I do really think that donating thoughtfully in ways that mean that someone is statistically living because of the interventions you've funded is just something to be really proud of. 

I also wanted to say that I think it's truly okay to also value making your own life more enjoyable, alongside improving the lives of others. I choose to donate at least 10% of my income, but I also spend money on many things I don't need - but I value a rich life full of diverse experiences as well as helping others, and I don't feel bad about it! I'm fulfilling my goal of being a net positive addition to the world, and enjoying my life :) I wanted to add this because I think people in the EA Community often hold themselves to extremely high moral standards!

One quick GWWC tooling note: If you take a Trial Pledge (starting a 1% of income for at least 6 months) or 10% Pledge, we have really nice dashboards and graphs that help track your donations over time!

Hi satelliteprocess!

I'm Grace, the Head of Marketing at GWWC.

Giving What We Can offers a number of giving pledges, the most popular being the "Trial Pledge" and the "10% Pledge"

A Trial Pledge allows you to pledge between 1%-10% of your income for a fixed amount of time between 6 months to 10 years.

A 10% Pledge is a pledge to give 10% of your income until you retire.

There's no progressive "tax" scheme for GWWC's Pledges, unlike The Life You Can Save (TLYCS)'s recommendations. GWWC also has the option for people to pledge a percentage of wealth, and we encourage those with significant wealth to give a higher proportion of their assets.

We encourage people to "give what they can" and find a level of giving that best suits them. We find that people have very different expectations about how much they can or should give and think it's for each person to decide what works for them. For example, some people on low incomes still take the 10% Pledge while others who earn significantly more might take a Trial Pledge for 1% or 5%.

If you're new to giving, I'd recommend taking a Trial Pledge for a percentage that feels comfortable to you, and plan on increasing it if you decide you'd like to give more.

Re: pre or post income tax, you can find the answer in this FAQ.

I don't know what country you're in, but to calculate your annual pre-tax and post-tax income but if you google, there's usually calculators or tools that do this for your country!

Peter Singer has taken the 10% Pledge (although he's mentioned he gives much more) but he is the founder of TLYCS. They are two different charities, which is why we have different pledges.

Giving What We Can offers a more active community around pledging, including a global slack community and dashboards to track your progress over time - promoting giving pledges is one of the main things we do and we're planning on improving the experience for our pledgers over time! So I'm biased in saying that taking a pledge with GWWC is a good idea, starting with a level of giving that you're comfortable with.

If you have any further questions, you can reach out to us at community@givingwhatwecan.org 

Currently at GWWC in our materials for EA Groups, we suggest that a Trial Pledge is a good starting point for people who are interested in effective giving, but are just learning about it.

My personal POV: I think it's generally a good idea for people to try out giving 10% or take a Trial Pledge before committing to the 10% Pledge. I think it's important that people feel comfortable with giving that amount and think seriously about what tradeoffs they might need to make if they take a 10% Pledge. But I think introducing people to the idea of the 10% Pledge at university is a good idea. We see people end up taking pledges even 10+ years after learning about it at university!

Thanks David - really helpful to be able to read about this succinctly!

Thank you for this beautiful post, Julia. Your writing always really resonates with me.

Just echoing Luke's response here: When I moved from my corporate job to GWWC, I gave up ~30% of salary I would have had if I stayed. I still give at least 10% of my current salary.

I think I was lucky to be in a high paying role to begin with, and that I get paid a fair salary at GWWC but there definitely was a large financial cost to moving to a non-profit, especially on top of donating min. 10%.

Hi Simon,

Thanks for the question!

The EA Hub used to facilitate donation swaps - but the project was retired so now there's no one owning this.

I think it can be hard to formally organise this, and have some reservations as to whether there could be legal implications for an organisation to run a project like this.

That being said, I know some people who are informally organising donation swaps at the moment.

It could be a good idea to gauge feasibility and interest in this across the EA community. I don't know if it's something GWWC would want to own but I do think it's worth someone exploring!

Another thing to mention is that in the absence of a donation swap, if you expect a non-tax-deductible donation opportunity to be ≥2x times more impactful than one that you could claim a tax deduction on, you should probably choose the higher-impact option and forego the tax deduction. Here's a nice page to explain why: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/donating-effectively-tax-deductibly

Thanks for your kind words about our work and team, too!!

Hi Vasco,

This isn't something that GWWC is currently planning to look into, but I think it's a good question and I'd like to see us develop our thinking about it further. We've made an internal note on this to discuss within the team!

We may also review this page mentioned next year to include sources.

Thanks as always for your feedback :) 

Hi Vasco,

Thanks for your question - I think it's a good one!

I was going to write up a response but then I remembered we had this nice explanation on our research and approach page:

Some other organisations in the effective giving space advocate a particular “worldview”; for example, they might believe it is most impactful to focus on safeguarding the long-term future and as such, recommend giving to organisations working to reduce existential risk, rather than other high-impact causes like global health. Others may believe it is best to focus on non-human animal wellbeing, because the scale of the problem (if you value all sentient beings equally) is so enormous compared to human wellbeing and the solutions are much more tractable than attempting to safeguard the long-term future.

At Giving What We Can, we believe there are compelling arguments and reasons for focusing on any of the high-impact cause areas we recommend, and that no matter which one you choose, you’ll have the capacity to help solve some of the world’s most pressing problems and prevent the suffering of many. We’ve outlined why the cause areas we recommend are particularly impactful (and why we encourage supporting these over others) but we don’t currently take a view on which of our high-impact cause areas we deem most impactful as we think this is quite value-specific. Instead, we wish to provide the public with a variety of highly effective giving options, and then empower them to determine which ones best align with their own worldviews/values. Some of our donors feel strongly that they’ll have more impact by prioritising one of these cause areas; others prefer to diversify their giving portfolio across several cause areas.

So I think the TL;DR of this answer is that we provide recommendations across a number of worldviews but don't currently want to weigh in on what we think is the "correct" worldview. This means that we'll be unlikely to create a ranked link of recommendations across our cause areas unless we change our view on how we think about worldview diversity.

Hi Vasco, I think you're probably right in rational terms! For me personally, I find it's actually helpful with donors sometimes to be able to talk about the different charities I donate to and meet them on their level. But I'm also probably not as rational as I could be!