At Coefficient Giving, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to help others as much as possible through our grantmaking. Many of us are also passionate about giving in our personal lives. This post shares how some of our staff members are donating this year and what motivates their choices. We were inspired to start this annual tradition by GiveWell, which originally incubated Coefficient Giving.
We hope the diverse approaches highlighted below — from simple frameworks to detailed strategies, across various causes and parts of the world — show that there are many ways to give thoughtfully and effectively.
Notes on these entries:
- They come from individual staff, and don’t represent Coefficient’s institutional view.
- They don’t capture all of the ways our staff give — just the ones who decided to share. Some staff donate to local charities, political candidates, and other kinds of causes.
- Some of our staff have taken the Giving What We Can 10% Pledge, committing to give at least 10% of their income to charity. Unless otherwise stated, references to a “pledge” in the text refer to the 10% Pledge.
- Some of the charities mentioned are Coefficient grantees; others are not.
Britney Budiman
Editor
Are you lazy but well-intentioned? Have you once again procrastinated on your giving? Does the thought of scouring the Internet for donation recommendations feel more like homework than a treasure hunt?
Consider donating to GiveWell, the “yeah, seems good” of effective giving. They spend 70,000+ hours researching charities each year, which is 69,999 more than I want to. I trust its decisions far more than my own, and so do 150,000 other donors who’ve let GiveWell direct their donations.
As I did last year, I’m donating to GiveWell’s All Grants Fund, which backs a broader range of experimental work than its Top Charities Fund. It appeals to me because I believe in a hits-based approach, and I want to support global health charities in prospecting for, scoping, and incubating breakthrough opportunities.
Juliana Martins
Recruiter
I took the 10% Pledge this past September. For now, I’ve set up a simple recurring donations portfolio so that I wouldn’t procrastinate on getting started. My current allocation is:
- 34% to GiveWell’s All Grants Fund
- 33% to GiveDirectly
- 33% to the Against Malaria Foundation
I give an extra 5% on top of that to Giving What We Can, to support its research and advocacy around effective giving.
I plan to revisit and adjust this portfolio at the end of the year once I have more time to think through my priorities. I also volunteer as a mentor at Magnify Mentoring, providing mentorship for women and non-binary people from underrepresented backgrounds.
Kearney Capuano
Business Operations Coordinator
I took the 10% Pledge in October. This year, I’m donating:
- 50% to GiveWell’s Top Charities Fund, which allocates funding among charities GiveWell thinks are especially reliable and likely to be highly impactful. I rely on GiveWell’s rigorous evaluations to highlight where my giving can have the greatest impact on improving and saving lives.
- The remaining 50% split between the newest charities incubated by Ambitious Impact’s Charity Entrepreneurship program: First Embrace, the Better Season Project, Opal Health, and the Better Futures Guide.
I’ve been a longtime fan of Ambitious Impact, and these new projects feel especially exciting. I’m eager to support entrepreneurial charities because their iterative, innovative approaches let us discover new ways to help more people over time.
Lewis Bollard
Managing Director, Farm Animal Welfare
I support a wide range of effective farm animal welfare organizations — mostly as a signal of moral support, since the amount I personally give is much smaller than what we move via Coefficient Giving. This year, I was excited to also donate to the FarmKind fundraiser organized by Dwarkesh Patel, and to a political candidate who I think could do great work on our issues.
Aveek Bhattacharya
Strategy Fellow, Cause Prioritization
I give 10% of my income away. I tend to be quite small-c conservative with my personal giving, prioritizing charities I’m confident are impactful and cost-effective. It’s like an investment portfolio heavy on bonds — cautious and not too adventurous.
As a result, I give the biggest share to Against Malaria Foundation, one of GiveWell’s top charities. I also donate to GiveDirectly, as I value the directness of simply redistributing cash to poorer families. In addition, I give money to StrongMinds, a charity recommended by the Happier Lives Institute which provides psychotherapy in Uganda, Zambia and Kenya. I recognize that the evidence base for psychotherapy is less well-developed than those for bednets or cash transfers, but I’m a strong believer in the value of promoting subjective wellbeing (not just physical health).
Caroline Daniell
Associate Counsel
I’m continuing my support for The Humane League, which I’ve given to several times over the last five years, because I think they add important value to the farm animal welfare field. This year, I expect to also support the Against Malaria Foundation.
Melanie Basnak
Senior Program Officer, Effective Giving & Careers
This year, I’m splitting my donations as follows:
- 45% to GiveWell’s All Grants Fund. I’ve supported GiveWell for many years — it was my first exposure to data-driven giving, and I continue to see its research as some of the most rigorous available. I choose the All Grants Fund because it supports both established top charities and more speculative, high-upside opportunities, and I value that balance.
- 45% to early-stage high-impact charities. I like the idea of supporting promising organizations at pivotal moments in their growth. This year, to select organizations in this category, I drew on posts from the EA Forum’s Marginal Funding Week, my own experience with certain organizations and cause areas, and my interest in supporting global health and development. I ultimately chose Lafiya and Respira Health.
- 10% to GiveDirectly. I continue to believe that unconditional cash transfers are one of the most reliable ways to meaningfully improve the lives of people in low-income countries. GiveDirectly is exceptionally good at executing this intervention, while also generating and disseminating rigorous evidence about its effects.
Norma Altshuler
Program Director, Global Aid Policy
I’ve decided to not mix my professional grantmaking and personal giving, so I’m not donating to the grantee partners I work with. Instead, my spouse and I are donating to:
- Youth Impact and Pratham, two standout NGOs with track records of using evidence to inform government programs at scale.
- GiveWell, which I believe is an exceptionally good way to save and improve lives.
I’ve worked closely with each organization’s leaders over the years, and I’m excited about their long-term potential (as well as their immediate work).
We also plan to donate to one or more animal welfare charities. We’ll lean on the advice of our farm animal welfare team to decide where.
Martin Gould
Associate Program Officer, Farm Animal Welfare
My family’s giving is focused on reducing suffering among farm and wild animals. This year, we’re supporting:
- Anima International, which runs campaigns to improve farm animal welfare in seven countries in Europe and at the EU-level.
- Wisdom Good Works, which supports the use of fertility-control technology for mice and rats, reducing the use of rodent poisons which cause acute suffering.
- The Center for Wild Animal Welfare, a new organization advocating for improvements to policy related to wild animals in the U.K.
Will Sorflaten
Interim Recruiting Lead
As a Giving What We Can pledger, I’m currently giving 10% of my income to The Humane League UK (THL UK), which I’ve supported since it was founded in 2016. I discovered its work through Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE), which is a significant factor in determining where I donate each year.
THL UK is consistently one of ACE’s top-rated charities; I like the org’s hits-based approaches and the impact it’s already had in a relatively short amount of time on a relatively low budget.
Nisha Austin
Program Operations Manager, Abundance & Growth // Biosecurity & Pandemic Preparedness
The majority of my giving focuses on evidence-backed global health and poverty alleviation, with most of my donations going to GiveWell, followed by GiveDirectly and J-PAL. I’m drawn to this combination because it brings together rigorously evaluated interventions that save lives at scale, direct cash transfers that respect people’s agency, and high-quality research on what actually works.
Alongside this, I give smaller but consistent amounts, and time, to civic and information infrastructure. This includes supporting open knowledge through projects like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive, strengthening public-interest journalism through the Public Media Bridge Fund and my local newspaper, and investing in long-term public goods like the National Park Service.
This year, I began serving on my town’s Housing Committee and Master Plan Advisory Group. I see this as an extension of the way I think about giving: issues like housing can’t be solved by funding alone and require people to show up and build local capacity over time.
I’ve been thinking more explicitly about how philanthropic capital can unlock systems-level change, both by funding individual solutions and by helping build the infrastructure that makes more solutions possible. Across both my giving and my service, the common thread is investing in people, information, and institutions that increase long-term resilience and expand the conditions for shared abundance.
Chris Webster
Information Security Lead
This year, I used FarmKind’s compassion calculator to help me decide how much to donate to animal charities to offset my consumption of animal products. I love this tool and have shared it with many of my friends. It turns out you can donate ~$25 per month to do as much good as going entirely vegan, which really highlights how effective the best animal charities are.
Olivia Larsen
Strategy Fellow, Partnerships
This year, I’m excited to direct 100% of my donation to GiveWell’s All Grants Fund! It’s the first year I’m giving appreciated securities, which are a particularly tax-effective way to give.
I worked at GiveWell for five years before joining Coefficient last year. During my time at GiveWell, I saw firsthand the rigor and care my colleagues on the research team put into allocating funds as cost-effectively as possible. (This is also true of Coefficient, but GiveWell is a better fit for donors at my scale!)
My time in the weeds at GiveWell makes it easy for me to trust it with my annual donation. But I recognize that most donors can’t spend years thinking full-time about charitable giving — and that it’s hard to build trust in a field where feedback loops are long, counterfactuals are complicated, impact happens far away, and exaggerated claims are common.
I don’t think there’s a shortcut to building that trust. But GiveWell publishes the details of its analyses so donors can vet them, and its outreach team is available to answer questions. When GiveWell says that roughly $5,000 can save a life, I know that estimate accounts for the fact that some of the medication won’t reach the intended recipients and that research results don’t always translate perfectly to the real world.
Even with that trust in the numbers, it can be hard to emotionally connect with what they mean. Reading John Green’s Everything Is Tuberculosis this year helped me feel the emotional weight of what my donation can actually do.