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Coefficient Giving
Our Approach

Our Approach

Our mission is to help others as much as we can with the resources available to us. We think choosing which problems to work on is the most important decision in philanthropy, and we focus on causes that are important, neglected, and tractable — those where additional resources can make the greatest difference. 

We remain uncertain about some fundamental questions regarding how to help others most, but taking action doesn’t require full certainty. Rather than betting everything on one approach, we allocate resources across multiple cause areas that could plausibly be among the most important.

This includes both immediate, evidence-backed interventions that save lives today and high-risk opportunities that could take decades to pay off. Since much of our impact could come from a small number of exceptional successes, we’re willing to take calculated risks.

We believe that people have intrinsic value regardless of where they were born, and that animal suffering matters morally. This often drives us to fund work that others overlook or find unconventional.

Our approach evolves continuously as we learn from our own work and from other philanthropists. We strive to show our reasoning, name our assumptions, and remain open to changing our minds when the evidence shifts. 

Learn more about the key ideas that inform our approach:

  • We think the most important decision a philanthropist makes is choosing which causes to fund.

    Philanthropists tend to choose causes based on personal experience, geographic proximity, or emotional appeal. This approach is understandable — personal connection is what motivates many people to give in the first place. But some causes offer far greater opportunities for impact than others: the same donation might save ten lives in one place but a thousand in another.

    That’s why we devote significant effort to investigating different causes before committing resources to specific areas. We evaluate causes using three criteria: importance (how many individuals are affected and how deeply), neglectedness (whether the cause already receives adequate attention and resources), and tractability (whether additional philanthropic funding can drive significant progress).

    We’ve applied this framework to more than 200 potential causes, leading us to launch funds in the areas where we see the strongest opportunities. In order to direct resources as effectively as we can, we regularly explore new areas and reevaluate our current programs.
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  • We divide resources across multiple compelling approaches to help others as much as possible.

    When choosing which causes to support, we face difficult moral and empirical questions. Should we direct more funding toward proven ways of improving health today (like vaccine distribution), or toward efforts that have a small chance of helping billions of people (like pandemic prevention)? Should we focus only on improving the lives of people, or should we also try to improve the lives of animals?

    We don’t think there’s a single “right” answer. Instead, we divide resources across several broad approaches to doing good, each grounded in a different worldview — an interrelated set of moral priorities, empirical beliefs, and strategic heuristics.

    This strategy, which we call worldview diversification, helps us move forward in spite of deep and irresolvable uncertainty about what truly does the most good. It also makes us a more resilient organization by allowing us to develop expertise across a wide range of areas, stay flexible and learn across different cause areas.
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  • We’re willing to fund work with a high risk of failure if the potential impact is large enough.

    One of our core values is our tolerance for philanthropic risk. We’ve seen that the biggest philanthropic wins often come from ideas that seem unlikely to succeed, so we’re open to funding a lot of work that could fail in order to find a few transformative successes.

    We call this approach “hits-based giving.” Like venture capital investors, we expect a small number of “hits” to account for a large share of our impact. Just as one successful startup can justify dozens of failures, a single breakthrough grant can offset the costs of many unsuccessful efforts.

    Succeeding with this approach can require making some counterintuitive bets. But because we’re aiming to maximize our portfolio’s overall impact, we can take bigger risks on individual grants.
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  • We aim to make highly cost-effective grants — those with the highest expected impact per dollar. 

    Measuring cost-effectiveness helps us compare very different opportunities and direct funding to where it can do the most good.

    We estimate cost-effectiveness in different ways depending on the type of work. For our funds focused on improving health or boosting incomes, we quantify health and income benefits using a shared unit of impact. In areas where outcomes are harder to quantify, like certain kinds of advocacy, we may rely more on qualitative reasoning, expert input, and comparisons to past projects than precise numerical models — though we still use numbers where we can.
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