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GWWC Research and Approach - givingwhatwecan.org
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Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
Rating inherited from publication venue: Giving What We Can
Tangentially relevant to AI safety; GWWC's cause prioritization framework occasionally intersects with existential risk and long-term future funding, but this page primarily addresses general philanthropic methodology rather than AI safety specifically.
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Importance: 22/100organizational reporthomepage
Summary
This page outlines Giving What We Can's (GWWC) methodology for evaluating charitable giving opportunities, emphasizing effective altruism principles such as evidence-based impact assessment, cost-effectiveness, and cause prioritization. It explains how GWWC identifies high-impact donation opportunities and guides members toward maximally beneficial giving. The resource serves as an overview of the organization's philosophical and practical framework for directing philanthropic resources.
Key Points
- •GWWC uses evidence-based, cost-effectiveness analysis to identify high-impact giving opportunities across global health, poverty, and other cause areas.
- •The approach prioritizes causes based on scale, tractability, and neglectedness, core criteria from effective altruism methodology.
- •GWWC does not conduct primary research itself but synthesizes and curates findings from organizations like GiveWell and Open Philanthropy.
- •The framework encourages donors to think critically about where their money can do the most good rather than defaulting to familiar or emotionally compelling charities.
- •Cause prioritization within GWWC's scope includes near-term human welfare, animal welfare, and long-term future considerations including existential risk.
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| Page | Type | Quality |
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| Giving What We Can | Organization | 62.0 |
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Our Research & Approach · Giving What We Can Our Research & Approach
Introduction Our Research & Approach
Introduction
Cause Prioritisation
Learn more about our approach to cause prioritisation:
Charity Recommendations and Other Supported Programs
Learn more about our charity recommendations and other supported programs:
Can you really do 100x more good per dollar by donating to the best charities?
[Video] 1000x your ROI: How to think about cost-effectiveness when deciding where to donate
Data sets where the cost-effectiveness of different interventions is compared:
Read more about charity comparisons:
Worldview Diversity
Introduction
Giving What We Can bases its charity recommendations on the research of impact-focused, expert charity evaluators like GiveWell , Longview Philanthropy , and EA Funds . We decide which evaluators to defer to for our recommendations and grantmaking based on our evaluators research . 1
Our educational resources are informed by the work of these impact-focused evaluators and others, as well as scholars, thinkers, and philosophers contributing to the effective giving and effective altruism projects, including the foundational effective giving texts Doing Good Better and The Life You Can Save .
Below, we summarise why we believe that careful thinking about how and where you donate can make a surprisingly large difference in the lives of others . We also provide some additional information on the research and approach we use to inform our recommendations.
Cause Prioritisation
With so many problems in the world, we make hard choices every day, whether or not we are aware of them. We simply can’t do everything; our time and resources (both individually and as a society) are limited. Thus, by choosing to work on one problem, we (often by necessity) deprioritise another .
It makes sense to make these decisions consciously rather than unconsciously. By carefully examining which problems make the most sense to work on right now, we’re in a much better position to help. This is especially true since the problem you choose to focus on could (based on a recent 80,000 Hours estimate) lead to up to 1000 times more impact .
At Giving What We Can, we believe you can maximise the impact of your charitable donations by first choosing a high-impact problem (cause) that aligns with your values and worldview, and then choosing to support a high-impact fund or charity working within that cause.
Learn more about our approach to cause prioritisation:
Choosing a cause
High-impact causes we recommend supporting
Charity Recommendations and Other Supported Programs
While your choice of cause (see above ) may be even more important than your choice of charity, there are also large differences in efficacy between different organisations working on the same or similar problems . These differences are not always intuitive; a charity’s programs sometimes sound highly impactful (and may indeed be well t
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