Going Bigger: How We're Scaling Effective Giving & Careers in 2026

By Melanie Basnak🔸, Kearney Capuano 🔸 @ 2026-03-16T19:36 (+109)

This is a linkpost to https://coefficientgiving.org/research/going-bigger-how-were-scaling-effective-giving-careers-in-2026/

Overview

The mission of the Effective Giving & Careers fund at Coefficient Giving is to support people to have a greater positive impact through their donations and careers.

We launched the program in 2022. Since then, we’ve made over 60 grants totaling >$30m across four main areas:

Our early results have been encouraging. In the effective giving area alone, organizations we support have collectively moved hundreds of millions of dollars to cost-effective charities.

Over the past year, we’ve updated toward a broader view of impact. In addition to direct ROI, we’ve seen how this ecosystem can contribute to larger wins by influencing major funders, strengthening policy relationships, incubating organizations that later secure large-scale funding, and building a talent pipeline for high-impact work.

These wins have made us more ambitious about what this program could become.

2025 highlights

We grew our Effective Giving portfolio by running our first Request for Proposals (RFP) for Effective Giving organizations. Following that process, we funded 10 organizations. Based on 2025 reported data, these 10 grantees collectively moved ~$14m. After incorporating quality and counterfactuality adjustments, we obtained a weighted average ROI of ~5x for the portfolio. Most grantees are meeting or exceeding both our bar and original forecasts. Overall, the RFP appears to have been a success: it surfaced high-performing opportunities, maintained portfolio-level ROI well above our bar, and helped us determine which grants warranted renewable support. We expect to repeat and refine this model.

More generally, our full effective giving portfolio is strong, having moved ~$300m in 2025, at an average weighted ROI of ~5–6x.

On the incubation side, our main incubation grantee, Ambitious Impact, launched eight new global health and development charities in 2025. Additionally, several of their relatively early stage organizations (2–3 years old) have already gone on to receive funding from leading evaluators, a promising signal for the quality of the pipeline.

On the careers side, our talent grantees had a strong year. Collectively, they exceeded expectations across key metrics, including career changes, career plan changes, and even 10% pledge acquisition. We also meaningfully expanded our work in two new talent niches:

Our strategy for 2026

Due to top-ups and rollover funds, we have nearly 3x as much funding available in 2026 as in prior years. We also have more capacity, because Kearney Capuano joined the team earlier this year! This creates a meaningful opportunity — and responsibility — to scale what’s working and experiment more deliberately.

At a high level, we plan to scale the program in the following ways:

1. Scale up existing high-performing grantees

Many of the organizations we fund are lean. Some are moving large amounts of money or helping to place significant talent with very small teams.

We’re excited to:

We think that even our most mature grantees haven't hit a ceiling. While marginal returns on additional dollars may be lower than in early stages, the absolute gains from investing more in these proven models remain large, and we believe these organizations can continue performing well above our ROI bar even as they scale.

2. Run 2–4 focused RFPs

In 2025, we ran our first Effective Giving RFP. We received ~40 applications and ultimately recommended 11 grants. It helped us:

As mentioned above, the initial update suggests promising results.

In 2026, we expect to run 2–4 targeted RFPs, including RFPs focused on:

3. Seed new efforts

To date, much of our grantmaking has supported existing opportunities. However, we think there are significant opportunities for new organizations to fill gaps in the ecosystem. Some examples of ideas we’re excited to explore:

Effective Giving

Effective Careers

4. Support the ecosystem in additional ways

We see an important role for ourselves beyond individual grants, acting as a coordinator and capacity builder for the broader ecosystem. Some things we've started and want to expand:

Effective Giving Ecosystem

Effective Careers Ecosystem

We also want to recommend more grants to organizations providing shared services across the ecosystem. Our main grant in this category is to Good Impressions, which provides growth and marketing support to a range of aligned organizations. We see real demand for more of this kind of external support and plan to fund additional providers.

Why fund a service provider rather than giving more money directly to organizations and letting them purchase services themselves? In an ideal world, organizations would identify and pay for the external support they need. In practice, some organizations may not recognize the value of certain services until they've experienced them. Furthermore, even when organizations are open to it, the uncertainty of whether a service will pay off can make them reluctant to spend scarce operational funds on it, especially for very lean orgs. Providing pro bono support upfront can overcome both barriers, and might lead organizations to invest in these services independently once they've seen the results. An added benefit of funding providers like Good Impressions directly is that they support a broader range of aligned organizations beyond our direct grantees, extending the reach of our support.

We do not expect to pursue all of these. But with more funding and capacity, we want to deliberately test the most promising of these ideas rather than remain overly conservative.

A note on incubation and research

Beyond the four areas above, we want to briefly address where incubation and research fit into our 2026 plans.

On incubation, we remain enthusiastic supporters of this space and currently fund two incubation-focused efforts, the largest of which is Ambitious Impact. That said, we don't plan to run dedicated RFPs here. The landscape of credible incubation organizations is considerably smaller than in other areas, and we think the bar for building a successful incubator is high enough that broad open calls are unlikely to surface strong new opportunities. We are, however, actively exploring ideas at the frontier, including the possibility of launching an incubator focused on specific geographies of interest, such as India.

On research, we expect to fund it primarily where it directly supports our other work — for example, research that strengthens the M&E practices of our grantees across both effective giving and careers. We have deliberately deprioritized a broader strategic focus on cause prioritization research so far. Our reasoning is that the theory of change for research of this kind is harder to evaluate, the bar for quality is very high, and we need to be selective given capacity constraints. This is not a permanent position; we are open to revisiting it in the medium to long term.

Key uncertainties

As we scale, there are some important questions we're still working through:

We don’t have final answers to these yet. We expect 2026 to involve deliberate exploration alongside continued support of high-performing organizations.

What success could look like in 3–5 years

Looking ahead, we think this ecosystem has the potential to grow substantially in both scale and sophistication. With increased resources and a more coordinated field, we believe the next 3–5 years could mark a real inflection point, in terms of how much funding flows to cost-effective causes, how many people find their way into high-impact careers, and how mainstream effective giving becomes. Here's what an exciting version of that future could look like:

We don’t expect to achieve all of these. But with increased resources, we believe we can meaningfully increase the program’s ambition.

We want your feedback

We're publishing this update because we'd like outside input. We're especially interested in:

You can comment publicly or fill out this form. Please note that this is not a call for proposals. If you'd like to flag a specific organization (including one you're involved with), you're welcome to mention it briefly in the form, but we won't be using responses to assess funding applications. If you're interested in applying for funding, the best route is through one of our upcoming RFPs, which will be posted on our fund page and announced in our newsletter.

We read all comments and feedback carefully and will take them into account as we refine our strategy. However, given the volume of responses we expect, we may not be able to reply to most comments directly. Even if we don’t respond, please know that your input has been heard. 

NickLaing @ 2026-03-17T19:04 (+11)

I'm surprised by how much I like this, given my natural bent towards "just find organisations doing direct work". Effective giving, talent and charity incubation are just such important areas it makes a lot of sense to me to support the highest quality of these.

Kestrel🔸 @ 2026-03-16T20:04 (+11)

Hello! It's amazing that your funding allocation to these areas has gone up so much. Let's hope it leads to good things in future!

Here's my question:

I know that when you fund more mature effective giving organisations, you often limit yourselves to 50% or so of their operating costs in a hope to encourage funding diversification and ongoing sustainability of the effective giving field. This means an organisation (like e.g. Giving What We Can) can have both a really strong giving multiplier and a genuine operating costs funding gap.

This is in strong contrast to the average EA intuition developed by observing other areas, where "funding gap" is often thought of as "below the funding bar", with a certain negative reputation attached to it. I've had multiple conversations with people in EA who believe that if CoGi hasn't fully funded an effective giving organisation, its marginal giving multiplier must be close to 1x (that is, low). It seems that this rather widespread belief is hurting your aims of encouraging funding diversification.

Are you planning to publish summaries of at least some effective giving organisations you partially fund, confirming that you both estimate them to have a high marginal giving multiplier and also a genuine further funding gap? It would help my attempts to encourage people who give effectively and want to maximise their impact to direct more of their donations to the operating costs of effective giving organisations, if I had something official-looking to point to.

Melanie Basnak🔸 @ 2026-03-18T15:17 (+9)

Thanks for the question!

You're right that we often cap our funding at a share of an organization's budget, and that this is a deliberate choice aimed at encouraging funding diversification and long-term sustainability. That said, if we're funding an organization, even below its full budget, you can assume we believe they are above our bar at their full projected budget. We use their full projected expenses when estimating the giving multiplier, so a partial grant from us is not a signal that we think the marginal dollar is low-value.

We have a policy of not publishing our individual grantee assessments. However, we've discussed specific grantees with interested donors many times and are always happy to do so. If you know people who are considering donating to effective giving organizations and would find it helpful to hear our perspective, please don't hesitate to connect them with us!

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2026-03-18T17:29 (+2)

Hi Kestrel and Melanie. Thanks for the relevant discussion.

Melanie, could you share your current bar in terms of the multiplier affecting the total expenses of grantees? You say this multiplier for 2025 was "~5–6x", but your bar is lower because the cost-effectiveness of your grants has to be above the bar, and because you are expanding your funding?

That said, if we're funding an organization, even below its full budget, you can assume we believe they are above our bar at their full projected budget. We use their full projected expenses when estimating the giving multiplier, so a partial grant from us is not a signal that we think the marginal dollar is low-value.

On the other hand, the marginal multiplier could in principle be 0 or negative even if the multiplier affecting the total expenses is high. For example, if the last 10 % of the total expenses have a multiplier of -1, the 2nd last 10 % have a multiplier of 0, and the 1st 80 % have a multiplier of 10, the multiplier affecting the overall expenses would be 7.9 (= 0.1*(-1) + 0.1*0 + 0.8*10), but the marginal multiplier would be at most -1 (at most because the multiplier could continue to decrease as expenses increase). I do not think a negative marginal multiplier is realistic, but I wonder whether it could be close to 1 when accounting for all effects, such as the benefits of a funding cap making grantees look for more counterfactual sources of funding, and the costs of CG scaling up the funding of effective giving initiatives too fast.

Kestrel🔸 @ 2026-03-18T17:58 (+7)

Hi Vasco!

On the contrary, I think that for at least some effective giving org structures, the marginal multiplier is actually above the total multiplier. This is because effective giving org structure costs sometimes break down into

  • Costs of maintaining a platform/brand (software technical upkeep, reputation management, etc) - where you'd expect more core funding to go
  • Costs of using the platform/brand to promote effective giving - where you'd mostly expect marginal funding to go

There's a degree to which, once the costs of the platform/brand are covered, it becomes more effective (on the margin) to use it. (Or at least you'd hope - assuming it's any good!)

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2026-03-18T18:42 (+4)

The marginal multiplier should still decrease with spending if the organisation allocates funds to the most cost-effective activities 1st? I think so. If the marginal multiplier accounting for all effects, including longterm and low probability effects, of additional spending on core activities was lower than the marginal multiplier of additional spending on expansion activities, the organisation should move funds from core to expansion activities until their marginal multipliers were equal. Otherwise, they would be leaving impact on the table. The impact of core activities may not always be that visible. The impact of the organisation may not change much nearterm as a result of a temporary reduction in the spending on core activities. However, these are important for the longterm success of the organisation.

Kestrel🔸 @ 2026-03-18T21:54 (+16)

I will present a mathematical example:

Effective Giving Antarctica has a core activity - a website that encourages Antarctic residents to donate to effective charities as a mark of national pride - and a marginal activity - social media ads that cause people to click through to the website. EGA has two available strategies:

  • A bare-bones functional website that links through to GWWC for £10k, which allows fundraising at a 4x manner by buying social media ads
  • A fancy website optimised for user experience with integrated payment system and donations advisor chatbot for £100k, which allows fundraising at a 6x multiplier by buying social media ads.

If EGA has £200k funding, it could raise £190k x 4 with a bare bones website (3.8x) or £100k x 6 with a fancy one (3x).

If EGA has £500k to spend, it could raise £490k x 4 with a bare bones website (3.92x) or £400k x 6 with a fancy one (4.8x).

Raising the budget £200k -> £500k raises the optimal strategy giving multiplier 3.8x ->  4.8x, meaning the marginal giving multiplier is higher than the overall one.

This is just standard economies of scale: investing in technology (like a great website) that improves your productivity at a fixed outlay is more feasible at higher budgets.

There will be other forces acting on an effective giving organisation like market saturation (not that many residents of Antarctica, they'll get sick of social media eventually). But there would definitely be situations where economies if scale would dominate and the marginal giving multiplier ends up higher than the overall one.

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2026-03-19T10:34 (+4)

Thanks for the helpful example. I strongly upvoted it. I suspected you had something like it in mind. I still think the marginal multiplier of funding EGA at a given time (not across time) accounting for all effects decreases with spending if the organisation allocates funds to the most cost-effective activities 1st. In addition, I believe the marginal multiplier of funding EGA should ideally not change across time. EGA should try to move spending from the years with the lowest marginal multiplier to the years with the highest marginal multiplier, thus increasing the marginal multiplier of the years with the lowest marginal multiplier, and decreasing the marginal multiplier of the years with the highest marginal multiplier, until the marginal multiplier is the same in all years.

In your example, the marginal multiplier of the strategy EGA is scaling up neglecting effects on other strategies increases with spending. It is 4 for 200 k£ of spending, and 6 for 500 k£. However, I believe the marginal multiplier of EGA is not the same as the marginal multiplier of the strategy it is scaling up neglecting effects on other strategies. I would say a signicant fraction of the value of funding EGA while it has a bare-bones website, and scales up social media ads is increasing the probability of EGA shifting to the fancy website. Neglecting this results in underestimating the marginal multiplier of funding EGA. Here is another way of noting this. For a spending up to 10 k£, the marginal multiplier of the strategy EGA is scaling up neglecting effects on other strategies is close to 0 (assuming the bare-bones website barely raises funds without social media ads). Yet, this does not reflect well the cost-effectiveness of funding EGA in its earliest stages. A significant fraction of the impact of initial funding comes from increasing the probability of EGA achieving strategies with a higher marginal multiplier neglecting effects on other strategies.

Here is how I relate the above to economies of scale. Being an early adopter of solar panels would not have looked like a cost-effective way of decreasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions looking just at the initial cost of solar panels, and neglecting the reduction in cost resulting from increased adoption. However, a significant fraction of the (expected) decrease in GHG emissions would have come from the potential of early adoption enabling cheaper panels. This is why I mentioned in my past comment "marginal multiplier accounting for all effects, including longterm and low probability effects".

Relatedly, it may naively seem that decreasing the consumption of chicken by 0.1 kg does not change the production of chicken if this can only be adjusted by multiples of e.g. 1 k kg. However, in this case, a better model would be that decreasing the consumption of chicken by 0.1 kg would increase by roughly 0.01 pp (= 0.1/(1*10^3)) the probability of the production of chicken decreasing by 1 k kg. So the expected reduction in the production of chicken would still be roughly 0.1 kg (= 1*10^-4*1*10^3).

Kestrel🔸 @ 2026-03-19T11:30 (+4)

A great reply!

I'll note CoGi has a different funding philosophy for early stage funding, where it will often provide 100% of funding for a few years to allow the testing and development of new strategies. This talk is specifically about mature effective giving organisations.

It is true that the 50% of funding applied by CoGi across years for scale-up may be more useful to the organisation establishing itself, and thus ultimately higher-impact taking into account uncertain future effects. (Indeed I assume that's why CoGi does this).

However, it's still true that if an organisation raised £5x for effective charities this year at an operations cost of £x, its marginal effect on its yearly fundraising total of you giving it £y could be greater than £5y due to economies of scale. (It's just that the effect of CoGi giving it its first £z for the year is also greater than £5z due to future effects).

If one is willing to tolerate uncertainty in one's giving, long time horizons, and a significant evaluation burden, you can probably do better by signing up to the Meta Charity Funding Circle and hashing out which organisations could make best use of startup and core scale-up funding that don't already have it, at which point you really are looking for highest-impact otherwise-unfunded opportunities, so the evaluation burden to find and fund them gets large. If you're not, then picking something CoGi funds at 50% and donating to its operations costs is a great way to "save 5 lives for £4000 rather than 1".

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2026-03-19T14:14 (+2)

Do "£5x" and "£5y" refer to the impact accounting for all effects? If so, you are saying that the marginal multiplier accounting for all effects could be greater than the multiplier concerning the total spending accounting for all effects. I think this can only be the case if the organisation fails to allocate funds to the most cost-effective activities (accounting for all effects) 1st.

I still guess the marginal multiplier of the effective giving initiatives (EGIs) funded by Coefficient Giving (CG) is higher than 1, but I would be a bit surprised if it was 5. In this case, CG would be leaving lots of impact on the table by not funding EGIs more. CG is scaling up their funding of EGIs, and should ideally be doing this in the way that maximises impact. For CG's marginal funding of EGIs to have a multiplier of 5, one would have to think they should be scaling up faster. Maybe they should. The altruistic market is not perfectly efficient. However, it is worth having in mind that the multiplier of CG's marginal funding of EGIs may be closer to 1 after accounting for the risks of scaling up too fast. For example, a slower scale up could allow for learning more about which organisations are the most promising. I expect CG to be taking this into account, but mostly informally, not formally in the calculations of the multipliers of their grantees.

Kestrel🔸 @ 2026-03-19T16:08 (+4)

£5x and £5y refer to only money moved by fundraising in that year (or in the case of a pledge-based organisation, to pledges collected in that year multiplied by the estimated future money moved from a pledge). I believe this is standard for an organisation reporting its giving multiplier.

They do not account for total overall impact in the year (of a mature effective giving organisation), which would also need to account for a whole bunch of other things like

  • The intrinsic value of having a stable effective giving organisation next year as a place to put money with a substantial giving multiplier
  • The organisation acting as an entry point to the EA community and people who see an effective giving advert and get into EA for effective giving reasons then going on to make career changes
  • People who give effectively turning up to EA meetups and being great sources of career networking and advice, improving the value of the meetup.
  • People who start by giving effectively through an organisation, then transition to earning-to-give in a way that the organisation doesn't capture.
  • Any formal or on-the-job training in doing effective fundraising the organisation provides its staff or volunteers, who then may leave to work at another effective giving organisation.
  • Positive reputational effects on the EA brand from advertisement of doing a fairly well-regarded politically neutral activity (though plenty of people don't want to donate to the Against Malaria Foundation, you would be somewhat hard-pressed to find anyone who is pro-malaria and thinks someone who donates to AMF is evil).

I think certain effective giving organisations also have large impact through these fuzzier things too. Though it's hard to measure, effective giving organisations that involve a significant amount of volunteer coordination and thus training delivery, or that reach larger numbers of people (giving smaller amounts per person) so introduce more people to the concepts of EA, seem like they'd do more on the fuzzy impact side. Whereas paying a few staff who already know how to fundraise well to pitch at millionaires, less so.

--
I think CoGi have previously left a lot of impact on the table by not funding the expansion of effective giving enough (while consistently directing a lot of their money to GiveWell, implying they would have wanted to do so if they'd known they should be diverting more of that to incubating effective giving). The time between the pivot to careers in 2017 until the FTX crash in 2022 when the EA community narrative was "we're talent-constrained not funding-constrained" was a massive chokepoint for effective giving. Check out https://coefficientgiving.org/funds/effective-giving-and-careers/#featured-grants and look by year - before and after 2022 is a huge difference in grant allocations to effective giving organisations.

And if that chokepoint hadn't have happened we'd be a hugely different and probably much bigger and better EA community today. (To be clear, I don't think it was at all obvious at the time that incubating effective giving was a good strategy! It's only become so in hindsight.)

Even now I think we could scale up faster (and hugely welcome this scale-up post). But I understand that CoGi has a certain amount it wishes to allocate, and its strategy to maximise impact is allocating that in such a way as to create clear high-giving-multiplier funding gaps for other GiveWell-aligned donors to be able to step in and fill.

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2026-03-19T17:32 (+2)

Even now I think we could scale up faster (and hugely welcome this scale-up post). But I understand that CoGi has a certain amount it wishes to allocate, and its strategy to maximise impact is allocating that in such a way as to create clear high-giving-multiplier funding gaps for other GiveWell-aligned donors to be able to step in and fill.

Are you confident that CG should be increasing the funding of EGIs faster (for example, by using looser funding caps)? If not, can you be confident that funding the EGIs supported by CG is significantly more cost-effective than funding GiveWell? 

Kestrel🔸 @ 2026-03-19T18:52 (+4)

I am confident that CG running more RFPs, committing multi-year scale-up funding, branching out into diverse initiatives, and other such things with its increased EGI budget allocation is a very clear sign that it believes there is both high impact and absorbency here. And knowing that their previous RoI has been 5x, I doubt this one will end up substantially lower. I reckon they'll use about the same judging criteria, the pot just won't run out so fast. Which means that I do think funding an EGI funded by CG is more cost-effective than GiveWell.

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2026-03-20T10:00 (+3)

I am confident that CG running more RFPs, committing multi-year scale-up funding, branching out into diverse initiatives, and other such things with its increased EGI budget allocation is a very clear sign that it believes there is both high impact and absorbency here.

It does not follow from this that funding the EGIs supported by CG is more cost-effective than funding GiveWell? For this to be the case, assuming CG is trying to maximise their impact, one would have to think they should be scaling up their funding of EGIs faster, regardless of how fast they are currently scaling it. If CG's marginal funding of EGIs had a multiplier above 1 accounting for all effects, they would be leaving impact on the table by not scaling up faster.

Kestrel🔸 @ 2026-03-20T12:26 (+6)

I do believe that, from a purely expected-impact-maximising perspective, CG should scale up faster than they are currently doing by directing more of their money from GiveWell charities -> fundraising organisations for GiveWell charities. There's a whole bunch of opportunities above 1x they are intentionally missing out on, and also opportunities above their 5x funding bar they are trying to create and then intentionally miss out on. I believe that their current limit here is primarily reputational, and that altruism at this scale is not an efficient market.

The reputational considerations being that CG does not want to be seen using too much of its global health allocation paying for fundraisers, because someone could write a hitpiece on "a billionaire wants you to give money to help the extreme poor but won't give any himself".

Anyone who is not CG is not bound by the reputational considerations of CG, and can take advantage of a significant arbitrage opportunity.

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2026-03-20T13:07 (+3)

CG's current scaling could still be maximising expected impact if they are correctly assessing the reputational risks of funding EGIs. However, I agree this applies less to small individual donors, and I also suspect the marginal multiplier accounting for all effects of these donors funding EGIs supported by CG is higher than 1.

I wonder whether it would be good for CG to clarify why they do not fund EGIs more. I feel like this would make sense even if the cause was the reputational risks you mentioned, which I believe are broadly seen as understandable.

Deena Englander @ 2026-03-17T16:51 (+2)

I so love seeing this post - I'm thrilled with the direction Coefficient Giving is going in. I strongly agree with the part about funding service providers; that's the biggest bottleneck to organizational success (and why I founded WorkStream Nonprofit). Org leaders commonly don't know:
- what norms they should be following
- what type of expertise they should be requesting and paying for
- whether it's responsible to use funder dollars to pay for these supporting services.

Between all of that, they're not engaging with the right kind of (or any) support, and that significantly hurts impact. (See my past post on operational norms.)

I think that you, as funders, are the best positioned to help encourage best practices amongst your grantees, and I'm loving that you're making that a priority this year!