GWWC’s effective giving ecosystem strategy 2026/27

Written by Sjir Hoeijmakers (CEO) and Lucas Moore (Senior Partnerships Manager), Giving What We Can following the Effective Giving Summit 2026.

(Edit: this ecosystem strategy pertains ONLY to GWWC's ecosystem coordination work, which is a small part of our overall strategy. Please refer to our 2026 org-wide strategy to get a view of everything else we're focused on).

The core proposition

GWWC provides three public goods to the effective giving ecosystem, and these are the only ecosystem work we should take on for now:

1. Convening: the EG Summit and Evaluators Forum
2. Information node: the ecosystem annual pulse survey and associated update, money moved (not public) and total number of donors (not public) sheets, ecosystem overview, and evaluators database.
3. Quality control: evaluating evaluators, impact evaluation toolkit.

We are a key coordinator, but not the only one, and don’t aim to be the exclusive provider of these three goods either. We provide them because we are uniquely well-placed to, and we invite others to contribute to these goods alongside us and to build the public goods we are not building.

Why this scope

We considered the full range from substantially expanding our coordination role (up to incubating or spinning out a broader coordinating body), and dropping GWWC’s coordination work entirely. We landed deliberately at a mid-point where we feel currently able to create the most value.

Why not less. These three functions provide a lot of value, both for the ecosystem as a whole and for GWWC’s own strategy. They enable GWWC to take a role strongly aligned with our values (e.g. alliance mentality, proactive integrity), and to represent and promote these values in the ecosystem. And they are relatively low-lift for us because we already do them and have the assets in house. In the longer term, we think a separate organisation could house some if not all of these goods, and we might decide to spin them out at some point (see below), but in the meantime we are best positioned to house them.

Why not more. We are a growing organisation with an ambitious strategy that requires focus, and so we cannot take on every public good the ecosystem needs. Taking on more, particularly work less aligned with our core strategy or competencies, would dilute both the quality of our core and our public goods work.

In some ways, this is a solidification of a direction we were already heading in last year: more clearly bounding and specializing our “ecosystem coordination and incubation” role in a way that plays to GWWC’s key strengths and creates space for others to fill the gaps we don’t think we are best positioned to fill.

Why these three specifically

The same elements run through all of them: we already do them reasonably well; we have the relevant people, expertise, and trust in house; and no one else is currently better positioned. For other public goods, there is much less of a comparative advantage for GWWC to pick these up.

• Convening, and in particular the EG Summit, has clear traction and value, based on attendance, feedback and concrete follow-ups. We have the in-house expertise and trust of other organisations to host the Summit, built up over the past four years. Furthermore, it enables us to lead by example in values we think are important for effective giving beyond GWWC, and create the conditions for a high-quality, collaborative, transparent, and high-integrity ecosystem.
  1. For the Summit, one slight update in approach is that we’d like to take on (even) more of a facilitative rather than agenda setting role, particularly in areas where we have less expertise or context, such as (U)HNW advising e.g. one takeaway from the 2026 Summit is that most of the value was in bringing together the right people and allowing them to self-organize in meeting (in 1-1s and small groups) and sharing their thoughts (in memos), and the least value was in us trying to curate content around topics of interest to the group, but where we had little context on. Relatedly, we’re planning to ask (even) more input from various key stakeholders in the ecosystem on how to best curate the Summit invite list, as we will not have all the relevant context in house.
  2. For 2027, the only meeting we’ll likely host beyond the Summit is an Evaluators Forum. The main reason is again that we seem particularly well-positioned to do this, both through evaluating evaluators and through having a stake in the evaluation and grantmaking field improving broadly (rather than in a particular cause). For other potential convenings of sub-spaces (e.g. (U)HNW advisory, broad-base fundraising) we think there are other actors who are better suited to host these (e.g. European national fundraising orgs are already exploring hosting a convening later this year).
• The information node is low-lift and supports our convening. To keep this so, we’ll limit our work here to a few high-value ecosystem-wide pieces we’re mostly already providing, such as the annual pulse survey, money moved sheet, and total number of donors sheet. To play to our comparative advantage, we explicitly don’t aim to be the information node on every topic, e.g. we are less well positioned to do this in the (U)HNW advisory sub-space.
• Quality control through evaluating evaluators and impact evaluation is work we need to do as part of our core strategy regardless. Proactively sharing it is low-hanging fruit and exemplifies our values of alliance mentality, proactive integrity and mission accountability in the ecosystem. We invite other organisations to collaborate and compete on evaluating evaluators and funds as there’s currently a larger evaluation gap than only we can fill, and we believe this will increase quality of evaluations longer-term.

What we are explicitly NOT doing

• We are not the ecosystem's only coordinator or strategic leader: we provide three specific goods, and don’t claim a broader mandate.
• We are not building other public goods: we help others build them through the three goods we provide; we don't build them ourselves.
• We are not claiming exclusivity: we welcome other evaluators, other conveners, other information-holders, and collaborate and compete gladly.

We name these boundaries partly so others feel actively invited to fill the gaps we leave.

Other public goods we'd like to see

We’ve identified a few plausibly high-value (categories of) public goods that we would love others to build, as we don’t think we are well-positioned to do this:

• Cause prioritisation research
• Convenings in the broad fundraising and (U)HNW space
• Shared standards and coordination among meta funders
• Talent recruitment and pipeline coordination and improvement
• Filling cause area gaps in the grantmaking and evaluation space
• Best practices and template sharing in advising and fundraising (we might consider this in the future in the evaluation and grantmaking space, as a natural extension of evaluating evaluators)
• Donor coordination among (U)HNW advisors
• Crisis response / Rapid reallocation infrastructure
• Formalized EG standard-setting and accreditation

By default, we will contribute to these being built only through the three public goods we provide, and in particular through helping to surface gaps and connecting the right people via convening and being an information node.

What would change this conclusion

We plan to re-evaluate our coordination activities at least every year immediately following the EG Summit, as this is when we’ll have the best information position to do so. We can already indicate a few triggers that could change our conclusions on specific goods or all three of them if they were to materialize:

1. A dedicated, independent coordination organisation is founded
   1. We don’t think there currently is enough work to justify such an organisation, and there are various challenges with founding one, but if one were to exist we could see us spinning out some or all of these functions to that organisation.
2. A better-positioned party emerges
   1. If another organisation steps forward to provide any of these functions and does so in a plausibly better quality way and/or in a way that replaces rather than complements our work, we would consider winding it down.
3. Significant conflicts of interest emerge
   1. If at any point conflicts of interest emerge that are significant, e.g. there is a need for us to evaluate one of our funders as an evaluator, this might prompt us to spin out certain functions.
4. The work is no longer plausibly competitive with our core strategy
   1. If we find on further evaluation that any of these three public goods is (much) less valuable or more costly than we currently expect, e.g. future EG Summits show lower returns and/or significantly larger resource needs, this could prompt winding down.
5. There’s a strong case for a new public good that we’re not yet providing
   1. We’re open to pitches of public goods that seem highly valuable and we’re well-positioned to provide, though we have a very high bar for taking up any more such work given costs of reduced focus.
6. Key personnel  leave GWWC
   1. Part of the case for us providing these goods is our current in-house context and trust, and a large part of that is held by the authors of this post (Lucas and Sjir), so if either of us were to leave this would cause reconsideration.
7. The ecosystem no longer wants GWWC to provide these
   1. If for some reason we lose trust or lose uptake from (key organisations in) the ecosystem in some other way, this could cause us to wind down or find a more suitable organisation to provide these goods.