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Thanks for collating and sharing!
3 recent posts from Effective Altruism Australia about our work and strategy
2 min readFeb 24
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I joined Effective Altruism Australia as CEO back in July 2025, after spending 3.5 years as the Head of Marketing at Giving What We Can. I wanted to share a few blog posts from our website, that help give some insight into our work and direction going forward.
What does Effective Altruism Australia do?
Effective Altruism Australia (EAA) champions the principles of effective altruism in Australia and connects Australians to practical actions through giving and community.
We primarily raise money for effective charities in global health and climate change (through the EAA Environment charity). We would likely fundraise for other causes if they were tax-deductible in Australia, but that’s a story for another time.
We also have a national community building team who support EAGxAustralasia, as well as the EA community across the country.
Our guiding motto for 2026 is “Strengthen the Soil, Test What Grows”. This reflects our aim to consolidate best practices and build a strong foundation for future growth. Our focus is on strengthening core programs, improving consistency and quality of fundraising and communications practices, and ensuring EAA is well-positioned to scale sustainably over time.
Going forward, our operations and growth efforts – including staff, communications, marketing, and fundraising – will be funded entirely through donations and grants that have been directed specifically to our operations, not from the money given to our partner charities. For every dollar spent on EAA’s operations, we raised an additional $9 for our partner charities in 2025 – a strong multiplier that demonstrates the effectiveness of investing in our capacity.
You can expect to see more communications, events, and engagement initiatives as we test strategies to reach new donors, while maintaining transparency and respect for donor preferences. Your feedback and support in introducing our work to your community will help us continue to grow our impact responsibly.
In 2024 and 2025, we intentionally pivoted from a historically very low-cost approach to investing more in growth. While this increased our operational spending, it allowed us to reach more Australians, support more high-impact donations, and build stronger infrastructure for future scaling (you can read more about our investment in growth in the above post).
Our previous giving multiplier covered a three-year period from 2022 to 2024 — what we consider our transition years. For 2025, we treat the year as a standalone snapshot. We’re proud to report that even with increased investment, we maintained our giving multiplier, showing that scaling our operations has not come at the expense of efficiency or impact.
After reviewing our 2025 data, we estimate that for every $1 spent on fundraising, donation processing, and outreach, approximately $9 counterfactually reaches highly effective charities, with $5 being a conservative estimate.
If you'd like to get in touch to discuss our work, feel free to email me at [email protected]
Quoting their Giving Multiplier calculations doc:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jmq18Ud4RQx1sPdnTHv5zD_DYoVx8PmTk3aW0d9T04M/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.jjl75aeojvn
4. Evidence of Behavioural Influence
In December 2025, we added a live impact calculator to our donation form and compared giving between donors who saw it and those who didn’t. Our A/B test of impact-focused messaging demonstrated:
Donors who saw the impact calculator gave AUD 936.95 more per donor than those who didn't, representing 70% of their total donation value. This validates that our impact-focused communications measurably change donor behaviour, providing evidence that we actively influence giving decisions rather than passively capture donations.
While this experiment represents only a small subset of total donations, it provides a clear demonstration of causal impact, supporting our understanding of how our communications contribute to above-baseline growth in 2025, when we intensified focus on impact messaging across all donor channels.
In my view, this is massive gains and deserves to be replicated by other effective giving organizations to see if the results are replicable. Are you planning on writing more about this specifically?
This is a great call out! It was featured in a longer report that we shared directly with other effective giving orgs, but wasn't called out explicitly as a single post.
I'll share this again with the effective giving orgs :)