Alana Horowitz Friedman

Giving What We Can

What do we mean when we say you can have 100x more impact by donating to the best charities?

Comparing effective giving to other forms of charitable donations: Dos and Don’ts 

On our homepage and throughout our website, we make a claim that is quite central to the project of effective giving: 

where you choose to donate greatly affects how much impact your money will have.

To make this point, we use language like: “You can often have 100x more impact by donating to the best charities” or, in a bit more detail, “Many of us can easily 100x our impact by giving to charities that achieve more per dollar spent.”

You may also notice similar claims on other effective giving websites. They may be phrased or framed slightly differently, but the core premise is the same.

Perhaps in part because there are so many different phrasings and framings of this idea, we’ve noticed some misconceptions surrounding what it really means, and we now believe language we’ve used in the past (such as “the best charities are often 100x better than others”) may, regrettably, have contributed to this.

The language we currently use (and this explanatory post) is an attempt to correct these misconceptions and stop them from happening in the future. Here, we’ll explain more about 

why we’ve shifted to a donor-facing perspective

can often have 100x more impact by donating to the best charities” or “the best charities can do 100x more with your dollar” — and we’ll also clarify what we do and don’t mean by statements like this. We hope this exploration also helps others (especially those who regularly talk or write about effective giving) discuss impact differences between charities in a clear and compelling way.

The language we used previously — “the best charities are 100x better than others” — is a good “broad brush” statement to encapsulate the reality that where you choose to donate has significant impact consequences. However, it runs the risk of being taken too literally while at the same time being quite vague.

The “than others” part of the statement — the best charities are 100x better 

? Is it most charities? A handful? Something in between? There’s no information about 

 are 100x worse than the “best” charities.

This leads us into the potential for misinterpretation: 

We’ve seen this statement be interpreted to mean that effective charities are 

, which is a stronger claim than we feel comfortable making. 

the case that highly effective charities are significantly more impactful than many other giving options

 more impactful (5x? 10x? 50x?) will vary, sometimes considerably, depending on which giving options you’re comparing! It’s also sometimes impossible to calculate — for example, if a charity doesn’t have cost-effectiveness data or reasoning behind its programs.

Another reason we chose to shift the language is that effective giving focuses on how

 can do the most good with their dollar. A truly exceptional 

 might be 100x better than an alternative giving opportunity, on average, but if it is already up to its ears in funding and can’t absorb more, then 

 to it won’t do 100x more good than the alternative.

Last but not least, making a general claim about charities “being better than other charities” begs the question “better by whose light” / “what is “good” here?” Even within the general framework of effective giving, there are several different 

 about which kind of donation opportunities are most impactful. By shifting to a donor-facing perspective, it is clearer that we’re evaluating this from the perspective of the donor’s 

, rather than claiming we have access to a “one true worldview” by which these charities are better than others.

For all these reasons, we think it makes sense to talk about this from the donor perspective, rather than comparing charities in an (ambiguous) vacuum.

Breaking down the claim: You can do 100x more good per dollar by donating to the best charities.

 Most of the principles linked above could easily increase your impact by a factor of 10 (depending on your starting point) which means that, in some cases, following just two of them could multiply your impact by 100.

 because some of these principles overlap with others; counting each one as a literal 10x boost that could then be multiplied with others would be double-counting. In other words, following all five probably won’t 10

When interventions in global health were studied via the DCP2 and DCP3 projects, there were drastic differences in their cost-effectiveness. The best interventions were

 more cost-effective than the median (an intervention in the middle of the lot) and 

 more cost-effective than the worst. Note that 

; charities implement interventions but may have added costs to do so. (For this reason and others, we don’t mainly rely on the DCP2 data to make the case that donors could 100x their impact or more, but we do think it illustrates how extreme variations in cost-effectiveness can be. See our 

Other data sets comparing interventions in other areas show similar patterns. For example, a 2020 

 comparing 150 education interventions attempting to improve learning outcomes in low and middle income countries found that the best interventions were, on average, 

 more cost-effective than the median, and as stated in the abstract: “The results show that some of the most cost-effective programs deliver the equivalent of three additional years of high-quality schooling (that is, schooling at quality comparable to the highest-performing education systems) for just $100 per child -- compared with zero years for other classes of interventions.”

The difference in cost-effectiveness of interventions 

 cause areas (for example, cage-free initiatives vs. global health initiatives) may be greater than when comparing interventions in the same cause area, but this depends on your value system.

For example, if you value getting chickens out of battery cages, 

 that $1 has paid for the freedom (from cages, not factory farms) of between 9-120 chickens. This is likely at least a 100x impact boost compared to donating that dollar to your local library, where it couldn’t buy too much. (But if you don’t value the freedom of chickens from cages, then you might not see this as an impact boost.)

We think our recommendations are incredibly high-impact, as shown by the 

 behind them, as well as meeting at least one (and often more) of these 

. However, whether they provide 100x better opportunities than other charities will depend on these other charities you compare them to and on your particular worldview. The charity evaluation space is still very young, and we’re confident it has far from identified or evaluated all highly cost-effective donation opportunities there are to be found. This is part of the reason why we offer a range of promising 

 on our donation platform in addition to 

, and there may be many more charities out there that we’ve never even heard of that could outperform our recommendations by some worldviews.

Depending on how you define “typical,” this is likely true in some cases and for some donors, and we’ve used language similar to this in the past. For example, one could define a “typical” charity as a popular donation choice. If we go with that definition, then it’s notable that the 

most common place to donate is to a religious institution

. Compare what $5 could buy donated to (say) one’s local church to what it could buy if donated to an organisation like the Against Malaria Foundation, where it could protect two people for two years from the devastating and painful disease of malaria, and a 100x impact boost would probably be an understatement by most worldviews, even considering the benefits it would bring to the church or the church’s community work.

That said, given the wide range of definitions for “typical,” we no longer use language like this. For example, a charity like Amnesty International or International Rescue Committee could very well be considered “typical” given its large donor base and high name recognition. Due to the types of programs these “typical” charities operate and the absence of an evaluation from an 

, we feel confident that donors can reasonably expect to have much more impact by giving to our recommendations over these charities. Yet, part of the reason for this is that we just don’t know how impactful Amnesty International and co. are (and absent this evaluation, we don’t think donors can know either). Therefore, while we want to encourage donors to support programs where we have much higher confidence of impact, we don’t want to be misinterpreted as claiming that our recommendations are 100x better than charities like these. It could be much more than 100x, or it could be much less.


Your impact can vary significantly depending on where you choose to donate. We’ve said this for years, and we’ll continue to say it.

In other words, shifting the language we use to make this point doesn’t change our charity recommendations or core premises.

Rather, it addresses a very real concern: if the language used to make this point leaves open the potential for misinterpretation and/or misrepresentation, we run the risk of encouraging unsupportable statements. If unsupportable statements are used to discuss this topic, confusion around this could overshadow the (quite supportable) and 

 opportunity we have – through our donation decisions – to drastically increase our impact and build the world we want to see.

Here are the best charities to donate to this Giving Tuesday and in 2025. These recommendations are based on thorough impact-evaluations and are our research team's top picks.

2025 charity recommendations are in! 

If you’re looking for vetted, cost-effective options this Giving Tuesday (and throughout 2025) check out the 

newly updated list of our research team’s top recommendations

. We think these are among the best places to donate if you’re looking to maximise the impact of your next dollar – and be confident your money is leading to real impact.

As we start to wind down towards the end of the year, Giving Tuesday can help us take action on giving back, and help prompt us to finalise our giving before year-end.

So without further ado, here are our 2025 charity and fund recommendations:

Can't decide?

You may notice that our recommendations are similar to last year’s. This is because we base our charity recommendations on the research of vetted, 

 work – are best suited to help donors maximise the impact of their next dollar.

through investigating six evaluator programs

 – we determined that we could confidently rely on EA Funds’ Animal Welfare and Long-Term Future funds, Longview’s Emerging Challenges Fund, and GiveWell’s funds and research. This year, we re-evaluated ACE’s Movement Grants and Charity Evaluation Program, and we also evaluated the Founders Pledge Global Health & Development Fund. We determined that of these three, we were only confident recommending the ACE’s Movement Grants program at this time. 

Read more about our 2024 evaluator research

We also felt confident that the evaluators whose research we deferred to last year would likely take a similar approach and so maintain similar marginal cost-effectiveness this year, so we’ve kept those recommendations active (though plan to re-evaluate some of these next year at the two-year mark.) That said, we made one exception last year and recommended an individual charity that was not recommended by any of our vetted evaluators – The Humane League. We didn’t feel confident continuing to rely on that recommendation this year without a re-evaluation since we think charity programs can change more quickly than grantmaking programs, so we’ve removed The Humane League from our list (though we still think it’s an option worth considering and you can still donate to it via our donation platform.)

Many of our recommendations are funds. Funds allow donors to pool together money that then will be distributed to projects or charities that are chosen by expert fund managers. This allows donors to access donation opportunities they might not otherwise get access to, like supporting specific grants such as 

funding the rollout of the malaria vaccine

 in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi. Funds also allow for donations to be allocated where they are most needed at that time, which generally leads to higher cost-effectiveness on the margin. 

Learn more about the advantages of donating to funds.

We wish you a very happy giving season, and please feel free to share our research and guides with others who may be looking for exceptional donation opportunitie

Giving What We Can

Articles

Comparing effective giving to other forms of charitable donations: Dos and Don’ts

2025 charity recommendations are in!