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by Aaron Gertler 🔸
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Effective givingBuilding effective altruismCommunityDonation choicePublic giving
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In the early days of EA, people often tracked their giving on personal websites, or at least wrote about each year's donations. I read about it and felt inspired (and a bit competitive).

This is less popular now. I want to see more.

How to track donations

Here's a list of examples. Some people write long posts with all their reasoning, others just share numbers. More info is nice, but anything beats nothing.

My approach is minimal — a page explaining why I give in general, and a spreadsheet with names, numbers, and brief notes. It takes me like 20 minutes a year.

Why track?

The classic EA pitch is "you can improve the world".

Another pitch, which many people find more compelling, is "join a community of kind, interesting people who are trying to improve the world".

The more of us talk about our giving, the easier it is to see what our community is like. People like it when you live by your values, and the nerds in our core audience like it when claims are backed by data.

Also, if someone hears about EA, it makes a big difference if they know even a single donor personally — the difference between "those are weird nerds" and "hey, that's Aaron!" You can be your friends' first impression of effective giving.

Finally, the current state of affairs seems like a waste. There are 10,000+ Giving What We Can members who claim to give 10% of their income, but 95% of them don't say anything more — it's just a long list of names, with an occasional "I took the pledge!" tweet.

While not everyone keeps the pledge, thousands surely do. I wish they'd spend more time promoting that fact, explaining where they give, and sharing the data for people to see. (Same goes for non-pledgers, of course!)

In the golden age of public giving, the EA community spent most of its time thinking about where to give. Now, it's more about finding the right job. That's appropriate; the average person can make a much bigger impact by working than giving.

 However:

  • They aren't mutually exclusive. We can simultaneously convey "it's really good to find an impactful career" and "it's also good to donate, lots of us do it".
  • Donating is easy to explain. I find it hard to describe my employer to people who aren't familiar with EA — as do many other people, especially in the AI/meta space. "I give 10% of my income, here are some charities I support" is easy to explain and leaves a lasting impression.
  • Donating reaches more people. Most of my friends are doctors and lawyers and insurance agents who aren't going to change their jobs no matter what I tell them. But lots of them have asked me about charity over the years, because I talk about my giving and put the details on my website.
  • You should also write about your job. No hypocrisy here!

Why not track?

  • I don't give very much because I take a low salary to support my employer, live off small grants, have family to support, need savings to stay flexible, etc.
    • Makes sense! That said, if you are in fact donating something like 10%, even from a small salary, that will still be cool or inspiring to many people.
    • To be clear, this isn't an argument for giving more — just talking about whatever giving you do.
  • I don't have anything interesting to say — I give 10% to GiveWell, unrestricted.
    • You don't have to be interesting! It's still cool to live in a world where more people are talking about the causes they believe in. Also, most people have no idea what GiveWell is, including some of the people you know.
  • I give to weird or controversial causes that will not endear people to EA — it's all AI research, meta stuff, and political campaigns.
    • Makes sense! But you (a) can write about some but not all donations if you want, and (b) may find it interesting to explain why you chose those causes — maybe you'll convince someone.
    • If you're worried about political donations making it hard to get a job later, remember that U.S. campaign giving is already public; the AI hiring bots of the future will find you anyway. But it's reasonable not to broadcast your support for e.g. partisan think tanks whose donors aren't disclosed.
  • I worry that people in EA will shame me for donations they think are suboptimal, or start annoying arguments I don't want to engage in.
    • Yep, that does sound plausible :-/   For what it's worth:
      • If you want to ignore critics of your giving, that's entirely fair. You have no obligation to engage; a single post still beats not saying anything.
      • No one's donations will look good to every other person. Your critic, if they shared their own views, would have critics of their own.
      • Even Coefficient Giving gets regular criticism, and that's a team of full-time professional grantmakers trying really hard to get things right. Getting criticized doesn't mean you're a bad person, bad EA, whatever.
      • I've been tracking donations for twelve years and exactly one person has tried to shame me (they're a friend, we got past it).
  • I don't have anywhere to put the information.
    • Make a Google Sheet and put the link on your profiles. Feel free to copy mine.
    • Once a year, make a post somewhere about where you gave. No need to explain your reasons — one sentence about each charity, or even just a link, is great.

But actually, track your donations

I've found this habit incredibly worthwhile, and I think you should try it.

You can set up a page or spreadsheet and a quick statement of intent in less than an hour. If you want, you can fill in your entire donation history in another hour or two.

If you don't have time today, or want to procrastinate, put this post in your calendar for November 21st and do it before Giving Tuesday. Let's show the world what EA looks like!

 

Appendix: Who tracks?

This includes anyone I think of as connected to EA and EA causes, even if they wouldn't describe themselves that way. (Ask me if you'd like to be removed.)

I'd love to grow this list. If I missed you, or you start tracking after this post, let me know!

The "Donation Writeup" tag has more examples, like the 2025 donation celebration post.

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Nina Friedrich🔸5
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Thank you for sharing (and for having @High Impact Professionals on your 2026 list)! Three additional thoughts:

  • People often think it's hard for them to talk about effective giving but easy for the people who already do. I don't think that's the case. For various reasons (many of which raised in this post), I find it hard and uncomfortable to talk about my giving. And still I do it. I think the upsides are much larger. And it gets easier over time.
  • When I wrote my first post about effective giving (on Linked + here) I almost didn't post it. I had already kicked it off my to do list - twice. What made the difference was seeing other people talk about it. So, you talking about this might not just lead to your additional posts on the topic but might inspire someone else to talk about it also!
  • Tracking your donations means you get to track donation milestones. I find this is a great way to make the impact more tangible and a good excuse to talk about it. ;-)

I love the push on tracking donations! I track mine but it's a private spreadsheet - I have a donation milestone coming up, so I might publish it for that occasion.

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Karla Still 🔸8
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I agree :) I have written 6 posts about effective giving during the past year on Substack. And the latest one, which also got the most views relatively (still only around 100), was about my personal donations in 2025. 

Also, consider writing in your native or local language! Example: As far as I know, there are <10 people (or organisations) who have ever written about effective giving in Finnish, and I'm the only one doing it semi-consistently. Most people in my target audience in Finland are essentially fluent in English, but many prefer reading in Finnish if they can, as it might be faster and easier to connect. I'm also not writing anything particularly novel, so few EAs miss out on anything. But my content could be a way to spark the initial curiosity, so that people get the motivation to read more in English (in which there's a lot more content that I often reference in my posts). 

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Austin7
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Very much agreed, though I'm guilty for not having done this myself; hope to fix this soon!

Two other donation writeups I really liked:

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Aaron Gertler 🔸2
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Thanks! I didn't add Richard initially because he's said he doesn't think of himself as part of EA (didn't want to saddle him with associations he might not want). But his donation writeups are great, so I adjusted the language of my list to be more inclusive of anyone who shares an interest in EA-linked causes.

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Xylix3
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As someone trying to broadly develop views on what kind of neglected work there is available in the AI Safety space, Richard Ngo's giving shortform was a very good read. Thanks for linking it!

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Jeff Kaufman 🔸6
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@Ben Kuhn has a log at https://www.benkuhn.net/ea/ , though the last donation is 2019.  I don't know if that's putting giving on hold vs no longer updating the list?

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Vasco Grilo🔸0
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Hi Aaron. Nice post.

In the golden age of public giving, the EA community spent most of its time thinking about where to give. Now, it's more about finding the right job. That's appropriate; the average person can make a much bigger impact by working than giving.

Do you mean random people in the whole population can have a much greater impact through work than giving? I find this hard to believe. Benjamin Todd thinks “it’s defensible to say that the best of all interventions in an area are about 10 times more effective than [as effective as] the mean, and perhaps as much as 100 times”, which is in agreement with the cost-effectiveness of interventions following a heavy-tailed distribution. If so, jobs were uniformly distributed across interventions, and a person in a random job within an area were 10 % more cost-effective than the 2nd best candidate for their job, them donating 10 % more of their gross salary to the best interventions in the area could have 10 (= 0.1*10/0.1) to 100 (= 0.1*100/0.1) times as much impact through donations as through work. In reality, I assume there are more jobs in less cost-effective interventions, as the best interventions only account for a small fraction of the overall funding. Based on Ben’s numbers, if there are 10 times as many people in jobs as cost-effective as a random one as in the most-effective jobs, a person in a random job within an area who is 10 % more cost-effective than the 2nd best candidate for their job, and donates 10 % more of their gross salary to the best interventions in the area is 100 (= 10*10) to 1.00 k (= 100*10) times as impactful as a person in the same job not donating.

Here's a list of examples.

Nitpick. The link links to your post instead of the appendix.

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Aaron Gertler 🔸6
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Thanks for the nitpick, fixed!

I mean something like "the average person in the EA community" or "the average person who is interested enough in EA's ideas and methods to take action" — that seems like the relevant audience for the question of what the community should focus on.

(This is complicated by giving being an easier pitch/reaching more people than career choice — but that's beyond the scope of this comment.)

Some thoughts:

  1. I'm not sure what it means for a candidate to be "more cost-effective", but I assume it equates to "better at their job" (assuming a fixed salary).
  2. My impression, from spending a lot of time in EA orgs and working on several hiring rounds, is that the difference between "best candidate" and "second-best candidate" is often well over 10% (though, to be fair, orgs may be wrong about which candidate is best).
  3. And even a candidate who is only 10% "better" might have additional impact worth far more than 10% of their salary. Let's say an average org employee generates $2 million in value for the organization (seems realistic based on this). Getting the "best" candidate for a job would then be worth $200,000 to the org. If that employee earned a $100,000 salary (and donated $10,000/year), they'd generate more value by working than giving even if their donation target was 10x as cost-effective as their employer.
    1. The linked figures are old and could be flawed in many ways, but I'm not aware of anything better.
    2. The implicit assumption I'm reading from your model is that someone's impact within a job is worth exactly what they are paid. But I may be misunderstanding something — you have much more experience with this kind of modeling than I do!
  4. Your model seems to assume that a donor will support the most cost-effective intervention in an area. But if less cost-effective interventions have a lot more jobs, doesn't that imply they also have more funding, and thus that the average donor is more likely to support them?
    1. This is hard to support empirically without some shared views on which interventions are best. But I will say that donors, relative to job-seekers, have historically been much more interested in global health than animal welfare or X-risk — if you think the most effective interventions are in the latter categories, that's some evidence in favor of prioritizing career choice over giving.
    2. If new donors did reliably support the most cost-effective interventions, that seems like it would open up many more jobs in those interventions and boost the impact of an expected career change (though perhaps not above the impact of donating).
  5. People who decide to change their careers don't just add to existing interventions — they sometimes make it possible to support new interventions (e.g. by founding an org, or bringing a new kind of expertise into an existing org).
    1. Donors can also do this, but it's hard — I'd guess the average EA-interested person is more likely to be capable of starting a new org than providing sufficient seed funding to get one running.
  6. In my experience, EA orgs tend to describe themselves as much more limited by talent than funding. This doesn't disprove your model — it could be that orgs are broadly wrong about this, or that the most effective orgs are more likely to be primarily funding-bottlenecked, or that the average person can do more to resolve a funding bottleneck than a talent bottleneck, etc. — but it seems like evidence that the model is incomplete.
  7. In theory, the best outcome is for someone to change their career and start donating. And I think someone who changes their career is more likely to start donating than vice-versa. A career change is a big change to someone's environment/what they think about all day, and likely connects them to lots of other people who donate, while donating is a smaller change with little day-to-day impact on how the donor thinks about their career.
    1. If you think most people make far more impact by donating than working, and that it's much easier to convince people to donate than change careers, this factor won't change much; you'd still prefer lots of new donors to a small number of new workers who also donate. But I still thought it was worth noting.

I probably won't have time to respond to more comments at length (if at all), but I appreciate the impetus to think about the question!

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Vasco Grilo🔸4
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I'm not sure what it means for a candidate to be "more cost-effective", but I assume it equates to "better at their job" (assuming a fixed salary).

Yes. I meant more impactful per unit cost (accounting for the direct impact of the job, and its time and financial costs).

My impression, from spending a lot of time in EA orgs and working on several hiring rounds, is that the difference between "best candidate" and "second-best candidate" is often well over 10% (though, to be fair, orgs may be wrong about which candidate is best).

The expected difference will tend to be smaller than the observed difference (the best candidates will tend to regress more towards the mean). I do not know how much this matters, and the extent to which organisations try to account for it, but I guess you are right that the most cost-effective candidate are often more than 10 % more cost-effective than the 2nd most cost-effective. Donating more 10 % of the gross salary to an organisation 10 to 100 times as cost-effective at the margin as A would still be 2 (= 0.1*10/0.5) to 20 (= 0.1*100/0.5) times as impactful as joining A for an alternative hire 50 % as impactful who would get the same salary.

Your model seems to assume that a donor will support the most cost-effective intervention in an area. But if less cost-effective interventions have a lot more jobs, doesn't that imply they also have more funding, and thus that the average donor is more likely to support them?

Great point. I would just say "random funding" instead of "average donor". I see now that the vast majority of people considering joining A would not find the comparison I made just above relevant. If they thought there was another organisation 10 to 100 times as cost-effective at the margin as A, they would most likely only consider joining organisations significantly more cost-effective at the margin than A.

The implicit assumption I'm reading from your model is that someone's impact within a job is worth exactly what they are paid.

Yes, I am making this assumption. I think it roughly applies to new jobs. My thinking is that funders should fund organisations until they are indifferent between funding them more or not. If a funder thought that an organisation spending 100 k$/year more on a new job would be worth 1 M$/year more to the funder, they would be leaving 900 k$/year (= 1*10^6 - 100*10^3) of impact on the table, in the sense that giving 100 k$/year more to the organisation would be as impactful as the funder having 900 k$/year more to spend.

In my experience, EA orgs tend to describe themselves as much more limited by talent than funding.

I wonder whether this depends on the audience. Organisations have an incentive to highlight talent constraints in hiring efforts (to get more applicants), and funding constraints in fundraising (to get more funding).

I am not sure what organisations mean when they say they are limited by funding or talent. Organisations are always constrained by both funding and talent to some extent. Additional funding can be used to retain and acquire talent via higher salaries and greater spending on hiring, including on field-building efforts like fellowships. I believe it would be better for organisations to say how much they value the best candidates over the 2nd best candidates (for roles they are hiring for) in terms of additional funding instead of just saying they are funding or talent constrained. 

I think someone who changes their career is more likely to start donating than vice-versa.

I agree. In addition, I think people who change to more impactful jobs will tend to donate to more cost-effective organisations.

If you think most people make far more impact by donating than working, and that it's much easier to convince people to donate than change careers, this factor won't change much; you'd still prefer lots of new donors to a small number of new workers who also donate. But I still thought it was worth noting.

Makes sense. I do not know whether marginal funding should mostly go towards adocating for cost-effective donations, including via earning to give, or careers.

I appreciate the impetus to think about the question!

Likewise.

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