Quick takes

I’ve donated about $150,000 over the past couple years. Here are some of the many (what I believe to be) mistakes in my past giving: 1. Donating to multiple cause areas. When I first started getting into philosophy more seriously, I adopted a vegan lifestyle and started identifying as EA within only a few weeks of each other. Deciding on my donation allocations across cause areas was painful, as I assign positive moral weights to both humans and animals and they might even be close in intrinsic value. I felt the urge to apologize to my vegan, non AI-worrier friends for increasing my ratio of AI safety donations to animal welfare donations, and my non-vegan, non-EA friends and family thought that donating to animals over humans was crazy. Now my view is something like: donations to AI safety are probably orders of magnitude more effective than to animal welfare or global health + development, so I should (and do) allocate 100% to AI safety. 2. Donating to multiple opportunities within the same cause area. Back in my early EA global health + development days, I found and still find the narrative of “some organizations are 100x more effective than others” pretty compelling, but I internally categorized orgs into two buckets: high EV and low EV. I viewed GiveWell-recommended organizations as broadly 'High EV,' assuming that even if their point estimates differed, their credence intervals overlapped sufficiently to render the choice between them negligible. This might even be true! However, I do not believe this to generalize to animal welfare and AI safety. Now I’ve come full circle in a way, and believe that actually, some things are multiple times (or even orders of magnitude) higher EV than other things, and have chosen to shut up and multiply. If you are a smaller donor, it is unlikely that your donation will sufficiently saturate a donation opportunity such that your nth dollar should go elsewhere. 3. Donating to opportunities that major organizations recommend

Gavi's investment opportunity for 2026-2030 says they expect to save 8 to 9 million lives, for which they would require a budget of at least $11.9 billion[1]. Unfortunately, Gavi only raised $9 billion, so they have to make some cuts to their plans[2]. And you really can't reduce spending by $3 billion without making some life-or-death decisions. Gavi's CEO has said that "for every $1.5 billion less, your ability to save 1.1 million lives is compromised"[3]. This would equal a marginal cost of $1,607 $1,363 per life saved, which seems a bit low to me. But I think there is a good chance Gavi's marginal cost per life saved is still cheap enough to clear GiveWell's cost-effectiveness bar. GiveWell hasn't made grants to Gavi, though. Why? ---------------------------------------- 1. https://www.gavi.org/sites/default/files/investing/funding/resource-mobilisation/Gavi-Investment-Opportunity-2026-2030.pdf, pp. 20 & 43 ↩︎ 2. https://www.devex.com/news/gavi-s-board-tasked-with-strategy-shift-in-light-of-3b-funding-gap-110595 ↩︎ 3. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02270-x ↩︎

Hey folks! I wanted to share a quick update on fundraising for the Center for Wild Animal Welfare (CWAW), as the year draws to a close, and as people consider finalising their end-of-year giving.  Our original forum post, announcing the launch of the Center and setting out the giving opportunity, is here.  We’ve had a great response, and have successfully raised our core Year 1 budget - whoop! The $60,000 1:1 donor match has been fully used up, so further donations to CWAW won’t be matched.  We are still gladly accepting donations, which will be used for ‘stretch’ items in CWAW’s budget - things such as public polling and focus groups to inform comms and policy development, contracting experts for advice on specific policy areas, subscriptions for parliamentary and media monitoring, joining professional and policy networks, running events such as policy report launches, improving our website, and expanding our capacity for ‘mainstream’ fundraising. We think that these items offer substantial value for money at the margin.   If you’d like to support our mission, it’s super easy to donate, and there are a variety of tax-efficient giving options (for various countries). Please see the original forum post for full details.  If you’re considering making an end-of-year gift, and have any questions - whether to help you weigh up the strength of CWAW as a giving opportunity, or on logistics - please feel free to reach out to Ben and I at team@wildanimalwelfare.org.  I’m also delighted to share that we will be launching a newsletter to keep people up to date about CWAW’s work. Whether you’re a donor or not, if you’d like to receive this, please do sign up here.  Cheers, and happy new year! 

Consider whether you're comparatively advantaged to give to non-tax-deductible things. (Not financial advice.) I think people -- especially donors who are giving >$100k/year -- often default to thinking that they should stick to tax-deductible giving, because they have an unusually high "501c3 multiplier" due to high marginal income tax rates or low cost basis for capital gains taxes. I claim this is a mistake for some donors, because what matters is whether your 501c3 multiplier is unusually high relative to the average dollar in the donor mix, which is usually coming from other people in very high tax brackets. People who do have unusually high "501c3 multipliers" include those with employer matches to 501c3 donations. For a 1:1 match for cash donations, I think the multiplier is something like 3.5x, and even higher if you're donating appreciated assets like equity.[1] I would guess that you need to have a multiplier at least that good to actually be comparatively advantaged [ETA: because I think lots of the dollars from individual donors in the EA giving space come from people with 1:1 or better employer matches, like Google or Anthropic].[2] The reason this matters is that if too many people think they're comparatively advantaged for tax-deductible giving, then non-tax-deductible opportunities (e.g. 501c4 advocacy, political giving, even future 501c3s awaiting their 501c3 determination) will unduly struggle to fundraise, so the best marginal opportunities are often going to be in that category. 1. ^ If your donation budget is $10,000 (of post-tax income) and you're, say, a single San Franciscan making $500k (and therefore paying a 42.53% marginal tax rate, per SmartAsset), I think this means you could donate ~$17,400 in cash (a 1.74x multiplier) and deduct that from your income, reducing your tax burden by $7,400 = $10,000 from your post-tax income. Then your 1:1 employer match means the charity gets double that, or $34,800 (a 3.48x multiplier). If

Is there a running list of small, impactful & very capacity-constrained giving opportunities somewhere?

Quick take on longtermist donations for giving tuesday. My favorite donation opportunity is Alex Bores's congressional campaign. I also like Scott Wiener's congressional campaign. If you have to donate to a normal longtermist 501c3, I think Forethought, METR, and The Midas Project—and LTFF/ARM and Longview's Frontier AI Fund—are good and can use more money (and can't take Good Ventures money). But I focus on evaluating stuff other than normal longtermist c3s, because other stuff seems better and has been investigated much less; I don't feel very strongly about my normal longtermist c3 recommendations. Some friends and I have nonpublic recommendations less good than Bores but ~4x as good as the normal longtermist c3s above, according to me.

It's mind-blowing to me that AMF's immediate funding gap is $462M for 2027-29. That's 56-154,000 lives (mostly under-5 children) at $3-8k per life saved, maybe fewer going forward due to evolving resistance to insecticides, but it wouldn't change the bottomline that this seems to be a gargantuan ball dropped. Last time AMF's immediate funding gap was over $300M for 2024-26, so it's grown 50%(!) this time round. Both times the main culprit was the same, the Global Fund's funding replenishment shortfall vs target, which affects programmatic planning in countries. I'd like to think we're collectively doing our part (e.g. last year GiveWell directed $150M to AMF, more than to any other charity, which by their reckoning is expected to save ~27k lives over the next 1-2 years), but it's still nuts to me that such a longstanding high-profile "shovel-ready" giving opportunity as AMF can still have such a big and growing gap!

FYI: METR is actively fundraising!  METR is a non-profit research organization. We prioritise independence and trustworthiness, which shapes both our research process and our funding options. To date, we have not accepted payment from frontier AI labs for running evaluations. ^[1] Part of METR's role is to independently assess the arguments that frontier AI labs put forward about the safety of their models. These arguments are becoming increasingly complex and dependent on nuances of how models are trained and how mitigations were developed. For this reason, it's important that METR has its finger on the pulse of frontier AI safety research. This means hiring and paying for staff that might otherwise work at frontier AI labs, requiring us to compete with labs directly for talent. The central constraint to our publishing more and better research, and scaling up our work aimed at monitoring the AI industry for catastrophic risk, is growing our team with excellent new researchers and engineers. And our recruiting is, to some degree, constrained by our fundraising - especially given the skyrocketing comp that AI companies are offering. To donate to METR, click here: https://metr.org/donate If you’d like to discuss giving with us first, or receive more information about our work for the purpose of informing a donation, reach out to giving@metr.org   1. ^ However, we are definitely not immune from conflicting incentives. Some examples:    - We are open to taking donations from individual lab employees (subject to some constraints, e.g. excluding senior decision-makers, constituting <50% of our funding)  - Labs provide us with free model access for conducting our evaluations, and several labs also provide us ongoing free access for research even if we're not conducting a specific evaluation.