 | |
| Founded | November 2020 |
|---|---|
| Founders | Lucius Caviola, PhD & Joshua Greene, PhD |
| Founded at | Harvard University |
| Type | Nonprofit organization |
| Website | givingmultiplier.org |
Giving Multiplier is a donation platform promoting effective giving. It was founded at Harvard University in 2020 by psychologists Joshua Greene and Lucius Caviola.
Giving Multiplier was created as a research project in 2020 by Joshua Greene, a psychology professor at Harvard and Lucius Caviola, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard at the time. The goal was to introduce people to effective charities in a way that overcomes some of the psychological barriers to effective altruism. [1] [2] As of January 2025, Giving Multiplier has facilitated over 9,700 donations totaling over $4 million. [3]
Giving Multiplier uses research from charity evaluators [4] such as GiveWell, Animal Charity Evaluators, Founders Pledge, and Open Philanthropy to select a list of ten "super-effective" charities addressing three cause areas: extreme poverty, animal welfare, and global catastrophic risks.
Giving Multiplier lets donors select their favorite charity and one of their super-effective charities (i.e., "with the head and the heart") to implement a donation bundling technique. [5] This innovation combines donors' seemingly conflicting preferences, namely, that they have their own favorite charities, [6] and they simultaneously care about effectiveness. [7] Moreover, Giving Multiplier uses donation matching to further incentivize donors to donate more effectively. [5] [8] The original design by Caviola and Greene integrated donation bundling with a new technique called micro-matching. [9] [5] Micro-matching works by adding matching funds on top of each donation, with a greater matching rate for a greater proportion allocated to the super-effective charity. Individual donors support the matching system to encourage others to donate, creating a "supply and demand" cycle of charitable giving. [10]
The proof of concept for Giving Multiplier was published as part of Greene and Caviola's academic research on splitting donations between favorite charities and effective charities. Their research found that including an option to split donations between a favorite charity and effective charity increased effective giving by 76%. The authors suggested that favorite-effective donation splits satisfies donors' dual motivations of supporting causes meaningful to them and effective organizations that have a big impact. [9]
As of January 2025, Giving Multiplier's list of super-effective charities (based on charity evaluators' recommendations) include:
Altruism is the concern for the well-being of others, independently of personal benefit or reciprocity.
Matching funds are funds that are set to be paid in proportion to funds available from other sources. Matching fund payments usually arise in situations of charity or public good. The terms cost sharing, in-kind, and matching can be used interchangeably but refer to different types of donations.
Charity Navigator is a charity assessment organization that evaluates hundreds of thousands of charitable organizations based in the United States, operating as a free 501(c)(3) organization. It provides insights into a nonprofit's financial stability, adherence to best practices for both accountability and transparency, and results reporting. It is the largest and most-utilized evaluator of charities in the United States. It does not accept any advertising or donations from the organizations it evaluates.
The Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) is a registered UK charity that operates in the United Kingdom, the United States of America and Canada. It works with companies, private philanthropists, regular donors, fellow foundations, governments, charities and not-for-profit enterprises to enable them to give more. Its stated purpose is to “accelerate progress in society towards a fair and sustainable future for all.”
Charity is the voluntary provision of assistance to those in need. It serves as a humanitarian act, and is unmotivated by self-interest. Various philosophies about charity exist, with frequent associations with religion.
GiveWell is an American non-profit charity assessment and effective altruism-focused organization. GiveWell focuses primarily on the cost-effectiveness of the organizations that it evaluates, rather than traditional metrics such as the percentage of the organization's budget that is spent on overhead.
Giving What We Can (GWWC) is an effective altruism nonprofit that promotes effective giving through education, outreach, and advocacy around the 10% Pledge, which encourages members to donate at least 10% of their income to effective charities. It was founded at Oxford University in 2009 by philosophers Toby Ord and William MacAskill.
Warm-glow giving is an economic theory describing the emotional reward of giving to others. According to the original warm-glow model developed by James Andreoni, people experience a sense of joy and satisfaction for "doing their part" to help others. This satisfaction - or "warm glow" - represents the selfish pleasure derived from "doing good", regardless of the actual impact of one's generosity. Within the warm-glow framework, people may be "impurely altruistic", meaning they simultaneously maintain both altruistic and egoistic (selfish) motivations for giving. This may be partially due to the fact that "warm glow" sometimes gives people credit for the contributions they make, such as a plaque with their name or a system where they can make donations publicly so other people know the "good" they are doing for the community.
Holden Karnofsky is an American nonprofit executive. Karnofsky co-founded the charity evaluator GiveWell with Elie Hassenfeld in 2007. He co-founded the grantmaking organization Open Philanthropy in 2014, and was its CEO and later co-CEO until 2023. In 2025, he joined Anthropic as Member of Technical Staff.
Toby David Godfrey Ord is an Australian philosopher. In 2009 he founded Giving What We Can, an international society whose members pledge to donate at least 10% of their income to effective charities, and is a key figure in the effective altruism movement, which promotes using reason and evidence to help the lives of others as much as possible.
The Center for High Impact Philanthropy (CHIP) is a center at the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States focused on high impact philanthropy, both in the US and internationally. The Center translates the best available evidence in areas such as education and early childhood development, disaster relief, poverty, democracy, and public health into actionable guidance and educational programs for those looking to make a difference with their giving.
Effective altruism (EA) is a 21st-century philosophical and social movement that advocates impartially calculating benefits and prioritizing causes to provide the greatest good. It is motivated by "using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis". People who pursue the goals of effective altruism, who are sometimes called effective altruists, follow a variety of approaches proposed by the movement, such as donating to selected charities and choosing careers with the aim of maximizing positive impact. The movement has achieved significant popularity outside of academia, spurring the creation of university-based institutes, research centers, advisory organizations and charities, which, collectively, have donated several hundreds of millions of dollars.
Earning to give involves deliberately pursuing a high-earning career for the purpose of donating a significant portion of earned income, typically because of a desire to do effective altruism. Advocates of earning to give contend that maximizing the amount one can donate to charity is an important consideration for individuals when deciding what career to pursue.
GivingTuesday, often stylized as #GivingTuesday for the purposes of hashtag activism, is the Tuesday after Thanksgiving in the United States. It is touted as a "global generosity movement unleashing the power of people and organizations to transform their communities and the world". An organization of the same name is an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit that supports the global movement.
Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE), formerly known as Effective Animal Activism (EAA), is a US-based charity evaluator and effective altruism-focused nonprofit founded in 2012. ACE evaluates animal charities and compares the effectiveness of their different campaigns and strategies. The organization makes charity recommendations to donors once a year. Its stated purpose is finding and promoting the most effective ways to help animals.
Charity assessment is the process of analysis of the goodness of a non-profit organization in financial terms. Historically, charity evaluators have focused on the question of how much of contributed funds are used for the purpose(s) claimed by the charity, while more recently some evaluators have placed an emphasis on the cost effectiveness of charities.
Charity Intelligence Canada is a Toronto-based nonprofit organization which posts assessments of the finances and impacts of Canadian charities on its website. Founded in 2007 by former equity analyst Kate Bahen, using unconventional methodologies drawn from Bahen's stock market background.
The Centre for Enabling EA Learning & Research supports individuals to self-educate and work towards charitable aims within the framework of effective altruism (EA). It provides successful applicants with grants for free or subsidised accommodation, catering within the centre and a stipend.
In the philosophy of effective altruism, an altruistic act such as charitable giving is considered more effective, or cost-effective, if it uses a set of resources to do more good per unit of resource than other options, with the goal of trying to do the most good. In a book written by effective altruism scholars Stefan Schubert and Lucius Caviola, the effectiveness of helping is defined by how many lives you save or how much good you otherwise do with a given amount of resources.
Evidence Action is an American non-profit organization founded in 2013 that scales cost-effective development interventions with rigorous evidence supporting their efficacy. The organization operates four main programs: the Deworm the World Initiative, Safe Water Now, Equal Vitamin Access, and Syphilis-Free Start. It also operates an Accelerator program, whereby new development interventions are screened and scaled according to efficacy. Vox Media has described Evidence Action as taking a "VC approach to development work".