We think funds are the best option for most donors, and have created our new 

 to make it easy for donors who are having trouble deciding between the various top-rated options. These funds make it easy to support high-impact donation opportunities within a particular cause area(s) without having to stay up to date with the latest recommendations. Your donation is allocated based on the latest research by our research team, which includes consulting with the evaluators and grantmakers they think are best suited to maximise impact.

Of course, some donors will prefer to either choose the fund of a specific evaluator or grantmaker that they feel particularly aligns with their priorities, or they might feel most comfortable donating to individual charities (in which case, they can read more about each of our recommendations and decide which ones best align with their values). Interested donors can also 

check out our team’s reports on the charity evaluators and grantmakers

In any of these cases, the first step to deciding which charities or funds to support is to determine which cause area(s) best align with your values. To help you decide, let’s consider what you might get with a $5,000 donation to a charity or fund working in each cause area. (Note that these are just examples of the type of work you might fund; the actual outcome will vary depending on where you donate.)

If you donate $5,000 to a charity/fund working on global health and wellbeing, this could:

Save a life. The charity evaluator GiveWell estimates that 

$4,000 – $5,500 donated to charities like the Against Malaria Foundation or Helen Keller International

 is enough to concretely save a child’s life.

If you donate $5,000 to a charity/fund working on improving farmed animal welfare through corporate campaigns, this could:

Improve the lives of at least 50,000 chickens through furthering 

 commitments from industry. This is based on an 

 by the charity evaluator Founders Pledge (using data from 2016, 2018, and 2019) showing that for every $1 donated to highly effective corporate campaign work (such as the type engaged in by The Humane League) the living conditions of 10–160 chickens are significantly improved. We’ve taken the lower end of that range given the estimates are a couple of years old and early campaigns were particularly cost-effective.

If you donate $5,000 to a charity/fund working on reducing global catastrophic risks, this could:

Fund about a week of research into problems like AI alignment, nuclear security, or biosecurity. For instance, you could help fund improved 

 before they are released to the general public, or support 

the search for effective policy interventions to mitigate nuclear risk

. A week of research in these areas could be hugely impactful — perhaps the researcher stumbles upon a breakthrough or uncovers a key concept — or it might not be impactful at all. But the more funding for this type of research, the greater the odds of finding and implementing solutions to some of the biggest threats to humanity’s future.

So what are the takeaways here? The cause(s) you support depend on a variety of value judgements, and you might want to think about factors like:

Your comfort level with uncertainty vs. how much you value concrete outcomes

The weight you place on the number of lives affected

How you value human lives compared to nonhuman animal lives

How concerned you are about suffering right now versus in the future

These are difficult factors to think through. If you’re having trouble deciding, you’re not alone. Many people in our community have told us that decision paralysis about where to give initially prevented them from giving at all. If that’s you, we recommend simply splitting your donation among these high-impact cause areas via our All Causes bundle (either equally or with your preferred allocation). You can also choose to donate to individual funds or charities within each cause area, if you prefer.


Overall, just remember that sometimes the goal of maximising (searching for 

) can prevent us from taking action at all, and if we take no action, we’re 

The bottom line is that all of these cause areas are highly impactful and no matter which one(s) you choose to support, you’ll be doing a lot of good.

 are collaborations between the 10% Pledge and trusted organisations in the effective giving community who share the values behind the Pledge and wish to promote it to their audiences. These partnerships create focused Pledge communities (“

”) around specific cause areas or geographies, helping pledgers connect with others who share their interests and values. Partners provide additional support, resources, and opportunities to their members while maintaining the core commitment to effective giving.

You can find our current list of pledge partners on our 

. If you haven't taken the pledge yet, you can join the pledge club of any partner by choosing the “Pledge through [Org X]” option within each partner’s listing. 
If you're already a pledger, simply sign in to your account, visit the 

, and click the "Join Pledge Club" button for any clubs you’d like to join.

Yes! You're welcome to join as many clubs as you'd like. Each pledge club offers unique perspectives and opportunities to engage with different aspects of effective giving.

When you join a pledge club, we share your name, email address and pledge information with the partner organisation so they can keep you informed about relevant opportunities and events. Your donation reporting remains private unless you explicitly choose to share it.

Giving What We Can’s research team determines our annual recommendations based on thousands of hours of research from impact-focused third-party charity evaluators. The evaluators we use focus on:

How cost-effective that is to support (loosely, how far your dollar goes when you donate).

We believe these are more accurate evaluative tools than relying solely on metrics like overhead (

which isn’t actually a great indicator of impact

Since there are many impact-focused evaluators in the effective giving space, we determined that our research team could add additional value by 

more deeply investigating the research and approach of each of the evaluators whose research we rely on, or might rely on in the future.

 This allows us to better distinguish between their recommendations and advise donors which ones to follow based on their particular values and worldview. Our list of recommendations is based on the research of the evaluators we’ve looked into as part of our new research and found to be best-suited to helping you maximise the impact of your donations.


However, since this is a large undertaking, 

we have not yet looked into all of the evaluators whose research we’ve previously used, or that we expect to use in the future

 Therefore, if you don’t see a charity on our list that used to be there, this does not necessarily mean we have changed our opinion of it. You can still support these programmes and others via our 

, which lists a range of organisations that broadly fit within our charitable purpose of doing promising work in a high-impact cause area, and we expect to add more recommendations soon. 

That said, we are particularly confident in the impact of the organisations we’ve included on our recommendations list since these are based on the research of impact-focused evaluators that 

 for which we have good reasons to believe they can do a lot of good with the resources they have. Read our 

 to find out how we choose which charities to include on our donation platform. 

 to be highly effective by trusted charity evaluators and grantmakers. We conduct due dilligence on all charities added to our donation platform.

In addition, many of the charities we recommend are highly transparent, which means they provide a lot of information about how they use donations. This allows donors to see how their money is being used and to make an informed decision about whether they want to continue supporting the charity.

If your organisation is interested in becoming a pledge partner, we'd love to hear from you. We look for partners who:

Have a demonstrated commitment to effective giving

Share our vision for creating positive change

Can provide valuable support and resources to pledgers

Read our detailed document and book a call →

We review all applications carefully to ensure alignment with our mission and values.

Giving What We Can will use your personal information consistent with our privacy policy including to contact you about Giving What We Can related matters or to provide you with information that you have requested.

For donors in the UK we may link your data with donations so that we can claim Gift Aid on it. Donors may also elect to share their information with the recipient funds, nonprofits, or charities, in which case we share names and email addresses. Members who take a public giving pledge will have their full name and dated pledge made available on 

We may also use anonymised, aggregated data about donations in our public materials, in order to display information on how the community is donating.

For more information about how we use your personal information, please review our 

 generally identifies particular types of charities that are likely to be highly effective through 

, and then does a deep evaluation of the charities that seem particularly promising (because of track record, approach, or something else) within that already narrowed scope. As such, the final list of top-rated charities will be shorter.

We believe the recommendations on our best charities list are considerably more impactful than average donation opportunities, but this doesn’t mean that these are the 

 be more impactful than average. Impact-focused charity evaluators generally 

can’t evaluate every charity that exists

; they have to use reasoning and evidence to identify areas where it’s likely that charities could have considerable impact, and then evaluate a handful of promising charities in that area to see which ones meet their (typically quite high) impact and cost-effectiveness criteria.

If you are interested in donating to a charity not on this list, and want some clues about how its impact might rank compared to other giving opportunities, we recommend checking out our 

. That said, we think the best way to ensure your donations have impact is to follow the recommendations of impact-focused charity evaluators (

and note that not all charity evaluators are impact-focused

Our current list of recommendations is also shorter than we expect it to be in future years because we’ve based it on our 

, which is not yet complete. As such, we are only recommending charities from evaluators we’ve recently researched (see above).

We’re always interested to hear feedback from donors. Got some thoughts about our recommendations or don’t like what you see? 

Many donors can receive tax benefits for donations made with Giving What We Can. Read our latest information about tax benefits and processes:

Tax deductibility of donations by country

We are currently in the process of more deeply investigating each of the third-party evaluators whose research has informed our recommendations in previous years, or whose research we could consider using in the future (see 

). We based this year’s recommendations on our evaluations of the evaluators we investigated first. This decision has some consequences for our best charities list, including:

We are not including recommendations from evaluators we haven’t yet looked into. 

For example, we haven’t yet looked into Founders Pledge’s research, even though we plan to soon, and think some of its recommendations might be competitive with our own.

We haven’t included recommendations for cause areas that we think could be impactful but have not yet investigated. 

For example, we haven’t included any recommendations for climate change or organisations working on “meta” effective giving (such as effective giving outreach or fundraising, or effective charity incubation).

Our evaluations of evaluators have some limitations.

, which explain some of these limitations.

Because of this, we decided to highlight a few 

 in each cause area, based on our research team’s preliminary impression that they are promising alternatives to our recommendations and of interest to donors who want to investigate further. For example, we highlighted:

A selection of Founders Pledge’s recommendations in a range of cause areas

StrongMinds and some of Animal Charity Evaluators’ recommendations (as we think these could be competitive, but aren’t yet certain, as discussed 

A selection of recommendations from other cause areas, like the EA Infrastructure Fund and Founders Pledge’s Climate Fund

This is not meant to be a comprehensive list of all promising programmes, nor a strong claim about the impact of supporting the highlighted supported programmes; it’s rather a spotlight on some of the many projects you can support via our platform that, for various reasons, are not on our recommendations list. We share more information about each of these programmes on their individual programme pages — we encourage donors to read these, and the resources they link to, before making a choice about where to give.

That's fine! We encourage everyone to research and make their own decisions about which charities to support.

We also recognise that people have different opinions about what is effective and what is not. What matters most to us is that you are thoughtful and intentional about your giving, and that you are trying to have as much positive impact as possible.

We also welcome feedback (it’s how we get better!) and encourage you to 

 if you have any specific feedback you’d like to provide.

Credit/debit cards (securely processed by Stripe)

Bank direct debit (securely processed by GoCardless, UK only)

The payment methods available to you will depend on where you're donating from, and how much you're donating (for example GoCardless direct debits have a maximum value of 5,000 GBP, and we don't offer check/manual bank transfers for amounts under 100 GBP/USD/EUR).

While our list of the best charities to support have been thoroughly researched and vetted as 

 opportunities for impact, our donation platform also supports a number of other programmes that broadly align with our principles — in other words, all of these programmes are addressing a pressing problem and taking a reasonably promising approach. This means that you can support these organisations (which we call “other supported programmes”) through our donation platform, but that we either a) don’t (yet) have enough data to justify recommending them, or b) know that they don’t meet our current criteria for being recommended. We think these other supported programmes likely have varying degrees of impact; some could be more impactful than our current recommendations but simply have yet to be evaluated by one of our impact-focused evaluators; others were previously recommended by one of our impact-focused evaluators, but due to 

 are not currently recommended; and still others are likely significantly less impactful than our current recommendations, but are still doing work in a high-impact cause area. You can learn more about each programme on its individual programme page.


We base our giving recommendations on the research of trusted, impact-focused charity evaluators. We have recently decided to more deeply investigate the evaluators whose research we’ve relied on in the past, as well as new evaluators whose research we may rely on in the future. We are doing this primarily because we think we are well-positioned to help connect evaluators and donors in the effective giving space in a more effective and efficient way. Organisations that rely on the research of charity evaluators implicitly evaluate evaluators by including some evaluators’ recommendations and not others’. We think this process could be both more standardised and more transparent, and hope our “

” initiative could be the beginning of what becomes a critical institution within the effective giving space — leading to better recommendations, greater transparency, and ultimately more impact.

We do want to emphasise that we previously chose the evaluators that have informed our past recommendations for good reason; while each evaluator had slightly different criteria for their top recommendations, they tended to share our belief that good charities should be:

 Are the charity’s programmes making a difference rather than doing nothing, or even doing harm?

 Does your dollar go far when you donate to it? If you can achieve the same outcome by donating $100 to Charity A than you could with $1,000 to Charity B, we think most donors should choose Charity A.

Driven by evidence and/or careful reasoning: 

Is the programme a charity operates evidence-backed, or in cases where evidence isn’t practical to obtain — like global catastrophic risk reduction and other initiatives to safeguard the long-term future — does expert reasoning and analysis provide a strong case for support?

However, we think it’s valuable to do a deeper investigation of the specific methodologies, criteria, and decision-making process of each charity evaluator, along with its worldview, in order to:

Maintain a strong and recent research basis for the choice of which evaluators should inform our recommendations.

Better tailor our donation recommendations to individual donor values and worldviews by more transparently distinguishing between similar donation options (such as two funds, each managed by a different impact-focused evaluator, granting to organisations in the same cause area).

Uphold our value of continuously self-reflecting and updating our views should new data or evidence come to light.

Previously, we recommended several different top-rated funds for each of the 

 we believe to be particularly impactful. However, donors often weren’t sure how to choose among them. Giving What We Can cause area funds were created to help solve this problem, providing donors with a single, high-impact fund option for each cause area (along with the All Causes Bundle, which allows donors to support organisations in all three of our high-impact cause areas).

If you choose to donate to one of our cause area funds, your money will be pooled with donations from other donors and then allocated to high-impact charities working within that cause area. The Giving What We Can research team allocates the donations based on their latest research on where impact is most maximised, in consultation with the recommendations of vetted evaluators within the cause area. Thus, Giving What We Can cause area funds allow donors to set up one donation, knowing that it will always reflect the current recommendations of the Giving What We Can research team.

If you donate using a bank transfer, there are no associated fees, but the process is more time-consuming (you will need to instruct your bank to make the payment).

If you donate by credit, direct debit, or debit card, the payment fees are set by our third-party payment gateways (e.g. Stripe and GoCardless). We do our best to keep these fees as low as possible.

We (Giving What We Can) do not charge any additional payment processing or handling fees.

Before you complete your payment, we estimate your fees based on what we think the payment gateway will charge. Once you have completed your payment, the fees displayed will reflect what the payment gateway actually charged.

When thinking about how to donate most effectively there is some discussion about whether you should donate only to the one thing that you think on balance will do the most good or whether you should split your donation. When it comes to splitting between charities one attempt to solve this dilemma is to donate to a charitable fund instead (that will pool people's money together and have experts figure out the optimal allocation).

But what about choosing whether to donate 100% of your money to one cause area or split it across multiple?

On the one hand, if you think one cause area has the highest expected value (the amount of good that can be achieved multiplied by the probability of achieving that good) then there are strong arguments for only donating to that one area because you think that is where the highest positive impact can be achieved. 

 goes into greater depth on expected value and why it's important.

 it could be that different cause areas act as multipliers on each other meaning it is important to maximise all areas. For example, it could be important to both ensure the continuation of our species by 

 but also to make sure that future is favourable by 

 it may be important to donate at least a small amount to all the different cause areas as a way to reduce the biases we have to different cause areas perhaps because we identify with particular communities or identities (such as being vegan) or don't want to lose status associated with changing our minds.

How you think about these different arguments may affect how (and if) you split your donations between the different cause areas but it is an important area to think about before you donate.

There is no shortage of problems in the world, and they all deserve attention. However, we believe that because resources are limited, it’s important to triage when determining what to tackle first. Some problems are both

, and we think resources should be directed to these until they’re no longer “low-hanging fruit.”

Consider this metaphor: With so much suffering in the world, each of us who wants to help is akin to a firefighter — with multiple fires burning all around them. Some are very large (affecting many people) and some are smaller (affecting fewer people). Some are easy to fight and some just seem to spread and spread no matter what you do. Given this difficult reality, which fire would you fight first?

Easy to fight; affecting a great many people

Hard to fight; affecting a great many people

Most people would likely agree that it makes sense to choose C — a large fire that is also easy to fight — before you tackle the others. If you instead begin by fighting a small and difficult to fight fire, you might use up all your resources and not actually do very much good. All the fires would continue to burn, and the people you could have helped by putting your resources towards Fire C would instead be consumed by flames while you unsuccessfully fought fire B.

Usually, people are motivated to donate to a particular cause because of something in their personal experience, something heard through a friend or the media, or in-depth knowledge about a particular subject. While it’s natural and admirable to want to do something about the problems we hear about, it’s also important to recognise that for every issue we hear about, there are countless more that we might not. Yet suffering is still happening just the same. The fires are still burning, and the ones we tend to hear about the most aren’t necessarily those where we can make the biggest difference. Consider that issues like global poverty have ceased to become newsworthy — despite the fact that 

15,000 children still die every day from diseases that can be prevented

(but perpetually underfunded) interventions.

We try to work on the fires where we can have the most impact (though they may not always be quite as straightforward as Fire C).

 are organisations that use donations effectively to achieve their goals. That is, they are able to accomplish a lot with the resources they have. There are many factors that go into determining whether a charity is effective, including how well it is run, how efficiently it uses donations, how much good it does per dollar donated, and more.

Some charities aim to improve lives directly, for example through medical aid or public health projects. Some do so indirectly, for example by researching the best charities to give to, or helping students find more effective careers. Some do so by advocacy work such as lobbying for nuclear weapons safety or corporate farming reforms.

By focusing our donations on some of the most effective organisations that have proven themselves most effective, we can achieve much more with our donations and encourage charities to become more effective to receive our donations.

 that helps people identify the most effective charities in the world. We want to make sure that donations are having the biggest possible impact, so we only recommend charities that we believe are doing a lot of good with the resources they have. If you'd like more guidance, you can 

In the past, Charity Navigator focused primarily on a charity’s financial health and its ratio of programme-to-administrative costs, rather than evaluating what the charity’s programmes accomplished. However, in recent years, we’ve been happy to see Charity Navigator add an 

 that provides a cost-effectiveness rating and aims to look at what the programme is accomplishing per dollar donated. That said, there are still several differences between the methods our vetted evaluators use to measure impact and recommend charities and the way Charity Navigator scores charities on impact. These differences mean that Charity Navigator lists a huge number of charities as top-rated, even though there are substantial differences in impact among them. Some of the differences between Charity Navigator’s impact evaluations and ours include:

Charity Navigator states that it does not currently have the infrastructure to assess the impact of all program types/charities. However, charities can still achieve a four-star rating 

even if the impact of its programmes has not been assessed

. This indicates that Charity Navigator’s main focus is not (yet) on assessing impact.

When the data does exist, the Impact & Results rating is only weighted at 50%, meaning Charity Navigator places equal weight on impact and a combination of its other metrics. Most of our vetted charity evaluators place the most weight on programme impact.

Regarding the data, Charity Navigator states that its Impact & Results rating uses “information that was either publicly available or charity-submitted to estimate the actual impact a charity’s program has on people's lives.” However, charities often report misleading cost-effectiveness figures that are overly optimistic. Because Charity Navigator rates such a high volume of charities, it’s unlikely that it is able to do a deep-dive into the cost-effectiveness of each charity it evaluates. In contrast, impact-focused evaluators typically identify particular types of charities that are likely to be highly effective through 

, and then are able to do a much deeper investigation into each charity they evaluate.

Most importantly, when scoring a charity, Charity Navigator 

does not take into account the huge variation in impact and cost-effectiveness that arises from your choice of 

 states: “We categorize nonprofits based on their programmatic focus, and each category has specific benchmark levels for cost-effectiveness. These benchmarks serve as a reference for assessing the relative impact of nonprofits operating within that particular program category.” This means that a charity can get a high-impact rating even if its programmatic focus is relatively low impact when compared to other 

 For example, the Navy Seal Foundation, which grants scholarships to military personnel in high-income countries, and the Against Malaria Foundation, which provides bed nets to protect people from malaria in low-income countries, were both granted a perfect score of 100 and deemed “highly cost-effective” by Charity Navigator even though the good done per dollar is vastly different. In the first case, $3,200 would raise one recipient’s income by $7,500; in the second, it would provide about 640 bednets, which would protect 1,280 people from malaria for up to four years.

There is no single answer to this question as it depends on your personal circumstances and motivations. The most common amount members of Giving What We Can report giving is 10% of their income and we think that this is generally a good standard, especially for most people in high-income countries.

However, some other suggested standards for giving include giving what you can afford, giving what you won't miss, giving at an average level, or giving generously. Whatever you decide, it is important to also 

We write more about the different ways to approach deciding how much to give in our article: 

"How much money should we donate to charity?"

If the recurring donation was charged via credit card 

 3, 5 and 7 days after the scheduled date. For example, if there were insufficient funds on the card at the scheduled time, you can just add funds to the card and wait a few days. If all retries fail, your recurring donation will be cancelled.

If your card has expired, or is about to expire, you should instead 

Our contact details are kept up-to-date on our 

You can see your recurring donations by accessing your 

. You can cancel these by clicking on the "Cancel" link.

If, for some reason, that should not work, 

 is a public commitment to donate at least 10% of your lifetime income to the most effective charities in the world, with an option to also increase your pledge by including 

In addition to the 🔸10% Pledge, we have three other giving pledges:

: Donate at least 1% of your income for any period you choose

: Donate all of your income above a specified living allowance

: Donate at least 10% of your company’s profits

By default, we do not disclose your donation amount or your name to any unrelated third parties, except in compliance with the necessary statutory requirements of HMRC, the IRS, and our auditors.

During the donation process, we provide an opt-in system that allows you to choose whether or not to share your donation information with our program partners.

You can find our 

 is a good fit for most of the people reading this, clearly it will not be the right choice for everyone.

Here are some reasons it may not make sense to take the 🔸10% Pledge at this point:

You are or will soon be undertaking something very resource-intensive, like founding a startup or nonprofit (though in this case you may want to consider 

Your employment or health situation is unstable.

You expect your student debt to be particularly heavy, such that the years after graduation will be especially financially tight.

You have family obligations that require much of your money.

Taking a pledge is not necessary to be part of our community, and no one should feel pressured to pledge simply to feel that they are in good standing. We recognise the richness of ways that people contribute to this community and to the world — the 🔸10% Pledge represents only one of many ways of taking significant personal action to benefit others.

If you’re unsure, we’d recommend exploring taking a 

If you donate using Giving What You Can you will get a receipt for tax purposes.

Receipts for credit card payments should arrive almost instantly, but if you make an offline payment (like a bank transfer), you may not get a receipt until roughly a week or two after we receive your donation. In some cases it could take up to six weeks.

US donors will also get a single tax statement showing their donation history at the end of each tax year.

We chose 10% of income for the 🔸10% Pledge because we think it’s a good balance of significant and achievable: It is both a significant proportion of one's income, in recognition of the importance of the world’s problems and the need to take real action, while also remaining within reach of most people in wealthy countries.

Ten percent also carries with it a strong historical connection to the idea of tithing, a tradition in Judaism and Christianity of giving 10% of your income to charity or the church. Islam has a similar practice, Zakat, in which those who are able give between 2.5% and 20% of their wealth to those who are less well-off.

That said, 10% is just a minimum. Many of our members donate a lot more than their pledged amount, and other members pledge a higher starting percentage (

 if you’d like to do this) or even take 

 — a pledge to give everything earned above a specified living allowance. And if 10% doesn’t yet seem achievable, consider starting with a 

 (where you choose a custom amount of 1% or more and your own time commitment), or 

Learn more about how to decide how much to give in our article: 

How much money should we donate to charity?

The small orange diamond emoji is the symbol of the 🔸10% Pledge! People who have taken the pledge often add the emoji to their names on their social media accounts to indicate they've pledged.

Giving What We Can is an alliance of people both religious and non-religious, united in the belief that where we can relieve suffering without having to make serious sacrifices, we should do so. It is a belief supported by many traditions and philosophies, both religious and otherwise.

The following member stories highlight the experiences of some members who have religious motivations for giving:

If you want to give more than 10% of your income, that's great! We’ve chosen 10% as a nice balance of significant and achievable for most people, but many of our members choose to give more than the minimum they commit to. There are no rules or requirements about how much more you can give, and you can also give less in some years knowing that you’ll donate more in others.

Some members even choose to formalise a bigger commitment by taking 

 to give all of their income above a fixed living allowance.

For those who have significant wealth, we encourage you to pledge the greater of 10% of income or a percentage of wealth (suggested at 2.5%).

By processing donations for many funds and charities and batching together payments we are able to access lower fees than many individual charities. We also help reduce the administrative burden on individual charities by combining many individual donors’ donations into larger payments from a single source.

We provide our service at no additional cost (unlike donor-advised funds, we don’t charge a percentage of your donation as management fees).

Giving What We Can was founded in 2009 by 

 (a philosopher at the University of Oxford), his wife 

 (a physician in training at the time), and 

 (another philosopher at the University of Oxford).

At the time of its inception they were joined by other prominent members such as 

 (a Nobel laurete and development economist), 

Pledge

Do you have another question?