TL;DR
GoodWallet is a digital wallet that lets you redirect your own and your friends’ money towards effective charities. By streamlining and socializing the giving process, we aim to unlock new, counterfactual donations within the EA community. Additionally, by making effective giving the default, we hope to expose non-EA friends to impact-per-€ cues, exporting the idea of effective giving far beyond EA’s borders. Eventually, we hope that saying “just pay me back via GoodWallet” will be as common as splitting with Revolut/Paypal/Venmo/Monzo.
We’re fully online and need your feedback, brutal critique, and help to spread the word. Here, I wanted to walk you through our thought process, tell you the vision, and what is implemented and what isn’t. I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Big thanks to Antilia Virginie for her help in writing this article. Antilia is currently pursuing a PhD at Oxford, focusing on the behavioural determinants of effective giving.
Sign-up to the GoodWallet here: thegoodwallet.org
Related reading: A well-received EA Forum post, Small simple way to promote effective giving while making people feel good (Aug 2024), describes how redirecting small debts—friends repaying expenses, casual buyers on online marketplaces—toward charities sparks joy, reduces social friction, and spreads the idea through word-of-mouth.
1. What GoodWallet does today / our vision for tomorrow
The GoodWallet is live and has the following capabilities:
- Personal link / QR. Anyone can send money into your GoodWallet through your personal wallet link; money lands either in your wallet or (if you pre-select) goes directly to your chosen charity.
- Gift-card. Pre-load €X, send the link; recipients redeem and often go on to create their own wallet. Gift-card autonomy measurably boosts follow-on giving (Mulder and Joireman, 2016).
- Fee policy. We charge 0% and cover all processing fees.
- Impact defaults. EA-aligned donation options (GiveWell, EA Funds).
Our vision for the GoodWallet:
- Single place to manage all charitable donations. We are planning on adding any registered charity and make the GoodWallet a single place to track all charitable activities.
- A public API for anyone to integrate GoodWallet. We aim to make charitable giving an alternative payment method that anyone can integrate into their platforms. For example, a marketplace or a bill-splitting app could directly include GoodWallet payments as an option.
2. The (surprisingly big) friction problem
The problem
Giving online requires significant time and effort: typically, it involves seeking websites, scrolling through multiple pages and painstakingly filling out credit card forms. Behavioral studies have shown that high cognitive or time effort reduce prosocial behavior, including charitable giving (Greene et al., 2008; Xu et al., 2012; Achtziger et al., 2016).
It is therefore not surprising that removing tiny frictions boosts giving. In a workplace field experiment, switching to a one-click giving system increased participation rates by at least 50% (Hutchinson-Quillian et al., 2021). Yet common money transfers (i.e., paying back €10 for beers or sending a small birthday gift) rarely offer a one-click path to high-impact charities.
How does GoodWalllet help?
Convenience: it takes just a few clicks to transfer funds into someone’s GoodWallet and to effective non-profits. We also have an option that directs all funds that flow into one’s GoodWallet directly to a default charity they set. Additionally, the platform makes use of recent trends in payments for charitable giving: one quarter of Gen Z donors say that digital wallets are their preferred method for donating (Bloomerang, 2024), and recipients of charity gift cards are significantly more likely to make follow-up donations (Mulder & Joireman 2016). This indicates that GoodWallet gift cards can seed lasting donor behaviour.
We will soon also include one-click solutions like Apple Pay and Google pay during the payment process.
3. The mental budgeting and commitment problem
The problem
There is never a “right budget” or a “right time” for spontaneous giving.
Compared to regular expenses like housing or groceries, charitable giving rarely has a dedicated “mental budget” in most people’s minds. Instead, studies show that people are more willing to give and give more when donations feel irregular or exceptional (Sussman et al., 2015).
Additionally, a lot of people feel motivated to give after a direct solicitation (Andreoni and Rao, 2011), but follow through requires commitment. A recent study found that only 23% of people who had promised to donate to charity at a later date actually followed through with a donation (Fosgaard and Soetevent, 2022).
How does GoodWallet help?
By helping people convert irregular monetary interactions (like IOUs or thank-you gestures) into charitable donations, GoodWallet turns giving into a substitute for a social repayment, not a deduction from a fixed budget. Furthermore, when funds are deposited into a GoodWallet, they stay in a donor‑advised‑fund‑like pot until the owner donates them (unless the user has a charity pre-selected). This tackles the commitment problem by reducing the temptation to renege on making a charitable donation.
4. Road-map & open questions
- Next 60 days. More seamless payment processing e.g. by integrating Apple/Google Pay; charity-search refactor and grow the GoodWallet community from just over 100 to >500 users.
- Unknowns. What are the most useful use-cases for EA and non-EA users to raise donations in social settings? Gift cards? Sharing the link and QR code on professional and social platforms for others to donate into others’ GoodWallets? Let us know your thoughts.
5. How you can help
- 2 minutes: Create a wallet, send yourself or a friend (through the gift card feature) a €10 donation, donate to your favourite charity, and report any issues.
→ thegoodwallet.org
- 5 minutes: Share your critiques of our choice architecture in the comments.
- Further: Use the GoodWallet with your friends. Send them a Gift Card for their birthday, share your GoodWallet link on your professional social pages for others to donate into it, and let us know about any applications that you found for increasing impact through the GoodWallet.
Closing - Some personal words
Ben and I started GoodWallet because we believe charitable giving should feel as natural as any other everyday payment. What began as a passion project for us and our friends has now grown into something that other people outside of our immediate community are using. By working closely with people like you, we aim to turn GoodWallet into a next-generation digital impact wallet that removes friction and channels far more money to high-impact causes.
Patrick Mayerhofer
Co-founder, GoodWallet
(Thanks to everyone who already tested the MVP and shared real-world use cases – your stories shaped the roadmap.)
Has this concept been attempted in the past, especially considering that it could be a for-profit venture (e.g., a company taking a 5% commission)? If it has been tried and failed, what were the reasons for its failure? If it hasn't been attempted, what are the barriers preventing it from being pursued?
I find this project promising and I'm quite enthusiastic about it, but a part of me wonders why it hasn't been done already. We don't need to specifically promote effective charities for this project to succeed, what are the reasons this hasn't been done successfully in the past?
Indeed, I think a contrast with existing services like Paypal Giving Fund would be helpful.
Thanks both for the comments! In general, we have looked into other options, but so far couldn’t find anything yet that uses “pay-me-back-with-impact” behaviour to grow the giving network and increase donations on network size rather than higher donations per individual person. If you do know any similar apps, please let us know, I’d love to learn about them and chat with the founders. Here a "quick" summary:
The core problems we see in almost every donation app today
How existing services stack up against those problems
• Givey. Great for small UK charities (no effective-giving defaults). Has no person-to-person network effect.
• GoodCoin. A white-label “donate inside your banking app” tool. Clever B2B concept, yet it relies on each bank’s marketing and creates no person-to-person network effect.
• RoundUp App. Rounds card purchases to charity; a different mechanic that remains entirely solo, so the network effect never kicks in.
• Charityvest. Modern donor-advised fund with zero platform fee, optimised for tax-savvy givers, not casual IOUs or gift cards between friends.
• PayPal Giving Fund. Huge volumes but lives inside merchant checkouts; donors can’t pass balances to friends or settle IOUs, so no person-to-person network effect.
Why GoodWallet’s timing is right now
GoodWallet’s angle: remove every click possible, surface effective-giving defaults, and bake person-to-person network effects into everyday repayments and gift cards. The incumbents above do great work in their own niches; what’s missing is a product that turns people into the distribution channel.