Earlier this year, we launched a request for proposals (RFP) from organizations that fundraise for highly cost-effective charities. The Livelihood Impact Fund supported the RFP, as did two donors from Meta Charity Funders. We’re excited to share the results: $1,565,333 in grants to 11 organizations. We estimate a weighted average ROI of ~4.3x across the portfolio, which means we expect our grantees to raise more than $6 million in adjusted funding over the next 1-2 years.
Who’s receiving funding
These organizations span different regions, donor audiences, and outreach strategies. Here’s a quick overview:
Charity Navigator (United States) — $200,000
Charity Navigator recently acquired Causeway, through which they now recommend charities with a greater emphasis on impact across a portfolio of cause areas. This grant supports Causeway’s growth and refinement, with the aim of nudging donors toward curated higher-impact giving funds.
Effectief Geven (Belgium) — $108,000
Newly incubated, with solid early traction and plans to expand donor reach. This grant will help them expand from 1 to 1.5 FTE.
Effective Altruism Australia (Australia) — $257,000
A well-established organization with historically strong ROI. This grant supports the hiring of a dedicated director for their effective giving work, along with shared ops staff, over two years.
Effective Altruism New Zealand (New Zealand) — $17,500
A long-standing, low-cost organization with one FTE and a consistently great ROI. This grant covers their core operating expenses for one year, helping to maintain effective giving efforts in New Zealand.
Etkili Bağış (Turkey) — $20,000
A new initiative piloting effective giving outreach in Turkey. This grant helps professionalize their work by covering setup costs and the executive director’s time for one year.
Giv Effektivt (Denmark) — $210,000
A growing national platform that transitioned from volunteer-run to staffed, with strong early ROI and healthy signs of growth. This grant supports their operational costs for two years.
High Impact Athletes (Global) — $300,000
Recently pivoted their efforts in light of a new partnership with Hyrox, a global fitness competition. Through this partnership, competition attendees are offered discounted tickets if they fundraise for impactful charities. This grant will help High Impact Athletes onboard new staff to maximize the partnership’s potential and secure more fundraising from ticket-holders.
Mieux Donner (France) — $149,333
Recently launched via Ambitious Impact’s incubation program, they’ve seen good early results and have strong leads for future growth. This grant funds one year of operations.
Tien Procent Club (Netherlands) — $210,000
Organizes events in the Netherlands to introduce new audiences to effective giving and connect them with existing platforms. This grant enables them to scale their model by expanding from 0.5 to 2 FTE.
UHNW advisory effort in Asia and Africa (Hong Kong, Singapore, Nigeria) — $67,000
A new ultra-high-net-worth advisory effort focused on philanthropists in Asia and Africa. This grant covers the founder’s part-time salary and supports early-stage setup and outreach.
Więcej Dobra (Poland) — $26,500
A solo volunteer project using Instagram influencer campaigns to raise funds for GiveWell’s top charities. This grant supports scaling that approach by funding a larger multi-influencer campaign to raise funds for New Incentives, a nonprofit that runs conditional cash transfer programs in Nigeria.
Why promising applications sometimes didn’t meet our bar
In some cases, otherwise strong proposals didn’t meet our funding bar. The most common reasons were:
Lower effectiveness adjustment. We apply downward adjustments when donations are directed to interventions we believe are less cost-effective than GiveWell’s top charities (or similarly highly cost-effective interventions in our other priority areas). This can substantially lower the expected ROI of a fundraising effort.
High cost for early-stage experiments. While we’re excited to fund new approaches, we’re more likely to support experiments with relatively low price tags. For instance, we backed Etkili Bağış to test effective giving in Turkey with a $20,000 grant. More expensive pilots often didn’t clear our bar unless there was a compelling case for early impact.
Limited near-term upside. When proposals had a marginal expected ROI (e.g. 1.5-2.5x), we prioritized opportunities where we could plausibly learn about upside within the next 1-2 years. As a result, we typically chose to pass on opportunities with marginal ROI where we felt that it would take 3+ years to learn, or where the plans would not be ambitious enough for us to be able to assess the impact of the strategy.
What we learned
A few reflections from this round:
The ecosystem is growing. We received 40 applications, including strong proposals from established organizations and new experiments. This roughly matched our prediction for the number of applications we would receive, but we were surprised to learn about several new initiatives that weren’t on our radar. The effective giving ecosystem appears bigger than ever. We were also surprised to see that about half of those applications were strong enough to make it to a second, more in-depth, assessment stage, and that 11 applications went on to be funded. This all suggests a very strong applicant pool.
Monitoring and evaluation varies widely across organizations. We saw a wide range of methods for estimating counterfactual impact. We’re considering an internal project to help set and share clearer standards.
Open calls are valuable. We primarily do active grantmaking, reaching out to promising organizations in the space. This was the first time we ran an RFP — we didn’t know how useful it would be, and whether it would be worth repeating. However, having concluded the process, we found it very helpful. It allowed us to identify new opportunities, better understand the full space, compare across initiatives, and generally make more informed funding decisions.