Our mission at Giving What We Can is to create a culture of giving significantly and effectively. As part of this, we provide information and infrastructure for donors to find and fund the most impactful charities.
Giving What We Can retains full rights to add or remove organisations at any point from the platform or change their status, at the discretion of the Giving What We Can research team.
This page explains the different types of programs we list on our donation platform and our reasons for doing so.
The programs we list on our donation platform fall under two categories:
We provide a list of charity recommendations to give donors an overview of some of the highest-impact donation opportunities we know of across a range of worldviews. These recommended organisations generally have publicly available evidence and/or reasoning supporting their cost-effectiveness, and are recommended by at least one impact-focused evaluator that our research team has vetted. Notably, this excludes charities that may well be extremely cost-effective but simply haven’t been investigated by an evaluator we've vetted.
We aim to update our recommended programs as soon as possible when:
a) an evaluator we’ve vetted changes its recommendations or
b) we update our list of vetted evaluators
We include these programs primarily as a service to support donors, by providing a variety of impactful donation options in one place, and as an acknowledgement that our list of recommendations is based on very specific criteria. These other supported programs are organisations we think may be of interest to impact-focused donors, but that don’t (currently) meet our criteria to be recommended. We haven't deeply assessed these programs ourselves (apart from checking that they meet our inclusion standards), and their effectiveness likely varies — a few may rival our top recommendations, but most are probably less cost-effective.
We aim to conduct reviews of our other supported programs every year. During these reviews, existing supported programs that no longer fulfill our inclusion criteria will be removed from our platform and new supported programs that meet our inclusion criteria may be added to our platform. When programs are removed from our platform, we have a process for handling recurring donations made to those organisations, which is outlined in our FAQ section.
Both recommended and other supported programs must meet a few general criteria to be considered for inclusion on our donation platform:
We do not accept payments or charge fees to organisations that we include on our list of recommendations or elsewhere on our platform. We are here to help donors do the most good through their giving.
We base our recommendations on the research of impact-focused evaluators our research team has vetted. You can see more about why and how we evaluate evaluators here.
We currently only recommend charities and funds that a vetted evaluator has also recommended. In rare circumstances, we may not include a program recommended by a vetted evaluator if the program does not meet our General Inclusion Criteria (see above). We expect to continue evaluating evaluators periodically, which may influence our recommendations.
More about how we decide which charities to recommend
We do not accept requests from organisations looking to be included on our list of recommendations.
To decide whether a non-recommended program that meets our general inclusion criteria is suitable for other supported program status, we apply a number of additional criteria. While the research team maintains complete discretion to decide whether to support a program, our additional criteria are primarily concerned with:
Value to the platform — Is there sufficient evidence that this organisation is a highly impactful donation option and/or does it contribute meaningfully to the effective giving ecosystem?
Value from the platform — Will this organisation receive enough support from donors such that the benefits outweigh the costs of hosting the program on the donation platform?
In most cases, this means that we prioritise programs that meet at least two of the following four criteria:
1. Sufficient level of support by impact-focused evaluators.
2. Adds an option that the research team believes could be the most cost-effective to a donor according to a plausible worldview. For instance, they are among the most promising organisations we know of pursuing a specific approach to doing good that has been identified as especially promising by researchers in the area.
3. Is an impact-focused evaluator, fundraiser for highly effective charities, or otherwise contributes to the effective giving ecosystem in a way that brings significant impact.
4. Is expected to raise at least $50k USD per year through the GWWC donation platform.
Two important notes:
As an example, if we already list a supported program that works on a particular problem or utilises a particular intervention, then this raises our bar for adding another program implementing a similar intervention.
We do not accept requests from organisations wishing to be recommended, since inclusion on our list of recommended charities is determined by our evaluating evaluators research.
We intend to conduct periodic reviews of our other supported programs every year. During some of these reviews, we will open applications so new programs can apply for supported program status. Programs that apply will be assessed against our inclusion criteria, which are subject to change over time. We expect to next open applications for new supported programs in 2026. To be notified when these applications open, please fill out this survey.