In the early days of EA, people often tracked their giving on personal websites, or at least wrote about each year's donations. I read about it and felt inspired (and a bit competitive).
This is less popular now. I want to see more.
How to track donations
Here's a list of examples. Some people write long posts with all their reasoning, others just share numbers. More info is nice, but anything beats nothing.
My approach is minimal — a page explaining why I give in general, and a spreadsheet with names, numbers, and brief notes. It takes me like 20 minutes a year.
Why track?
The classic EA pitch is "you can improve the world".
Another pitch, which many people find more compelling, is "join a community of kind, interesting people who are trying to improve the world".
The more of us talk about our giving, the easier it is to see what our community is like. People like it when you live by your values, and the nerds in our core audience like it when claims are backed by data.
Also, if someone hears about EA, it makes a big difference if they know even a single donor personally — the difference between "those are weird nerds" and "hey, that's Aaron!" You can be your friends' first impression of effective giving.
Finally, the current state of affairs seems like a waste. There are 10,000+ Giving What We Can members who claim to give 10% of their income, but 95% of them don't say anything more — it's just a long list of names, with an occasional "I took the pledge!" tweet.
While not everyone keeps the pledge, thousands surely do. I wish they'd spend more time promoting that fact, explaining where they give, and sharing the data for people to see. (Same goes for non-pledgers, of course!)
In the golden age of public giving, the EA community spent most of its time thinking about where to give. Now, it's more about finding the right job. That's appropriate; the average person can make a much bigger impact by working than giving.
However:
- They aren't mutually exclusive. We can simultaneously convey "it's really good to find an impactful career" and "it's also good to donate, lots of us do it".
- Donating is easy to explain. I find it hard to describe my employer to people who aren't familiar with EA — as do many other people, especially in the AI/meta space. "I give 10% of my income, here are some charities I support" is easy to explain and leaves a lasting impression.
- Donating reaches more people. Most of my friends are doctors and lawyers and insurance agents who aren't going to change their jobs no matter what I tell them. But lots of them have asked me about charity over the years, because I talk about my giving and put the details on my website.
- You should also write about your job. No hypocrisy here!
Why not track?
- I don't give very much because I take a low salary to support my employer, live off small grants, have family to support, need savings to stay flexible, etc.
- Makes sense! That said, if you are in fact donating something like 10%, even from a small salary, that will still be cool or inspiring to many people.
- To be clear, this isn't an argument for giving more — just talking about whatever giving you do.
- I don't have anything interesting to say — I give 10% to GiveWell, unrestricted.
- You don't have to be interesting! It's still cool to live in a world where more people are talking about the causes they believe in. Also, most people have no idea what GiveWell is, including some of the people you know.
- I give to weird or controversial causes that will not endear people to EA — it's all AI research, meta stuff, and political campaigns.
- Makes sense! But you (a) can write about some but not all donations if you want, and (b) may find it interesting to explain why you chose those causes — maybe you'll convince someone.
- If you're worried about political donations making it hard to get a job later, remember that U.S. campaign giving is already public; the AI hiring bots of the future will find you anyway. But it's reasonable not to broadcast your support for e.g. partisan think tanks whose donors aren't disclosed.
- I worry that people in EA will shame me for donations they think are suboptimal, or start annoying arguments I don't want to engage in.
- Yep, that does sound plausible :-/ For what it's worth:
- If you want to ignore critics of your giving, that's entirely fair. You have no obligation to engage; a single post still beats not saying anything.
- No one's donations will look good to every other person. Your critic, if they shared their own views, would have critics of their own.
- Even Coefficient Giving gets regular criticism, and that's a team of full-time professional grantmakers trying really hard to get things right. Getting criticized doesn't mean you're a bad person, bad EA, whatever.
- I've been tracking donations for twelve years and exactly one person has tried to shame me (they're a friend, we got past it).
- I don't have anywhere to put the information.
- Make a Google Sheet and put the link on your profiles. Feel free to copy mine.
- Once a year, make a post somewhere about where you gave. No need to explain your reasons — one sentence about each charity, or even just a link, is great.
But actually, track your donations
I've found this habit incredibly worthwhile, and I think you should try it.
You can set up a page or spreadsheet and a quick statement of intent in less than an hour. If you want, you can fill in your entire donation history in another hour or two.
If you don't have time today, or want to procrastinate, put this post in your calendar for November 21st and do it before Giving Tuesday. Let's show the world what EA looks like!
Appendix: Who tracks?
This includes anyone I think of as connected to EA and EA causes, even if they wouldn't describe themselves that way. (Ask me if you'd like to be removed.)
I'd love to grow this list. If I missed you, or you start tracking after this post, let me know!
The "Donation Writeup" tag has more examples, like the 2025 donation celebration post.
Hi @Aaron Gertler 🔸 !
Thanks for this post - I think I needed to hear this.
Other than my replies to the annual forum post, I haven't written much about my giving, but I suspect there could be quite some leverage in me doing so, given how committed I am (the TLDR is I have taken something similar to a Further Pledge, and have lived off less than ~30,000 USD in the last ~3-4 years), and I'd love to inspire others to show them what's possible.
Do you have any recommendations for where to publish, and who might be interested in editorial support? (Maybe the folks over at GWWC?) I'd also consider approaching a bigger news outlet if you (or someone else) thought this was wise, though maybe your recommendation is "Just put it on LinkedIn, it'll be fine".
No need to respond to this at all - I just wanted to put this out there to signal my willingness to come clear about my addiction to effective giving ;-)
GWWC has a blog, so you could ask them about publishing there!
There's always the option of pitching your story to news outlets; occasionally we do see a GWWC member pop up in mainstream media, like Allan Saldanha in the Guardian (who also gives well over 10%). But I don't know how those stories tend to come together — whether it's through GWWC helping out or the subject making their own connections. Probably worth asking GWWC about that, though.