Reflecting on One Year of Mieux Donner: Launching the French Effective Giving Initiative

By Romain Barbe🔸, Jennifer Stretton 🔸️ @ 2025-07-13T15:19 (+99)

As we mark one year since the launch of Mieux Donner, we wanted to share some reflections on our journey and our ongoing efforts to promote effective giving in France. Mieux Donner was founded through the Effective Incubation Programme by Ambitious Impact and Giving What We Can.

TLDR 

• Prioritisation is important. And when the path forward is unclear, trying a lot of different potential priorities with high productivity leads to better results than analysis paralysis.
• Ask yourself what the purpose of your organisation is. If you are a mainly marketing/communication org, hire people from this sector (not engineers) and don’t be afraid to hire outside of EA.
• Effective altruism ideas are less controversial than we imagined and affiliation has created no (or very little) push back
• Hiring early has helped us move fast and is a good idea when you have a clear process and a lot of quality applicants

Summary of our progress and activities in year 1

In January 2025, we set a new strategy with time allocation for our different activities. We set one clear goal - 1M€ in donations in 2025. To achieve this goal we decided:

Our primary focus for 2025 is to grow our audience. We will experiment with a variety of projects to determine the most effective ways to grow our audience.

Our core activities in 2025 will focus on high-impact fundraising and outreach efforts. The strategies where we plan to spend the most time are :

• SEO content (most important)
• UX Optimization of the website
• Social Media ; Peer to Peer fundraising ; Leveraging our existing network

The graphic below shows how we plan to spend our marketing time:

We are also following partnership opportunities and advising a few high net worth individuals who reached out to us and who will donate by the end of the year.

Results: one year of Mieux Donner

On our initial funding proposal in June 2024, we wrote down where we wanted to be in one year. Let’s see how we fared:

Meta Goals

• Spending: We estimated our budget at 135k$ for the first year →  we spent only 59k$

Although we received less funding than requested and the start of our payments was delayed by two months, we were able to launch at speed.  Our expenses were significantly lower than anticipated. We kept costs low in part because one of our co-founders, Jennifer, reduced her salary and continued working as a mountain guide. Since March, she has been working for Mieux Donner on a voluntary basis. Our salaried team now consists of two full time staff (Romain and a Director of Communications) and we also hired two paid interns between January and July. 

• Internal fundraising: Secure money for year 2 →  We received funding for an extra year of operation.

Fundraising Goals

• Donation Goal: Ambitious goal: 1M€ in donations. Minimum goal: 150k€ → We reached 176k€, far from our ambitious goal
• Numbers of donors: Ambitious goal: 700. Minimum goal: 150 → We reached 200 individual donors
• Counterfactual: We estimated the counterfactual factor, the part of donations received that have happened as a result of our work, at 0.5 → Now, our best guess is 0.64

So for every 100€ collected, we estimate that 36€ would have happened even without the existence of Mieux Donner and that 64€ are the results of our work (aka counterfactual).

• Giving multiplier: We aimed to raise 4.07 times more counterfactual donations than our spending, with a minimum of 1 time as much → We reached 1.99.

Reflections on why our first year results were so low compared to our goals

We think we were overly optimistic about the amount of money we would raise in our first year for several reasons:

• Our goals were based on estimates from Ambitious Impact, which benchmarked against existing effective giving initiatives and assumed a faster growth trajectory due to incubation support. Firstly, we believe these projections may have overestimated our potential. Countries like Germany and the Netherlands have stronger cultures of charitable giving and greater alignment with effective altruism, which likely skewed the estimates when applied to the French context. Secondly, even though our participation in the incubator program gave us a significant head start, building an audience takes time, especially in a country where the effective altruism community is still small.
• We only recently discovered that no Effective Giving Initiative has reached €1 million in donations before their second giving season. In fact, only two initiatives reached that milestone by their second season. We've only had one giving season so far.
• We launched Mieux Donner in July, giving us only a few months to prepare for our first giving season. Since around 40% of donations typically come in December, our limited time and small audience meant we couldn’t fully capitalise on the peak giving period. As a result, much of the energy and resources we’re investing now are expected to bear fruit at the end of this year, during the 2025 giving season.

In short, we believe that it has been a good first year for Mieux Donner but we're still far from reaching our ambitious initial goals—we now believe those goals were overly optimistic. Other newly incubated effective giving initiatives have also revised their targets after gaining more on-the-ground experience.

It’s easy to shift the bar for impact, and while we aim to avoid that, we believe there are valid reasons to reassess our goals. They were set based on optimistic models that didn’t fully account for the local context or the realities of an early-stage initiative, combined with pressure to aim high - especially within incubation and funding environments.

Proxy of impact/future impact

Progress and Key Goals

• Ambassadors: Create a list of 20 ambassadors who published content or organised events on our behalf
  →  We did not create a formal list, but we are in regular contact with over 15 ambassadors who have spoken about us publicly or helped organise events.
• French Events: Organise events for at least 60 different people
  →  Over 100 people have been introduced to effective giving ideas through conferences and events held in France.
• English Events: Organise events for at least 60 different people
  → More than 120 people have been introduced to effective giving through private events, an open gala dinner, and webinars.
• SEO / Google Rankings: Rank first on Google for key terms (e.g., “Mieux Donner”, “meilleures associations en France en 202X”, “associations auxquelles donner”)
  →  This goal wasn’t clearly defined, but we are ranking in top positions for many relevant search terms and are currently refining our SEO strategy and keyword targets.
• Website Traffic: Reach 10,000 monthly unique visitors 
  →  Achieved 14,000 monthly unique visitors.
• Media Coverage: Earned media publications
  →  This was not a clearly defined goal, but we’ve been featured in several English and French online publications, including some English-language magazine articles.
• Social Media Growth: Gain 1,000 followers on LinkedIn, 500 on Facebook
  → Mieux Donner’s LinkedIn has 830 followers, while co-founder Romain’s personal account surpassed 1,000. In hindsight, we underestimated the importance of personal accounts and overestimated the relevance of Facebook for our audience.
• Social Media Reach: Top 5 posts to reach a combined 500,000 impressions
  →  One post reached 120,000 impressions, while the others remained below 20,000.
• Email Subscribers: Reach 1,000 email subscribers
  →  Currently at 489 subscribers.

Some data

€175,823 directed to high impact charities, you can check the live number on our impact page.

€112,527 estimated counterfactual to high impact charities

We separated alternative proteins from both climate and animal causes because they apply to both. The Good Food Institute is the only charity that allows tax reductions in both areas, which explains the proportion of donations going to this charity.

Our donation form includes the question "Where did you hear about us?" as part of the payment process. These are the results of this survey, along with corrections based on what we know about the donors, from August 2024 to the end of June 2025, from a sample of 203 donors. We lean toward attributing "EA", which just means have been inspired by EA ideas or EA actors. For donors whose affiliation was unclear, we cross-checked their names against EA France Slack and LinkedIn to determine if they were associated with EA, and updated their information accordingly. Even when people mentioned word of mouth, but with an EA-affiliated individual, we classified them under EA.

Learnings

Strategy/General

• It’s not always easy to know what works: An effective giving initiative is relatively straightforward in terms of evaluating overall impact, but assessing the impact of each individual action is challenging. Many of the things we do don’t show immediate results. Typically, people need multiple touchpoints before donating, so we need to take many actions and be present across different channels. New donations often arise from people who are unclear about what they’ve heard, and even what motivates them to talk about us to others is a complex process.
  • We also need to accept that, on many topics, we don’t have all the answers and may not know if something will have value. In these cases, it’s better to take action quickly and test things. For example, setting up Google Ads doesn’t need endless discussion — just get it done quickly, measure the results, and potentially iterate (in our case google ads didn’t work out).
• Just because it’s difficult, it doesn’t mean it can’t be done: We should resist the idea that things are too difficult or time-consuming and focus on getting things done. The French fiscal system has posed real challenges and is often cited as a reason not to launch here—another organisation faced similar issues that limited their communications. Despite this, we’ve made progress by fundraising for a few charities that offer tax deductions, allowing us to prioritise building an audience. Tax eligibility remains a work in progress—for example, donors can either give to one charity and receive a single tax receipt, or to multiple charities, each issuing their own. While not ideal, we don’t see this as a major barrier to growth.
• When in doubt, try a weighted factor model: Doing a small weighted factor model around different choices (e.g., which kind of event we decide to invest time), takes us 1 hour and allows us to advance under non-clarity. We are doing one each month on average.
• When you can test, do a test: For example, it was pretty easy to do a small test (with Prolific) about which headline to use on our homepage so that people could understand at a glance what we were doing and be motivated to donate (the winner was: Put impact at the heart of your giving). 
• AI is time saving: AI, particularly large language models (LLM), can be incredibly helpful for getting started on projects, such as drafting organisational statutes or creating contract templates. We’ve tested tools like Claude Code for some projects, and they’ve provided a great return on investment.
• Be lean: You can build a lot of lean stuff that has high value for the user. For example, we thought that it would be difficult to send personalized impact reports for people’s donations but found a very lean method to automate this.

Marketing

• Be prepared for disappointing results and keep moving forward: For example, launching a campaign and sharing it with friends and family and receiving no donations. It’s tough when many people say, “I will definitely donate,” but then don’t follow through and stop responding. This is something you should expect. The same disappointment applies when reaching out to journalists. Sometimes they solicit you and you invest time writing detailed analyses or answering questions, only to receive no response. But you just need to keep moving forward and continue putting in the work.
• Meet your audience where they are and invest in SEO: SEO shows promise, and it’s clear that not many EA organisations have focused on it yet, especially for appearing on Google (even for AI-related research now). To succeed here, you need to use specific SEO tools to identify relevant terms and other strategies to optimise your content for better ranking. Backlinks are also crucial.
• Social media hasn’t worked for us yet: Social media, even with regular posting, didn’t bring direct results, and only a very low percentage of people took direct action. In our view, social media serves more as a tool for visibility and creating a point of contact, rather than being a direct conversion tool for donations (although as mentioned above, it’s not always easy to know what works, and which was the final touch point that led to a donation).

Ecosystem

• Our fears of affiliation with EA were unfounded: At the beginning, we considered not displaying any effective altruism affiliation on our website, based on a few discussions. Over the months, we revisited this decision and made more direct links to EA, and we’ve received very little pushback for it. In France, most people are unfamiliar with EA except for a few who encountered it 5 to 10 years ago and are now glad to donate via Mieux Donner. As a result, we’ve had very little pushback regarding effective altruism.
• Most of our donations came from outside the EA community: On the other hand, we expected to receive more donations from the effective altruism community. However, we didn’t see a significant percentage of donations from active members or people on the EA Slack. This community has been incredibly useful as ambassadors, spreading the word and helping to move things forward. But they are not wealthy and when they do donate, it’s mostly to smaller animal welfare organisations or AI organisations in France, which aren’t on our platform. In contrast, much larger portions of our donations came from people less engaged with effective altruism—people who might have read Peter Singer years ago, or discovered EA ideas but never joined the community.
• Becoming a pledge partner has been a significant part of our success: 14 people have taking the 10% pledge through Mieux Donner, contributing to our impact. This was mainly people from the EA community. By the way, not only effective giving initiatives can be pledge partners, and we encourage more organisations to reach out to Giving What We Can if they’re interested in becoming partners.
• Helping people to speak about their donations and the pledges have yielded strong results: Some people are natural advocates for effective giving (for example Jen’s massage therapist managed to fill 20 spaces at our effective climate action event), whereas other people need a push and encouragement. At the end of the year, we organised a session about posting online about your donations, and this was a very good use of our time. We believe it’s very helpful in making effective giving the norm, as it gives donors the confidence to speak about it.
• Being collaborative is a way to increase your organisation's impact further: We believe it’s very valuable to share the experiences and results of our projects. It takes very little time to share with other effective giving initiatives or effective altruism-aligned organisations. For example, we’ve shared social media experiments or successful articles, and even formalised and shared our hiring process. At Mieux Donner, we prioritise overall impact, so we frequently assess how we can help the ecosystem and make an effort to share our insights with others. This is likely a key part of impact. First, by showcasing what’s been useful (and also our failures). It’s also about inspiring more effective giving initiatives to share their work, successes, and failures.

Team 

• Don’t be afraid to hire outside of EA, especially to get the skills you need: An Effective Giving Initiative is primarily a communication and marketing project. Therefore, the key skills we need are in marketing and communication. We decided to hire a Director of Communications, and received around 70 high-quality applications (almost none of the candidates knew about EA). By the end of the process, the candidates were very well aligned with our goals and values. We are very happy that our top candidate joined the team. In fact, almost all EA organisations need expertise in communication and marketing, and we believe they should hire professionals from these fields.
• Hiring interns has also been a great decision: We implemented a process similar to the leaner charity entrepreneurship hiring model and were prepared to not hire if the right candidates didn’t come along. Two interns passed our standards and have brought a lot of value to the team.
• Highly skilled volunteers are worth their weight in gold: We had very little success with generalist volunteers, especially people that are ready to give a few days of their time that are open to write, translate, or proofread. But we had immense value from pro-bono specialists like our amazing SEO pro-bono consultant, Josh Willet, Jaspreet Singh for UX and Cyrill Delfgou who is helping us with our donation platform. 

Others

• Companies have been a very effective way to raise money: Not from large institutional companies, but from founders or entrepreneurs who are able to donate through their businesses. In fact, it’s similar to outreach to individuals.
• Climate change is a cause area that makes it easy to reach a wider audience and introduce people to effective giving ideas: Effective Climate Action is an easy ask, and an easy concept to understand. Jennifer, our co-founder and a mountain guide, has a network full of companies that are already donating 1% for the climate, and we are now shifting those donations towards effective climate organisations. It’s a straightforward call, though results are typically slower to materialise from companies than from individual donors as there are more hoops to jump through. 
• We were surprised how little people in France knew about effectiveness: One of the biggest surprises was the French measuring “impact” sector and how little people in France knew about effectiveness or cost-effectiveness. At major charity and foundation fairs, no one has ever heard of organisations like GiveWell or GivingGreen. Most people aren’t even familiar with the concept of cost-effectiveness, let alone counterfactual impact. We struggled to gain traction when speaking with existing foundations and charities about effectiveness.
• We have started to focus more on French foreign aid and its effectiveness. We’ve found that many people are willing to listen to what we’re promoting. Although it still represents a small percentage of our time, it may turn out that our biggest impact has been on helping French foreign aid become more effective.
• Our outreach in Switzerland has not yielded results: We hoped to see good results in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Effektiv Spenden helped us prepare with their platform, but we received barely any donations from Switzerland. We did some outreach and participated in one event, but we had no natural traction there.

To conclude

We launched a birthday fundraising campaign to celebrate our first year. If you know any French speakers, please encourage them to speak about us and share our mission. You can also invite them to join the newsletter.

Whatever your cause, more donations can help advance it. We encourage you to consider donating, or even taking the 10% pledge, and becoming an advocate for effective giving within your country. You can also invite your friends or company to discuss donations with you. By doing so, you will help the movement grow. If we want significant social change to occur, we must be among the first to act and lead the way.

We would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to everyone who has helped Mieux Donner grow and learn. The Effective Giving Initiative ecosystem has been tremendously helpful in guiding us. The team at Giving What We Can and the Effective Giving Nationals have already laid the groundwork by sharing their experiences and helping us regularly. We are also grateful for the 2024 effective giving cohort we meet weekly, who face the same challenges and keep us motivated. We also want to express our deep appreciation for those who have supported our operational costs and those who have contributed to the effective charities we champion. And a special thanks to our pro-bono volunteers, and a big thank you to everyone who talks about Mieux Donner — your support is a key part of our success.

Romain, Jen and Mieux Donner Team