Effective Altruism Funds is a platform where you can donate to expert-led philanthropic ‘funds’ to maximise the effectiveness of your charitable donations.
As an individual donor, it’s often very difficult to know if your charitable donations will have an impact. It’s very hard to do thorough investigations of individual charitable projects. It’s also hard to know whether the charities you want to support are able to usefully deploy extra funding, or whether giving them more money would be subject to diminishing returns.
Effective Altruism Funds (or EA Funds for short) aims to solve these problems. We engage expert-led teams of subject-matter experts, who look for the highest-impact opportunities to do good. Our grant management teams:
- Have grantmaking experience in relevant fields. Grantmakers can make informed comparisons between grant opportunities and choose the ones they believe are the best.
- Take counterfactual considerations, marginal impact, and room for more funding into account. Grantmakers don’t just grant to projects that seem good in the abstract. Instead, they try to take into account the actions of other funders, and the amount of additional money a project could use. Read more about our grantmaking approach.
- Are a single desk for emerging projects. By having a single place where many projects can apply, potential grant recipients only have to deal with a single point of contact, rather than fundraising from individual donors.
- Enable lower fundraising overheads for charities. Charities can burn a lot of time fundraising. Instead of fundraising from many individual donors, charities can make a single application for funding.
- Are connected to other grantmakers working on effective giving. By coordinating with other funders, our grantmakers can share knowledge, avoid duplication of effort, and ensure that funding gaps across our cause areas are filled appropriately.
EA Funds focuses on areas where there is a large problem to solve, and which are currently under-invested in. The current Funds focus on global health and development, animal welfare, the long-term future, and supporting the work of the effective altruism community.
Effective Altruism Funds is part of the wider effective altruism community, a community of people using reason and evidence to do the most good they can with their limited resources. Grantmakers use principles of effective altruism when making grant decisions. You can learn more about effective altruism at EffectiveAltruism.org.
Effective Altruism Funds aims to make grants that outperform traditional charitable offerings in expectation. This means that some grants will trade off a higher risk of failure for higher expected returns. Before donating through EA Funds, you should understand the risks involved. For more information, please read about how we think about risk.
You can use this dashboard to view statistics on historical giving to each of the Funds.