A List of EA Donation Pledges (GWWC, etc)

Prabhat Soni

I was researching on EA pledging strategy and had a lot of difficulty finding less popular EA pledges. Often, I chanced upon them in EA Global talks, and Google searches weren't very helpful for discovering new ones. I intend for this post to act as a comprehensive list of EA pledges (especially less popular ones). I hope to keep this post updated with time.

Target Engagement Level	Target Income Group	Name of Pledge	Pledge Amount	Notes
Low	All?	OFTW	1%
Low-Medium	All?	GWWC's Try Giving	1%+	Pledge for a user-set time period
Medium-High	All?	GWWC	10%
Medium-High	All?	TLYCS	Differentiated (average ~5%)
Medium-High	High	REG	2%	For poker players
		Founder's Pledge	2%	For startup founders
		Generation Pledge	10%+	For inheritors
Very high	All?	GWWC Further Pledge	Everything above a certain income

A very notable non-EA pledge is the Giving Pledge. It is probably the most popular pledge among billionaires and requires pledging atleast 50% of one's wealth.

Miscellaneous

Isn’t the GWWC Pledge too simplistic to fit everyone’s specific situation?

Making the Pledge better in some ways makes it worse in others. A plan that accounted for every possible consideration in a person’s life would be more equitable, but would also end up reading like a tax code. We believe that the ability to succinctly explain the Pledge to others has great value, and that adding all conceivable loopholes and caveats would diminish that value. In the end we trust members to abide by the spirit of the Pledge, which is using a significant portion of one's income to benefit others.

Source.

There is good reason to focus on very rich people (say the top 0.1%) of the world's population. This is because donations follow a fat-tailed distribution. For example, the 2019 EA Survey says that 1.3% of donors accounted for 57% of donations. New "effective giving" pledges targetting niche segments of millionaires/billionaires would probably be very high-impact and generate millions of dollars.

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MichaelA🔸Aug 10 20207

Thanks for putting this together!

Isn’t the GWWC Pledge too simplistic to fit everyone’s specific situation?

Another thing that I think is worth mentioning here is that the GWWC pledge is already less one-size-fits-all than many people realise. To illustrate, here are some key points from their FAQ:

The pledge is of course just a minimum. Some members decide to go further than this and pledge to give a higher percentage, such as 20% or even 50%.
[...]
What do you mean by income?
The goal here is to help members stick to their plan of taking significant action to benefit others. All guidelines about how to calculate income should be thought of as serving that goal. [Then there are more details on this.]
[...]
Students, unemployed people, and full-time parents
Many students, unemployed people and full-time parents have little or no income, but are largely supported by money from family members, the government or a student loan.
The Pledge does not require you to donate any of this funding (although it does commit you regarding any future income). However, in the interests of all of our members giving what they can, we feel that the spirit of the Pledge requires them to donate at least 1% of their spending money.
We define spending money as money received for the purpose of spending on items such as food, rent, travel, children, or personal items. It does not include spending on tuition fees. If a couple with shared finances both wish to join, then they can simply donate 10% of their combined earnings and not worry about spending money.
Of course, people who earn some income but depend on other help for their living expenses may choose to donate 10% of their earnings if they want to go above and beyond.
[...]
How often should members donate?
The spirit of the Pledge is to donate on an ongoing basis, rather than letting “donation debt” build up over many years. We check in with members every year and encourage them to log their donations. However, you don’t have to donate on a strictly annual basis. Members who consolidate donations into certain years (for example for tax advantages, or in case of temporary financial hardship) are welcome to do so.
Do donations have to be to registered charities?
The commitment is to donate to “the most effective organisations". These organisations could be charities, but could also be entities not officially registered as tax-deductible charities (for example a charity in the early stages of getting registered, or an advocacy or lobbying group that is not a charity.)