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by Jennifer Stretton, Romain Barbe🔸
3 min read 9

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Effective givingBuilding effective altruismOrganization updatesAnnouncements and updatesEffective altruism fundingFundraising
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TL;DR

Announcing the launch of Mieux Donner - a fundraising organisation focused on informing and inspiring individuals in France and French speaking Switzerland to donate effectively, directing their contributions towards charities with the greatest impact.

Who are we?

Mieux Donner was co-founded by Jennifer Stretton and Romain Barbe. We completed AIM’s effective giving charity incubator program in July 2024. 

Key objectives for year one

  • Charity registration and launch our effective giving platform (Done) 
  • Our ambitious goal: Securing €1,000,000 in donations from at least 300 donors
  • Our minimal goal: Raise more in counterfactual donations than we raised in seed funding
    • We have been given funding of $95,000 to get the project started.
    • We would like to raise at least this in counterfactual donations in year one
    • Ideally, we would like to achieve a giving multiplier of at least two by raising  $180,000 in year one
  • Launch a pilot project of the 🔸10% Pledge and aim for 20 pledgers
  • Confirm our most effective audiences and outreach tactics to enable cost-effective scale-up in Y2-3

Why launch a new effective giving initiative?

  • Effective charities have significant room to absorb more funding.
  • Effective charities are reliant on the donations of a few large donors.
  • Effective Giving Initiatives, such as Giving What We Can and Effektiv Spenden, have raised over $500 million collectively and established a proven strategy for engaging donors. 
  • Leveraging their best practices and insights, Mieux Donner hopes to achieve high rates of growth.

Why France?

Why French speaking Switzerland?

  • There is huge donation potential to be unlocked in Switzerland.
  • In year one, Effektiv Spenden raised just €350K in Germany compared to €1.2M in Switzerland.
  • In 2021 48% of Effektiv Spenden’s donations came from Switzerland.
  • Effektiv Spenden are partnering with us to target French speakers in Switzerland (22% of Swiss population). They have provided us with their donation platform to enable tax deductible donations to all of our recommended charities for Swiss Tax Residents. 
  • Geneva has the second highest concentration of millionaires in the world and one of our founders, Jennifer, is based just one hour from Geneva. 

Isn’t there already an Effective Giving Initiative in France?

There is one other effective giving initiative in France called Don Efficace and we are working collaboratively with them. The reason that AIM decided to research and launch another effective giving initiative in France is because:

  • Don Efficace aims to increase the tax-deductible portfolio of effective charities and is a research focused organisation. Their strategy to increase donations to effective charities is to find effective charities within France that qualify for tax deduction*. They plan to help effective EU/EEA charities obtain fiscal agreements so that they can also become tax deductible in France.
  • Mieux Donner is an outreach focused organisation. Our strategy to increase donations to effective charities is to market the most effective charities, regardless of their tax deductibility status in France.

As Don Efficace’s research finds more effective charities within France, we expect that we will recommend them if they are on par with the effectiveness of our other global charities. 

*A note on tax deductibility in France: 
French residents get a tax deduction of 66% of the amount they donate, up to a maximum of 20% of their taxable income. Only donations to charities registered in France or in the EU/EEA are tax-deductible. For now, the only effective charity that qualifies for tax deduction in France is AMF because they have an office in France. Mieux Donner can offer tax deductibility for AMF. 

How you can help! 

Interested in volunteering?

We are moving as fast as we can to get Mieux Donner established before Giving Season (November and December), which is when charities raise 40% of their donations.

If you are motivated to have a huge impact, work with likeminded people and shape a new EA organisation. We’re looking for volunteers with some of the following skills; 

  • Enthusiastic generalists!
  • Web development
  • Copywriting skills
  • Social media marketing 
  • BOTEC calculation of charity impact
  • Event volunteers 
  • French language proficiency

Connections

If you know any people who live in France or Switzerland who would be interested in donating to effective charities, being an ambassador on social media or volunteering with us. Please put them in touch.  

Get in contact

If you’re interested in following what we’re up to, you can subscribe to our newsletter. If you have any questions, advice or feedback, we’d love to hear from you!

Thank you for your support!

Jennifer and Romain
Co-founders of Mieux Donner
info@mieuxdonner.org

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PabloAMC 🔸6
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Hi there! Some minor feedback for the webpage: instead of starting with the causes, I’d argue you should start with the value proposition: “your euro goes further or something along those lines”. You may want to check ayudaefectiva.org for an example. Congratulations on the new org!

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Jennifer Stretton3
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Thanks so much for taking a look Pablo and for your advice. We are still in the process of deciding on our wording for our audience. Eg) whether to focus on cost effectiveness and the impact on the beneficiaries - or whether to have a more feel good vibe for the donors. Once we are more clear with this, we'll have clearer value propositions dotted through the website =)

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James Herbert2
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There's a good chance you're already in touch with Paul Smeets via Bram at Doneer Effectief but, if not, check out his work on the effectiveness of different messaging strategies. His takeaway: use the ”100x more impactful” argument, but do not use the ”$5,000 per life saved”. He gave a talk at EAGxUtrecht on the subject. 

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Denis 5
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Formidable !! 

Great work Jen and Romain !

If you're desperate enough, I'm pretty good at BOTEC, and my French, while not great, isn't as bad as some other people's in the cohort, according to Romain ... 

Let me know if I can help!
 

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Jennifer Stretton2
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Thanks Denis! As you are the master wordsmith of our cohort - feel free anytime to write some blog content for us ;) 

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Denis 1
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Great idea! Let me do this when I feel inspired and opinionated! 

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Lostelly2
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This sounds really cool! It's great to see something new like Mieux Donner focused on effective giving in France and Switzerland. I love your goals and how clear your plan is. The 10% Pledge pilot project sounds interesting—how will you get people involved and keep them motivated? Also, I’m curious about how you’ll work alongside Don Efficace since you both have different focuses. It seems like there’s a lot of potential here!

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Jennifer Stretton1
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Hey, thanks for your encouraging message!

Our plan for 10% is multi faceted. As it's such a big ask for someone new to effective giving, we are currently focused on discussing this with our personal network. Each time someone takes a pledge we are going to share a personal quote for them on our newsletter. We also plan to reach out to our largest one-off donors, and monthly recurrent donors to invite them to have a call with us to discuss pledging. Essentially, it's something we are going to weave into our communications and we will also publish blog articles about the value of pledging.

We will also likely weave the idea of pledging into our newsletter series which we are developing for newsletter subscribers this summer.

In terms of how we are collaborating with Don Efficace, we are going to be keeping a close eye on any new effective charities in France that they discover in their research. If there are truly effective charities that are tax deductible in France, then we would consider adding them to our portfolio of charities. 

Please feel free to send any additional questions, thoughts or feedback - all extremely welcome =)

Jen

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ThomNorman1
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Congrats on the launch! Especially on getting up and at it so quickly :) The website looks great!

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