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!

I've done something similar with Effective Altruism Australia this year - we had christmas cards where you can make a donation in someone's name! I ordered 11 of them and will be keen to see if they encourage people to donate: https://effectivealtruism.org.au/ChristmasCards/

Thanks Nick! You inspire a lot of the GWWC team through your work and your thoughtfulness on the Forum!

Absolutely love this take! I'd love to see our community advocating for effective giving to their networks in ways that make sense for them!

I also see this as a reason to take a pledge with GWWC, even if you're already giving - by adding your name to the list of pledgers, and helping that list grow longer - you're showing that this is a real  movement of people who are taking giving effectively and significantly seriously. 

(Honestly, just scrolling through a really long list of names helped give me confidence to pledge despite not knowing anyone)

Help us reach 10,000 pledgers, so that the next 10,000 are easier for us to convince!

You can pledge here for Pledge Week

Thanks for your work on this! In general I would love to see headache disorders like cluster headaches and migraine receive more funding for research because of their burden.

As someone who has chronic migraine, I can only imagine what experiencing cluster headaches would be like.