Updates on the effective giving ecosystem (MCF 2024 memo)

On request of the Meta Coordination Forum 2024 organisers, my colleague Sjir (interim CEO of GWWC) and I had written some updates to the memo he wrote last year on the effective giving (EG) ecosystem. (Sjir's other MCF memos are here: 1, 2, 3)

Please note that, to share the info we thought worth sharing and make the points we thought worth making in the limited time we had to write this memo, and for the sake of brevity, we were at times sloppy or incomplete in providing definitions (e.g. of “the EG ecosystem” or “money moved”). Please leave a comment if you’d like us to clarify anything further.

• The EG ecosystem is still growing and various interventions are being tested for scale.
  • The ecosystem is expanding moderately in terms of money moved (excl. Open Philanthropy and GiveWell from ~$50M in 2020 to ~$160M in 2023; including them from ~$430M to ~$1.05B) and in terms of new organisations/projects (e.g. six new fundraising organisations were recently incubated by AIM).
  • Currently, about ~80% of funding in the ecosystem is going to global health and wellbeing causes, ~6% to longtermist/x-risk causes, ~4% to climate mitigation, and ~3% to animal welfare (the rest is a bit harder to categorise). This excludes money moved/influenced by Open Philanthropy, Longview, Survival and Flourishing Fund, Manifund, and Generation Pledge.
    • Excluding GiveWell as well the breakdown is ~60% to global health and wellbeing causes, ~15% to longtermist/x-risk causes, ~10% to climate mitigation, and ~10% to animal welfare (the rest is a bit harder to categorise).
  • There’s still quite a few potential gaps to fill (e.g. initiatives targeting non-UHNW inheritors; earning to give; for more ideas/gaps see here), though arguably a bigger question is which of the models currently being tested by the >50 existing projects and organisations can scale money moved to high-impact funding opportunities (e.g. to the $10B level).
  • The public EA charity evaluation and grantmaking field is still (very) small, e.g. there are only 3 organisations with >5 FTE full-time staff dedicated to evaluation/grantmaking. If further scale is unlocked on the fundraising side, more capacity will be needed on the grantmaking/evaluation side to keep up.
  • The best place to get an overview of the broader EG ecosystem is the EG ecosystem database, which is regularly updated.
• Since last year, some notable developments in the ecosystem have been:
  • On the fundraising side:
    • The relative stagnation in money moved for a lot of the larger organisations (e.g. GW, GWWC, Effektiv Spenden, TLYCS), with the exception of Founders Pledge (from $25M money moved in 2022 to $80M in 2023).
    • OP entering the fundraising space doing their own UHNW focused work and also sharing some grants with other UHNW-focused EG orgs.
    • AIM (in collaboration with GWWC) helping to launch four new fundraising organisations through an effective giving incubation program, and incubating another two through their standard incubation program.
    • GWWC collaborating with various pledge partners inside and outside the EG ecosystem to start testing whether a broad pledge strategy can scale money moved.
    • The second EG Summit bringing together ~40 EG fundraising organisations and other relevant actors in a way similar to the MCF for EA meta.
  • On the evaluation side:
    • GW working to make its research more legible.
    • Founders Pledge publishing various reports on global catastrophic risks.
    • GWWC launching evaluating evaluators.
  • On the meta funding side:
    • Meta Charity Funders beginning to make grants to EG orgs ($1.3M in first 2 grant rounds)
    • Mel Basnak having taken over from James Snowden at OP as the largest grantmaker to fund the EG ecosystem at ~$5M annually.
    • GWWC and Meta Charity Funders exploring whether to launch an EG meta fund accessible to retail donors by next Giving Season.