enough diligence. The incentive structure rewards caution, not impact - and institutional gravity pulls relentlessly toward risk aversion.

I've seen this repeatedly: someone commits to giving at scale, hires a team to help them do it well, and within a few years the team has become the primary obstacle to capital getting out the door. The staff are doing their jobs… they’re being careful, doing diligence, managing risk - and the result is that less money reaches anyone.

My recommendation: one trusted, smart person at most. Someone whose values and ways of working align with yours, who's scrappy and autonomous and can move quickly. They should feel accountable for how much good your giving does, not just for avoiding mistakes. I know at least one individual advisor who moves ~$100M annually on behalf of their donor because they're deeply aligned, have optimized for fast high-quality decisions, and stayed lean. I'd be skeptical of any setup with more than one staff member per $50M in annual giving.

If you're unsure about hiring an individual, there are good advisory firms: Renaissance Philanthropy, Ark Philanthropy, Coefficient Giving, Jasper Ridge Partners, and Longview Philanthropy. One important distinction: keep your own giving operation lean, but don't starve those you fund. Be lean on your side of the table so you can be generous on theirs.
 

6. Make giving a recurring event, not a to-do.

If giving is always on your to-do list, it will always lose to whatever feels urgent at work or at home. So stop treating it like an ongoing task and treat it like an event.

Block one or two moments a year (alone, or with your advisor if you have one) where you compile a set of opportunities across your portfolio buckets and make decisions. Do real diligence, but constrain the set. Research consistently finds that donors given a large open-ended set of options are less likely to give than those given a small pre-vetted set. More options means more evaluation burden, more potential for regret, more reason to defer. Constraint is your friend.

If you want external structure, programs exist for exactly this. The TED Audacious Project curates roughly ten deeply-vetted big-bet ideas a year. ICONIQ Impact does something similar in different themes.

Between those windows, evaluate opportunities reactively as they come. Someone you trust recommends an organization, a crisis happens, something compelling lands in your inbox. Evaluate it against your portfolio and thesis. If it fits and there's room, fund it. If not, pass.

The key rule: anything you haven't allocated by year-end goes to an ‘index fund’ of giving. No exceptions. This is what keeps the deferral flywheel from spinning up again. You can always refine your higher-risk bets over time, but the money should move every year regardless.
 

A few final hot takes 

Places where I diverge from conventional wisdom, or where I think the philanthropy sector's incentives pull in the wrong direction:

• Prefer simplicity. In theory of change, in cost-effectiveness models, in operating models. The more complicated any of them are, the more places to be wrong. I'd rather fund a simple idea that seems less exciting than an elaborate plan built on 40 assumptions.
• People and leadership matter more than detailed plans. The single most underrated factor in whether a philanthropic investment works. I'd back an A+ team with a hazy high-level plan over a B+ team with something fully baked, every time.
• Run a tight process. I’ve raised VC capital, and I much prefer it to raising philanthropic capital. Why? VCs don’t waste your time. Fast VCs commit millions in days and tens of millions in weeks. They’ve designed their diligence and decision making processes to respect the entrepreneurs time; you can do the same without compromising on the quality of your decisions.
• Give unrestricted. When you restrict a grant, you're telling an organization you know better than they do how to spend their money. You almost certainly don't. The best leaders see opportunities and bottlenecks you can't see from the outside. Trust them.
• Reward transparency and honest failure. If a grantee tries something, it doesn't work, and they learn and improve — that's a good outcome. Fund them again. But be willing to kill investments where plausible progress isn't materializing. The sector's instinct is to keep funding what isn't working because stopping feels like admitting failure.
• Be skeptical of layers. It's not unusual to see chains like: donor advisor → donor collaborative → international NGO → national NGO → community-based org → local contractor. Every institution in that chain has an incentive to justify its own existence. So much value gets lost. Shorten the distance between your dollar and the person or problem it's meant to help.
• Don't over-coordinate with other donors. Share opportunities and learnings, absolutely. But don't galaxy-brain exactly how much should go to cause A vs. cause B. Diversity of worldview and theory of change across donors is a feature, not a bug.
• Don't force collaboration among grantees. Donors love the idea of their grantees working together. In practice it's usually a waste of everyone's time. Diversity of approaches and healthy competition between organizations tackling the same problem is often more productive.
• Don't get attached to tax deductibility. Some of the highest-impact opportunities (political giving, impact investing, direct support to individuals) aren't tax deductible. If you're optimizing for the tax benefit rather than the impact, you're leaving a lot of good on the table.
• Fight incrementalism. The nonprofit sector is structurally risk-averse. Funders want proven models. Grantees propose what they think funders will approve. The result is a lot of modest, incremental work. Push against that. Look for solutions that, if successful, could scale dramatically. There's a giant gap there.

That's what I've got for now. None of this is truth; many smart people disagree with me or take a different approach. But these are the lessons I've come to believe after 17 years of giving and all my work in this world. 

If you want to think any of this through - portfolio construction, finding an advisor, specific recommendations across buckets - I'm happy to talk. Email me at [email protected]