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Thanks for sharing, Melanie! It would be great if program associates from Open Phil's other areas shared more reflections like this.
Open Philanthropy: Reflecting on our Recent Effective Giving RFP
4 min readJun 16, 2025
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Thanks for sharing, Melanie! It would be great if program associates from Open Phil's other areas shared more reflections like this.
It feels like some kind of milestone to see Open Philanthropy funding Charity Navigator, whose previous CEOs once called EA "Defective Altruism" and an "Elitist Philanthropy".
But, I'm not sure which direction the milestone is. Is it that EA ideas have become so accepted that they are now even embraced by Charity Navigator? Or is it that EA has become so diluted that it's funding anything and everything, even Charity Navigator?
I think it's a positive sign. I think the answer to the second question is no.
I think it makes sense from a strategic point of view. CN is dependent on funding to survive, and by funding CN, EA funds can influence the work that CN does. While this is a somewhat cynical way to look at it, it is a simple fact that funders can influence of the work of charities. And CN plays a significant role in directing charitable donations.
Thanks for this write-up and making some cool grants! In particular I'm excited to see Charity Navigator move in an EA direction - thanks for helping make that possible :)
This makes straightforward sense to me, and I love the diversity of funding here - from Instagram influencer to the most traditional charity evaluator!
Will be interested to see how these orgs manage over the next couple of years - although with fundraising I would imagine there is a lot of circumstance and luck involved as well, it would be possible to work hard and make the right moves sometimes without much success.
This seems great!
I was wondering about how your ROI or "adjusted money raised" translates to other GH metrics, such as GW's "multiples of cash".
If an EGI in OP's portfolio has a average of 6x adjusted return on donation, and assuming the average GW top charity is around 10x as cost effective as direct cash transfers - does that mean you believe an EGI is equivalent in cost-effectiveness to 60x cash? Or is there a downward adjustment that needs to be made when cross-comparing metrics? Would love to hear your thoughts
Hi Ezra,
Thanks for your question! As a first pass, your assumption is correct in that, since our 1x benchmark is against GW charities (and charities of similar expected cost-effectiveness), an adjusted ROI of 6x is in expectation ~60x cash. That being said, we think the real number is likely lower than that, which is why we hold our EG grantees to a bar of at least 2x (and higher for more established efforts). Specifically, we think a 2x multiplier bar seems justified because (i) "meta" funding opportunities that are more distant from impact seem more likely to overestimate cost-effectiveness by failing to adequately account for additional efforts required by other actors to achieve impact, and (ii) intuitively, we aren't excited about supporting opportunities that could spend an additional $1 to generate only slightly more than that for high impact charities, even after a counterfactual adjustment. Supporting these opportunities would mean small errors in our calculations could result in negative impact, and risks falling into a meta-trap.
Really appreciate the transparency and thought behind this, and noting that benefits like partnerships (e.g., with GWWC) may have a longer tail than what the current ROI window captures.
I'm curious: As you continue to assess the portfolio, are there plans to explore alternate or complementary metrics beyond "adjusted money moved"? Especially for orgs experimenting with newer models (like influencer-driven giving or community-based approaches), it seems like traditional ROI might not fully capture longer-term or indirect effects.
Also, love the point about seeding new efforts. Are there specific areas or donor segments you’re especially hoping new orgs might target?
Earlier this year, we launched a request for proposals (RFP) from organizations that fundraise for highly cost-effective charities. The Livelihood Impact Fund supported the RFP, as did two donors from Meta Charity Funders. We’re excited to share the results: $1,565,333 in grants to 11 organizations. We estimate a weighted average ROI of ~4.3x across the portfolio, which means we expect our grantees to raise more than $6 million in adjusted funding over the next 1-2 years.
These organizations span different regions, donor audiences, and outreach strategies. Here’s a quick overview:
Charity Navigator (United States) — $200,000
Charity Navigator recently acquired Causeway, through which they now recommend charities with a greater emphasis on impact across a portfolio of cause areas. This grant supports Causeway’s growth and refinement, with the aim of nudging donors toward curated higher-impact giving funds.
Effectief Geven (Belgium) — $108,000
Newly incubated, with solid early traction and plans to expand donor reach. This grant will help them expand from 1 to 1.5 FTE.
Effective Altruism Australia (Australia) — $257,000
A well-established organization with historically strong ROI. This grant supports the hiring of a dedicated director for their effective giving work, along with shared ops staff, over two years.
Effective Altruism New Zealand (New Zealand) — $17,500
A long-standing, low-cost organization with one FTE and a consistently great ROI. This grant covers their core operating expenses for one year, helping to maintain effective giving efforts in New Zealand.
Etkili Bağış (Turkey) — $20,000
A new initiative piloting effective giving outreach in Turkey. This grant helps professionalize their work by covering setup costs and the executive director’s time for one year.
Giv Effektivt (Denmark) — $210,000
A growing national platform that transitioned from volunteer-run to staffed, with strong early ROI and healthy signs of growth. This grant supports their operational costs for two years.
High Impact Athletes (Global) — $300,000
Recently pivoted their efforts in light of a new partnership with Hyrox, a global fitness competition. Through this partnership, competition attendees are offered discounted tickets if they fundraise for impactful charities. This grant will help High Impact Athletes onboard new staff to maximize the partnership’s potential and secure more fundraising from ticket-holders.
Mieux Donner (France) — $149,333
Recently launched via Ambitious Impact’s incubation program, they’ve seen good early results and have strong leads for future growth. This grant funds one year of operations.
Tien Procent Club (Netherlands) — $210,000
Organizes events in the Netherlands to introduce new audiences to effective giving and connect them with existing platforms. This grant enables them to scale their model by expanding from 0.5 to 2 FTE.
UHNW advisory effort in Asia and Africa (Hong Kong, Singapore, Nigeria) — $67,000
A new ultra-high-net-worth advisory effort focused on philanthropists in Asia and Africa. This grant covers the founder’s part-time salary and supports early-stage setup and outreach.
Więcej Dobra (Poland) — $26,500
A solo volunteer project using Instagram influencer campaigns to raise funds for GiveWell’s top charities. This grant supports scaling that approach by funding a larger multi-influencer campaign to raise funds for New Incentives, a nonprofit that runs conditional cash transfer programs in Nigeria.
In some cases, otherwise strong proposals didn’t meet our funding bar. The most common reasons were:
Lower effectiveness adjustment. We apply downward adjustments when donations are directed to interventions we believe are less cost-effective than GiveWell’s top charities (or similarly highly cost-effective interventions in our other priority areas). This can substantially lower the expected ROI of a fundraising effort.
High cost for early-stage experiments. While we’re excited to fund new approaches, we’re more likely to support experiments with relatively low price tags. For instance, we backed Etkili Bağış to test effective giving in Turkey with a $20,000 grant. More expensive pilots often didn’t clear our bar unless there was a compelling case for early impact.
Limited near-term upside. When proposals had a marginal expected ROI (e.g. 1.5-2.5x), we prioritized opportunities where we could plausibly learn about upside within the next 1-2 years. As a result, we typically chose to pass on opportunities with marginal ROI where we felt that it would take 3+ years to learn, or where the plans would not be ambitious enough for us to be able to assess the impact of the strategy.
A few reflections from this round:
The ecosystem is growing. We received 40 applications, including strong proposals from established organizations and new experiments. This roughly matched our prediction for the number of applications we would receive, but we were surprised to learn about several new initiatives that weren’t on our radar. The effective giving ecosystem appears bigger than ever. We were also surprised to see that about half of those applications were strong enough to make it to a second, more in-depth, assessment stage, and that 11 applications went on to be funded. This all suggests a very strong applicant pool.
Monitoring and evaluation varies widely across organizations. We saw a wide range of methods for estimating counterfactual impact. We’re considering an internal project to help set and share clearer standards.
Open calls are valuable. We primarily do active grantmaking, reaching out to promising organizations in the space. This was the first time we ran an RFP — we didn’t know how useful it would be, and whether it would be worth repeating. However, having concluded the process, we found it very helpful. It allowed us to identify new opportunities, better understand the full space, compare across initiatives, and generally make more informed funding decisions.
Happy to see this. Overall I'm pretty excited about this area and would like to see further work here. I think my main concern is just that I'd like to see dramatically more capital being used in this area. It's easy for me to imaging spending $10M-$100M per year on expanding donations; especially because there's just so much money out there.
I'm a bit curious about the ROI number.
"We estimate a weighted average ROI of ~4.3x across the portfolio, which means we expect our grantees to raise more than $6 million in adjusted funding over the next 1-2 years."
1-2 years really isn't that much. I'm sure a lot of the benefits of this grant will be felt for longer periods.
Also, of course:
1. I'd expect that IRR would also be useful, especially if benefits will come after 2 years out.
2. I'd hope that it wouldn't be too difficult to provide some 90% bounds or similar.
To give more clarity on what I mean by imagining larger spends - it seems to me like many of these efforts are sales-heavy, instead of being marketing-heavy.
I can understand that it would take a while to scale up sales. But scaling up marketing seems much better understood. Large companies routinely spend billions per year on marketing.
Here are some figures a quick Claude search gave for car marketing spending, for instance. I think this might be an interesting comparison because cars, like charitable donations, are large expenses that might take time for people to consider.
(I do realize that the economics might be pretty different around charity, so of course I'd recommend being very clever and thoughtful before scaling up quite to this level)
I asked ChatGPT about the average marketing spend of auto manufacturers was (it said 7-8%) and the average fundraising spend of the largest US charities (it said ~10%, which is consistent with my intuition). While I'm not endorsing these percentages as optimal for auto manufacturers or non-EA charities -- much less advocating that they should be applied to EA charities -- they could provide some sort of ballpark starting point.
Automotive marketing, as I understand it, is considerably about creating vague positive brand associations that will pay off when the consumer is ready to make a purchase decision. That's a viable strategy in part because there aren't too many differences between (e.g.) a Ford and a GM truck. It's not obvious to me that would-be EA donors would respond well to that kind of campaign, and this may limit the extent to which their marketing budgets and strategies serve as a useful guide here.
Frustratingly, the links that Claude found for these went to Statista, which is mostly paywalled, but the public bits mostly seem to verify these rough numbers.
https://claude.ai/share/941fbda6-2dc5-4d15-bb31-99fcfc4d0a8b
I think 1-2 years is a reasonable window to test for 1 year of funding. I think some benefits of the grant would remain beyond that, but only a small percentage. Direct networking, marketing, website improvement etc. need people working directly to increase funding and I struggle to see how those benefits would persist if no-one was working and the money stopped?
How do you imagine the benefits might continue past 2 years?
Thanks Ozzie and Nick!
I agree that there will likely be some benefits beyond the grant period (which is 1-2 years depending on the grant). Those will especially be felt in cases in which the grant helped seed an org that might not get started or might get started many years later otherwise. That wasn't the case for many of the grants though, in general we're providing ops support for 1-2 y for an existing org.
Even though I made most of these grants non-renewable, in our core effective giving portfolio we're a stable funder for most organizations, which means that I'll reassess them every 2y or so to determine if we should renew funding, and at what level. We then use every grant period to look at (adjusted) money moved and how that compares to the orgs costs. This is a simplified view and I think we'll need to adjust it in some cases, e.g. now that a lot of the organizations are forming partnerships with GWWC, some of the wins they land in a given grant period through pledges will be seen for many years, so we should consider that, but avoid double counting in future periods.
Ozzie, to your point of expecting the area to be able to absorb more money, I think that's true. We did discuss with some orgs if it was worth them scaling further, but most are being cautious and want to hit certain milestones/make sure they're on a sustainable growth path before doing so, which I appreciate. The two ways in which I currently imagine the ecosystem could absorb more funds is: (1) by seeding new efforts (there are still many gaps, so I'm excited to see other orgs get started), (2) by scaling existing efforts if some marketing strategy really pays off and/or if they tap into a new segment and need more, or dedicated, staff (e.g. for national chapters that start doing more (U)HNW advising). I should also state that the amount of funding that we're able to provide for the ecosystem will vary depending on the year, considering my program's budget and other grants on the table (both funding tied to existing grantees, and other potential opportunities).
If any of these can be high-growth ventures, then early work is mainly useful in helping to set up later work. There's often a lot of experimentation, product-market-fit finding, learning about which talent is good at this, early on.
Related, I'd expect that some of this work would take a long time to provide concrete returns. My model is that it can take several years to convince certain wealthy people to give up money. Many will make their donations late in life. (Though I realize that discounting factors might make the later stuff much less valuable than otherwise)