Updates on Open Philanthropy’s Effective Giving and Careers program

By Melanie Basnak🔸, James Snowden🔸 @ 2025-03-14T18:22 (+68)

This is a linkpost to https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/updates-on-open-philanthropys-effective-giving-and-careers-program/

The Effective Giving and Careers program^[1] was launched in July 2022 to fund high-impact meta opportunities that help people use their donations and careers to improve human and animal lives. We’re excited to give an update on our progress so far and discuss our priorities for the coming year.

Executive summary

Since its inception, the program has recommended 37 grants, committing $28 million across four sub-strategies:

1. Effective Giving (~71% of funding) – Raising funds for highly effective charities.
2. Talent Development (~13%) – Helping individuals maximize career impact.
3. Incubation (~10%) – Seeding and supporting new effective charities.
4. Research (~6%) – Informing better philanthropic and career decisions.

Key Achievements:

• Effective giving has been the program’s primary focus, expanding fundraising efforts across eight European countries and, more recently, into Asia. Grantees raised ~$430M in 2023-24, with a counterfactual impact of ~$160M equivalent to Open Phil’s last dollar, and a portfolio ROI of ~6x.
• Talent-focused grants are still in early stages but show promise, supporting initiatives targeting doctors, mid-career professionals, and students.
• Incubation funding has helped launch 21 GHD and meta impact-driven charities, several of which have already secured further funding from impact-driven donors.
• The program’s first research grant aims to improve donor decision-making and philanthropic strategy.

Strategic Priorities for 2025:

• Enhancing the Effective Giving Portfolio: Expanding support for promising initiatives, including through a recently launched RFP process.
• Increasing Investment in Talent Initiatives: Given the success of existing grantees, the program is exploring a greater focus on talent, particularly in high-leverage roles like policy.
• Seeding New Efforts: Identifying and supporting promising gaps in the GHW meta space, while leveraging external interest for implementation.

Challenges & Funding Gaps:

• Limited Flexibility for New Grants: ~65% of future funding is expected to go toward renewals, leaving only ~$3.5M annually for new projects. Identified high-impact funding opportunities exceed $10M.
• Few Alternative Funders for Talent Efforts: While effective giving orgs can tap into broader funding sources, talent programs struggle to secure non-EA funding.
• Shifts in the EA Ecosystem: The broader EA movement is increasingly focused on global catastrophic risks, creating some challenges for global health and wellbeing-focused initiatives.

Introduction

The Effective Giving and Careers program launched in July 2022 as a counterpart to the Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building program, with an annual budget of $10 million.^[2]

Since May 2024, the program has been led day-to-day by myself, Melanie Basnak, with oversight from James Snowden.^[3]

We support high-impact meta opportunities in the global health and wellbeing (GHW) space. That is, we support projects that enable people to use their resources (e.g., careers, donations) to improve the lives of humans and animals. As of March 2025, the program has recommended 37 grants, committing $28 million across four sub-strategies.

Our grantmaking and impact to date

Effective giving

• The majority of our grantmaking (~70%) has supported effective giving (EG) organizations, defined as organizations raising funds for highly effective charities.^[5][6]
• We focused on this sub-strategy because:
  • Global health and development organizations are able to cost-effectively absorb substantially more funding than OP or others currently provide.
  • The theory of change (ToC) is relatively straightforward, with strong feedback loops that are relatively easy to assess.
• The main focus of our grantmaking has been to enable fundraising in mainland Europe, which had been relatively neglected. We started supporting effective giving efforts in Germany (through Effektiv Spenden) as our first grant in 2022, and have since expanded to support efforts covering eight countries. Recently, we expanded our efforts to support our first effective giving initiative in Asia.
• Our grantees raised a total of ~$180M in 2023 and ~$250M in 2024. After incorporating quality and counterfactual adjustments,^[7] this comprises ~$160M over two years in counterfactual impact equivalent to Open Phil’s last dollar. Our latest update for each organization suggests a weighted average ROI of ~6x for the portfolio.

Other theories of change

• We’ve made some initial grants to support talent development, but it’s too early to say how they’ve gone. While our initial strategy focused on effective giving, we’ve more recently supported three grantees working on helping people have an impact with their careers. Each of them provides career advice and support during career transition periods. Our focus to date has been split between (i) a targeted approach, with a focus on stronger talent pools (doctors through our grant to High Impact Medicine, mid-career professionals through our grant to High Impact Professionals), and (ii) a broad and more scalable approach, with a heavier focus on students (through our grant to Probably Good).
• Ambitious Impact is our only grantee focused on incubation, and we believe it is very cost-effective. Our grant to Ambitious Impact mostly supports their charity incubation program. In the three-year period covered by our initial grant to them, they launched 25 impact-driven charities, of which 21 were focused on global health and development or meta efforts. Several of these charities are already showing signs of success, with a few having received funding from GiveWell and other impact-driven funders.
• We recently recommended our first research grant. We recently made our first grant in this sub-strategy to Rethink Priorities, which will subsidize their consulting services to other large philanthropies and enable them to pursue an independent research agenda. We think this research could both drive additional impact-focused donations and help active donors find higher-impact opportunities. For the time being, that seems like the clearest ToC for the type of research we might support.

Priorities for 2025

Some areas we’re excited to explore this year are:

1. Improving our effective giving portfolio. We have been positively surprised by the growth of the effective giving ecosystem: new initiatives have launched worldwide, and existing efforts have successfully channeled substantial funds to promising opportunities. We believe that effective giving will continue to be a key strategic area in our portfolio. We recently launched a request for proposals for effective giving initiatives to gather information on opportunities we might be overlooking.
2. Considering spending more of our budget on talent. Currently, we’re relatively more focused on effective giving (71%) than talent (13%) in contrast to the GCR:CB team, which primarily focuses on talent. This is mostly because funding is a bigger bottleneck than talent in the GHW ecosystem relative to the GCR ecosystem.
   • However, when we assessed the three talent initiatives we now support, we were impressed with their track record and potential.
   • We think that helping people access high-leverage positions (such as in policy) could be a particularly promising niche, so we are keen to explore more targeted talent initiatives.
3. Exploring opportunities to actively seed promising efforts. Even though many great organizations already exist in the GHW meta space, we think some gaps remain.

Challenges

• Most of our future funding is tied up in expected renewals. Our program is the largest funder for most of our grantees, leading to a relatively high dependency on our funding. Most grantees would likely need to scale down or close operations entirely without our support. Projections through 2028 suggest that we expect to recommend ~65% of our budget for renewals, leaving an average of $3.5M annually for new projects — many of which could also become recurring grantees. We have identified over $10M of opportunities we believe are high impact, but don’t expect to be able to fund. This leaves some clear funding gaps in the GHW meta space.
  • Other relevant funders are the Meta Charity Funders and the EA Infrastructure Fund. They are more likely to support new initiatives (generally with lower grant amounts and for shorter periods of time), and so represent a good starting point for new efforts that can later apply for more stable funding from us.
  • We believe that effective giving organizations generally find it easier to fundraise from sources other than meta organizations. These sources might include a tipping function, and individual donors. Because of this, we generally cap our support of EG orgs at 50% for more established groups.
  • Talent organizations can get some funding from individual donors (e.g., people who go through their programs), but it seems unlikely that they’d be able to raise significant amounts from non-EA sources.
• EA’s shift toward global catastrophic risks. Over time, the EA community has continued to shift more of its attention toward global catastrophic risks. As a result, some EAs focused on GHW and/or effective giving have expressed frustration at feeling undervalued and/or dealing with reputational effects driven by negative press directed toward the GCR sections of effective altruism. Our strategy so far has been to create spaces within effective altruism dedicated to GHW goals. For example, we supported a well-received annual networking event for leaders of effective giving organizations.

If you are another funder interested in supporting the GHW meta space and would like help deciding which efforts to support, feel free to reach out to me at melanie.basnak@openphilanthropy.org.

1. ^{^}

   Formerly called Effective Altruism (Global Health and Wellbeing).

2. ^{^}

   At the end of last year we received additional funds for 2025 through an internal top-up process, so our budget exceeds $10 million this year, but it’s unclear if that will be true in the future.

3. ^{^}

   James was originally the Program Officer for this program and now oversees this program, Global Public Health Policy, Global Aid Policy, and LMIC growth.

4. ^{^}

   Previously known as Charity Entrepreneurship.

5. ^{^}

   We recognize that there is some subjectivity in the determination of which charities are effective and that different actors use different methods to determine this, and come up with the different recommendations as a result. An example of a charity we would consider effective in the global health and development space is a GiveWell Top Charity.

6. ^{^}

   The different effective giving organizations we support recommend different charities, and direct different percentages to charities in various cause areas. That being said, ~60% of the money funneled by our grantees goes to global health and development organizations, with GiveWell Top Charities receiving most of that.

7. ^{^}

   We apply adjustments for (1) quality of recipient: we benchmark 100% to a GiveWell Top Charity and adjust downwards from there based on where donations are directed and (2) counterfactuality: we attribute credit to fundraising organizations based on how likely their donors would otherwise have been to donate to high-impact charities. This assessment is based on (i) surveys of donors, (ii) case studies of large donations, and (iii) an assessment of whether the organization is reaching populations who would otherwise have been unaware of effective giving.