After more than a decade as Open Philanthropy, we’re becoming Coefficient Giving, a name that better reflects our role as a philanthropic funder and advisor working with many donors. Our mission and values remain the same. This post shares why we’re changing our name and what to expect as we enter this new chapter. For more on our plans for the future and why we believe philanthropy can be a much stronger force for progress than it is today, read this essay by CEO Alexander Berger.
When I joined Open Philanthropy in the summer of 2024 as its first Director of Communications, one of my top priorities was taking a fresh look at how we presented ourselves to the world. The team had been working and growing for more than a decade, giving away hundreds of millions of dollars a year. But we weren’t sure whether our public positioning, our website, and even our name still fit who we were becoming.
For most of our history, we’d operated primarily as outsourced staff for Good Ventures, Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz’s foundation. That began to change as we launched multi-donor initiatives like the Lead Exposure Action Fund (over $125 million from a dozen partners to reduce global lead poisoning) and the Abundance & Growth Fund (over $120 million to accelerate economic growth).
As we started to truly fulfill our original vision of helping many donors give effectively, the leadership team began to discuss whether our brand still matched reality. Many outside the organization still saw Open Philanthropy as synonymous with Good Ventures — a fair assumption given where we started, but not quite true anymore. We weren’t sure we needed a new name, but we wanted to explore whether one might help us better explain who we are today and signal that we’re open for collaboration.
By early 2025, the case for change was growing stronger: working with other philanthropists had become a core part of our work, not a side project.
There were other nudges, too. Externally, we were often confused with other, better-known organizations. And internally, many felt that “Open Philanthropy” no longer quite fit. When the name was chosen in 2014, it signaled both our openness to many cause areas and our unusual level of transparency. Back then, we published notes from nearly every conversation we had with experts and even wrote candidly about the potential downsides of new hires. As we grew, that kind of radical transparency didn’t scale well. While we still prioritize openness and sharing our reasoning, these are now part of a broader set of values rather than the centerpiece of our identity.
And practically, our website and other communications hadn’t caught up to our current moment. I often heard from potential hires, journalists and grantees that it wasn’t always easy to tell what we did or why it mattered. The substance was there, just buried. We wanted a clearer, more approachable window into our work, one that would make sense even to readers less steeped in our way of thinking.
Still, we didn’t want change for its own sake. We knew our core approach and values wouldn’t be changing, and we weren’t sure we’d find a name we liked better than Open Philanthropy.
At a February 2025 meeting of the leadership team, we debated whether to keep the name and just refresh the website, or undertake a full rebrand. We decided to explore both paths: if we found a name we loved, great; if not, we’d continue with the current one and make gradual changes to our public presentation over time.
We decided to work with a naming agency to see if there might be better options. When they presented Coefficient Giving, it immediately resonated.
A coefficient multiplies the value of whatever it’s paired with, just as we aim to amplify impact through our research, grantmaking, and partnerships. “Co” nods to our collaboration with donors and grantees, while “efficient” reflects our unusual focus on cost-effectiveness.
We knew any name would take some getting used to, but this one seemed to capture something essential about our work in a way that “Open Philanthropy” no longer did.
Once the name felt right, we turned to how to bring it to life. We planned a full website relaunch by the end of the year, aiming to make our work easier to understand for people encountering us for the first time, while keeping the depth that longtime readers expect.
Our new site is easier to navigate, more mobile-friendly, and more visually engaging. We revamped the structure to foreground more of our important ideas and, in what may be our boldest move yet, expanded from a single shade of periwinkle blue to an entire color palette.
A few other small touches we especially like:
Beyond our new name and website, one substantive shift is that programs are becoming funds. They’re no longer just internal divisions, but philanthropic initiatives that donors can join to support specific causes at scale. The Lead Exposure Action Fund and Abundance & Growth Fund already worked this way; now all our focus areas will too.
In practice, that means each fund has its own page outlining its work and listing contributing donors who agree to be named. Each fund also has its own set of featured grants, rather than sharing one centralized database.
We also worked on a refreshed website for Good Ventures, which launches today with a personal reflection from Cari and Dustin on their philanthropy over the past 14 years.
Our mission remains unchanged: to help others as much as we can with the resources available to us.
The core principles behind our approach are the same: we continue to choose causes that are important, neglected, and tractable; allocate resources across multiple worldviews, and emphasize cost-effectiveness in our grantmaking. We still believe that people have intrinsic value regardless of where they were born, and that animal suffering matters morally.
We plan to continue and scale our partnership with Good Ventures. This new chapter isn’t about replacing that partnership but about building a broader ecosystem.
And our operating values — ownership, openness, calibration, and inclusiveness — remain central to how we work.
This launch was a huge team effort. Thank you to everyone across Coefficient Giving, and to our partners at A Hundred Monkeys and Upstatement, for their hard work, good taste, and creative problem-solving over the past six months.
Learn more about our funds, our approach, and our history. If you’re interested in collaborating with us as a funding partner, we’d love to hear from you.
Our new name marks our next chapter as we double down on our longstanding goal of helping more funders increase their impact. We believe philanthropy can be a far more vital force for progress than it is today.
