Effektiv Spenden
Effective Giving Advocacy
Effektiv Spenden (German for "donate effectively") is a nonprofit donation platform that promotes effective giving in Germany and Switzerland.
What problem is Effektiv Spenden working on?
Effektiv Spenden aims to raise as much funding as possible for the world's most effective and evidence-based charities and projects, thereby helping solve the most pressing problems. It focuses on supporting charities working on reducing global poverty, climate change, reducing animal suffering, and safeguarding the long-term future.
What does Effektiv Spenden do?
Through its German-language website, Effektiv Spenden:
- Informs potential donors about effective giving in general
- Presents an up-to-date selection of high-impact giving opportunities
- Offers personalised donation advice in collaboration with Munich-based HNWI philanthropy consultancy Legacies Now
As a donation platform, Effektiv Spenden accepts donations on behalf of its recommended charities to facilitate the donation experience and provide tax-deductibility to its donors, even if the charity is based outside of Germany or Switzerland.
In addition, it runs the Berlin EA Coworking Space TEAMWORK, which serves as a hub for the effective altruism community in Germany.
Effektiv Spenden was founded in early 2019 by Sebastian Schwiecker in coordination with the Effective Altruism Foundation. It is headquartered in Berlin, Germany. Since 2021, donations from Swiss donors are processed through their Swiss entity in Basel.
What information does Giving What We Can have about the cost-effectiveness of Effektiv Spenden?
We previously included Effektiv Spenden as one of our recommended charities based on Founders Pledge’s extensive evaluation highlighting the cost-effectiveness of Giving Multipliers. We’ve since updated our recommendations to reflect only organisations recommended by evaluators we’ve looked into as part of our 2023 evaluator investigations; as such, we don't currently include Effektiv Spenden as one of our recommended programs but you can still donate to it via our donation platform.
According to Effektiv Spenden, in 2021 it raised €18.86 million from more than 9,000 donors for some of the most effective charities in the world. This represents a growth of over 560% compared to the previous year (€2.84 million) and was done with an average of only 2 FTEs.
Please note that GWWC does not evaluate individual charities. Our recommendations are based on the research of third-party, impact-focused charity evaluators our research team has found to be particularly well-suited to help donors do the most good per dollar, according to their recent evaluator investigations. Our other supported programs are those that align with our charitable purpose — they are working on a high-impact problem and take a reasonably promising approach (based on publicly-available information).
At Giving What We Can, we focus on the effectiveness of an organisation's work -- what the organisation is actually doing and whether their programs are making a big difference. Some others in the charity recommendation space focus instead on the ratio of admin costs to program spending, part of what we’ve termed the “overhead myth.” See why overhead isn’t the full story and learn more about our approach to charity evaluation.