Our mission at Giving What We Can is to create a culture of giving significantly and effectively. As part of this, we provide information and infrastructure for donors to find and fund the most impactful charities.
Giving What We Can retains full rights to add or remove organisations at any point from the platform or change their status, at the discretion of the Giving What We Can research team.
This page explains the different types of programs we list on our donation platform and our reasons for doing so.
We base our recommendations on the research of impact-focused evaluators our research team has vetted. You can see more about why and how we evaluate evaluators here.
We currently only recommend charities and funds that a vetted evaluator has also recommended. We expect to evaluate more evaluators soon, which will likely mean we'll be adding to our recommendations.
Our goal in making these recommendations is to provide donors with an overview of some of the highest-impact donation opportunities we know of across a range of worldviews. These are organisations that generally have publicly available evidence and/or reasoning supporting their cost-effectiveness.
Notably, this excludes charities that may well be extremely cost-effective but simply haven’t been investigated by an evaluator we've vetted.
We do not accept requests from organisations looking to be included on our list of recommendations.
We do not accept payments or charge fees to organisations that we include on our list of recommendations. We are here to help donors do the most good through their giving.
We think some effective givers will have good reasons to want to donate to these options, but we are not yet confident enough in their cost-effectiveness to include them as recommendations. These programs align with our charitable purpose in that they are doing work in a high-impact cause area and taking a reasonably promising approach. We include them for a variety of reasons, including to support donors by providing many impactful donation options in one place, and to support the effective giving ecosystem as a whole -- by allowing organisations to receive support from many donors across the world. More specifically, these programs may be included because they:
Note that this is a wide range of circumstances, and as such, we expect there to be significant impact variations among our "other supported programs." You can read more about each program on the program's dedicated page.
We do not accept payments or charge fees to organisations that we include on our platform. We are here to help donors do the most good through their giving.
All supported programs must:
We have stopped accepting applications for new supported programs for now, barring exceptional circumstances (such as when the Giving What We Can research team believes a project looks exceptionally useful and would derive exceptional benefit from being on our platform). Organisations can express interest here.
We do not accept requests from organisations looking to be recommended. We have also stopped accepting applications for new supported programs, but still maintain an expression of interest form for exceptional cases (see above).