Strategies for promoting giving pledges

By Luke Moore 🔸, Nina Friedrich🔸, Thomas Moispointner, Romain Barbe🔸, Ana Barreiro @ 2025-09-10T12:49 (+34)

Introduction

Giving What We Can (GWWC) has partnered with a variety of organisations, both within and outside of the EA ecosystem, to promote the 🔸10% Pledge and 🔹Trial Pledge in ways tailored to their audiences. These partnerships provide new avenues for people to learn about and take giving pledges, helping to direct more funds toward highly impactful opportunities.

If you’re interested in exploring a partnership with GWWC, reach out to  lucas.moore@givingwhatwecan.org (GWWC's Partnerships Manager).

Coming out of the Effective Giving Summit in June (where Nina Friedrich from HIP led a session on promoting giving pledges) we wanted to share some of our key takeaways, as well as learnings from partners that have successfully driven a high volume of pledges. Our hope is that others can adapt and build on these strategies in their own work.

1. Meeting 1-1 with your community (example: Mieux Donner)

Mieux Donner is a fundraising organisation dedicated to helping people in France and French-speaking Switzerland donate as effectively as possible. While we don’t primarily focus on securing pledges, personally reaching out to our most engaged supporters (notably members of the EA France community) and to people in our networks has driven a remarkable number of pledges. Since we launched the Mieux Donner Pledge Club in July 2024, over 20 individuals have signed a giving pledge through our Pledge Club - including 13 🔸10% Pledges.

Giving What We Can estimates that by inspiring these pledges our work has generated roughly $140,000 in counterfactual high-impact donations (that’s more than 2x our operating costs for the year!).

Below are key takeaways you can apply to generate pledges within your own community or audience.

When cold reaching out, personalise your ask

Leverage in-person events

  1. At EA (or other) retreats or conferences, check which attendees haven’t yet made a pledge.
  2. Ask for a 1-1 with them.
  3. Prioritise who to speak to by who is most likely to pledge (corporate worker > EA job > student).

Prepare for the conversation (optional)

Review Giving What We Can’s guidance on talking about effective giving and pledging.

2. Cohort-based programs (example: High Impact Professionals)

Overview of our pledge drive

High Impact Professionals (HIP) supports experienced professionals in pivoting their careers to high impact work. During our 6-week Impact Accelerator Program (IAP), participants explore practical ways to use their skills, money, and networks to increase their positive impact. While pledging is not the core focus of the IAP, it has become a meaningful action step for many. Since launching the HIP Pledge Club in July 2024, over 47 participants have taken a giving pledge through the IAP - including 15 🔸10% Pledges. On average, this means over 20% of participants taking a new giving pledge.

We also tested a lower-touch version through our Career Impact Track (CIT) - a self-guided adaptation of the IAP - and saw encouraging results: 9 new pledges, including 2 new 🔸10% Pledges, from a broad participant base. This suggests that even lightweight community nudges can meaningfully increase giving commitments.

In total we’ve been able to inspire 70 people to take giving pledge - including 21 🔸10% Pledges

Strategies we use to inspire pledges

HIP’s approach is built around Community, Celebration, and Competition, combining the global, action-oriented spirit of the IAP with light-touch behavioural design:

In Week 2 of the IAP, participants are introduced to the HIP Pledge Club via workbook readings, email reminders, and a structured Slack discussion thread. The thread includes space for those who’ve pledged to share their motivations and for others to reflect on what might encourage them to pledge.

New pledgers are invited to announce their pledge in the Slack community and set a custom pledge status (🔸10% Pledger or 🔹Trial Pledger). We track total pledges across the cohort and highlight these regularly to celebrate milestones and help pledgers feel part of a shared movement and get inspired by the actions of others.

A pledge goal is set at the start of Week 2 at around 10% new pledges. Once it’s hit, the new challenge becomes beating the all-time record from previous cohorts. This keeps the framing communal rather than personal - no one is singled out - while providing a sense of shared momentum. Anecdotally, some pledgers have cited this dynamic as a motivator.

How we build trust and motivation to pledge among our participants

Trust is central to the IAP’s design. Our weekly cohort sessions are structured around Mastermind Sessions, where participants share their biggest career-related uncertainties and blockers. For this we require a high trust level, so that participants can share their actual blockers (which can be very personal), rather than simply discussing some intellectually stimulating topic that doesn’t allow them to take further action towards their high-impact career. To enable this:

This environment makes it easier to share real motivations, explore doubts, and commit to bold actions like pledging.

You can apply these learnings in different organisations/settings

While the IAP is relatively high-touch compared to other part-time programs, there seems to be potential for this to be applied in lower-touch settings. In our recent pilot of the Career Impact Track (CIT) - a self-guided version of the IAP - pledge promotion was much lighter-touch. Participants had access to the same workbook content, optional buddy matching, and end-of-program feedback. Pledges were introduced in Week 2 through readings and the weekly CIT email.

This is a far less hands-on approach - no cohort discussions, no 1:1 advising - and still showed promising results: the CIT pilot resulted in 11 new giving pledges, including 2 new 🔸10% Pledges. While the percentage of new pledges was significantly lower (ca 3%), these early results suggest that a focus on community and visibility can be enough to inspire significant giving commitments. For other organisations running group-based or self-paced programs, incorporating lightweight pledge prompts may be a high-leverage addition.

Key lessons

Framing pledging as a community norm rather than a personal obligation creates motivation without pressure on the individual. People often feel more inspired to join something collective than pushed into individual action.

Public acknowledgements - like pledge announcements, Slack statuses, shout-outs, and running tallies - help reinforce social proof and make pledging feel meaningful and valued.

Setting a cohort-wide goal, then trying to beat the record from previous rounds, adds light-hearted momentum and motivates some participants who might not otherwise pledge.

Rarely does a single prompt cause a pledge - instead, it's the layering of multiple small touchpoints (reading material, peer examples, reflection points, visible milestones) that collectively drive action.

Even in less interactive formats like the Career Impact Track, meaningful pledge outcomes can be achieved through clear messaging, reflective prompts, and timely visibility and reflection points.

3. Digital ad campaigns (example: Animal Advocacy Careers)

Animal Advocacy Careers (AAC) helps animal advocates find and transition into meaningful opportunities that make the world better for animals. Since launching the AAC Pledge Club in May 2024, over 60 people have taken a giving pledge as a result of our Giving for Animals initiative - including 23 🔸10% Pledges.

We launched a Meta ads campaign to promote the Giving for Animals initiative. Our primary goal was to encourage animal advocates to take the 🔸10% pledge (or the 🔹Trial pledge), as part of our partnership with Giving What We Can.

In this full write-up, we share what we learned in our advertising efforts, so other organisations can build on our insights and test the most promising strategies in their own campaigns. These insights apply not just to driving pledges or donations, but to encouraging any meaningful action for animals. In brief, here are our main takeaways:

Meta ads

On Meta ads, we ran two core campaigns: 

  1. Landing page campaign: One featured straightforward ads linking directly to a landing page about the 🔸10% Pledge, inviting users to commit a portion of their income to animal advocacy.
  2. Quiz campaign: The second used an interactive quiz format, guiding users through a short set of questions before introducing the pledge as a next step. Both aimed to drive meaningful action for animals, but through different levels of engagement.

Here are the links we were sending users to:

Key learnings

If you’re working on digital ads or campaign strategy and want to exchange ideas—or if you have feedback or suggestions for things we could test—I’d love to hear from you. Just drop me a message at ana@animaladvocacycareers.org. 

4. Passive pledge generation (example: Effektiv Spenden)

Effektiv Spenden is a multinational effective giving organization focused on the German-speaking countries (Germany, Switzerland, and Austria). Since launching the Effektiv Spenden Pledge Club in June 2024, more than 50 people have taken a giving pledge - including 33 🔸10% Pledges.

The 🔸10% Pledge was added to our website as an additional option in our website’s main navigation, alongside donation vouchers, fundraisers, legacy gifts, and DAFs.

The launch was supported by:

However, strategically pledges are not our focus. After our initial communications push, we haven’t done much to actively promote pledging:

While our pledge numbers are strong, they remain small relative to Effektiv Spenden’s overall scale (2024: €23M raised from 12,000 donors; 171,000 active website users; 10,000 newsletter subscribers). Still, our reach means that even a largely passive approach can generate significant impact.

Interested in a Pledge Partnership?

We’re keen to form partnerships with organisations that share GWWC’s vision of a world without preventable suffering or existential risk, where everyone is able to flourish, and which would like to actively contribute towards this vision by making giving effectively and significantly a norm among those who can.

The strategies we’ve shared so far are just the beginning. We’re actively exploring what works when it comes to driving pledges through partnerships. If you think you could implement any of these tried-and-tested approaches, we’d love to hear from you:

However, we’re especially excited to collaborate with organisations that want to test new approaches for driving pledges in their own context. By trying something totally new you can help grow our list of successful strategies and pave the way for future partners to drive even more pledges. 

We believe these partnerships should represent a serious commitment from both sides, but this doesn’t necessarily imply a large time commitment from either side. We expect most partnerships will start with running some small experiments, picking low-hanging fruit, and building out from there.

If you’re interested, reach out to lucas.moore@givingwhatwecan.org.

What our partners say

High Impact Professionals testimonial:

We’ve found partnering with GWWC to be a simple, high-leverage way to track and grow pledge engagement through our programs. Key benefits include:

If you’re interested to learn more about the Pledge Partnership, feel free to reach out to me at nina@highimpactprofessionals.org.