The GiveWell Blog

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Coefficient Giving Commits $175 Million to GiveWell Opportunities

(updated on: ) | by GiveWell Staff

We are excited to share that Coefficient Giving, formerly Open Philanthropy, has decided to renew and increase their funding for GiveWell, committing to set aside $175 million in 2026 for opportunities we recommend.

This is great news for the people our grants help, and it comes at a critical moment. Following 2025’s aid cuts, we think needs are greater than they were a year ago, and we expect they will continue to grow in the coming years as the impacts of current and future cuts mount. We’re grateful to see donors—including Coefficient Giving—stepping up and signaling that they trust us to help in the years ahead.

We think donating now to our Giving Funds remains an excellent way to help people in need, and we’re actively seeking donors who want to be part of this moment of substantial need and opportunity. Every dollar you give will be put to work, saving and improving lives through the most cost-effective programs our research identifies.

Growing Our Impact

Last year, we raised $415 million and directed $397 million. This new commitment from Coefficient Giving, combined with recent updates from other donors, will make a real difference in the amount of funding we use to help people over the next few years.

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An Update to GiveWell’s Grant Deployment Timelines

(updated on: ) | by GiveWell Staff

GiveWell aims to save and improve lives as cost-effectively as possible. That mission has an urgency, and we put a lot of effort into finding and funding high-impact giving opportunities quickly. But we also want to maximize our impact over time, and have found that high-impact interventions can take years of investment to discover, vet, launch, and scale.

As a result, we’ve begun to deploy funds across a longer time period in order to (a) avoid a scenario where we want to make cost-effective grants but can’t due to lack of funds, (b) aid long-term planning for our research team, and (c) communicate consistent expectations to grantees and potential grantees about our cost-effectiveness threshold.

Specifically, we previously aimed to allocate all funds within the same year they were raised, targeting a year-end balance of zero. Now, we plan to enter each year with sufficient funds to fully cover our grantmaking activities for that year without accounting for new donations.This approach creates greater financial stability, which we think will allow us to plan better and to achieve greater impact over time.

If you donate to our Top Charities Fund (TCF), nothing has changed. We still expect to commit TCF donations in the quarter after they are received. These changes will only apply to our unrestricted and All Grants Fund (AGF).

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Including GiveWell on Your Wedding Registry

| by Chandler Brotak

Planning a wedding is stressful. Questions around who to invite, what to eat, where to take pictures, what kind of music to play—the list goes on and on. But when Lucie and Geoff started planning their big day, at least one element was a no-brainer.

A fundraiser for GiveWell would serve as their wedding registry.

“I think we were pretty aligned since the beginning that we didn’t want to get gifts,” says Lucie. With successful careers and after living together for several years, the couple didn’t feel the need for a traditional wedding registry with household items. Offering a fundraiser instead allowed guests to contribute whatever felt reasonable to them, avoiding the social and financial pressures of buying a registry item.

Lucie and Geoff’s wedding was held in the Czech Republic with a blend of Czech and American guests, and the two cultures celebrate weddings differently—weddings in the US often involve gifts for the couple, while wedding guests in the Czech Republic often bring envelopes of cash instead. “It just seemed better for everyone to have a unified outlet.”

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The hardest part about fundraising for GiveWell

| by Maggie Lloydhauser

May marked my three-year anniversary as a Philanthropy Advisor at GiveWell. It’s a job I adore (as I’ve written about here and here), and I’ve recently been tasked with the exciting process of interviewing candidates for our growing team.

One of the best questions I’ve been asked in this process is: What’s the hardest part about fundraising for GiveWell? The short answer: GiveWell is funding constrained, but we can’t point at a specific opportunity and say, “If you donate now, here’s the impact your donation will actually cause.”

Instead, our answer is fairly abstract, and pretty far from traditional fundraising language. We tell donors that we would spend additional money on opportunities at or above our cost-effectiveness bar (which translates to saving a life for about $5,000), but we’re unable to explain in advance precisely what we will allocate additional funds to. That answer isn’t as compelling as telling someone a vivid story about how their money alone would allow us to fund a great program we’ll otherwise have to decline, but it has the advantage of being completely accurate and true.

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Open Philanthropy’s 2023-2025 funding of $300 million total for GiveWell’s recommendations

| by Isabel Arjmand

This year, Open Philanthropy plans to give $300 million for GiveWell to spend over the next three years. We’re grateful for what this support will enable us to do.

Annualized, this is similar to what Open Philanthropy gave in 2020 and roughly in line with what we projected earlier this year. It’s less than Open Philanthropy gave in 2021 and 2022, and we’ll need strong growth in donations in order to make up the difference. We expect to identify more great funding opportunities than we’ll be able to fund, and your support can fill those cost-effective gaps, helping to save and improve people’s lives.

Below, we share:

  • How this update affects GiveWell’s work
  • More background on Open Philanthropy and GiveWell’s relationship
  • Why Open Philanthropy’s spending is changing
  • The impact donors can have by supporting GiveWell’s recommendations

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How much funding does GiveWell expect to raise through 2025?

| by Isabel Arjmand

We’re optimistic that GiveWell’s funds raised will continue to increase in the long run. Over the next few years, we believe our annual funds raised are more likely to stay relatively constant, due to a decrease in expected funding from our largest donor, Open Philanthropy, offset by an expected increase in funding from our other donors.

In November 2021, we wrote that we were anticipating rapid growth and aiming to influence $1 billion in 2025. Now, our best guess is that we’ll raise between $400 million and $800 million in 2025 (for comparison, we raised around $600 million in 2022). We now think it’s possible but unlikely that we’ll raise close to $1 billion in 2025, and we also think it’s possible but unlikely that our funds raised in 2025 will be substantially lower (e.g. around $300 million) than they were in 2022.

We’re excited about the impact we can have at any of those levels of funding, and we’ll be continuing to direct as much funding as we can raise to the most cost-effective opportunities we can find.

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