If you are like most of us, you have only rather limited money that you can give to charities, and you want to make it count.
Luckily there are a number of charities that can do hundreds of times more good with your donation than most others. Effectively, you will donate hundreds of times as much. Way to feel like a major philanthropist!
Top-Tier Charities
These are the charities that we think do the most good with your donation because we know the area they work in very well ourselves.
- The Foundational Research Institute of the Effective Altruism Foundation, which researches how we can avert particularly dystopian future scenarios due to advanced artificial intelligence.
- The Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which researches how we can improve outcomes from advanced artificial intelligence more generally.
Second-Tier Charities
We are relatively confident that these charities are less cost-effective than the top-tier charities by a factor of 10–50, but we also know of some plausible arguments why they may be on par.
- Rethink Priorities, which conducts empirical research into various interventions in various cause areas with the goal of improving our ability to prioritize between them.
- The Wild Animal Initiative, which conducts foundational research into how we can improve the well-being of wild animals and also encourages independent scientific research into welfare biology.
- Animal Charity Evaluators, which researches causes, interventions, and charities in the area of animal welfare to find the most effective ones.
- All top charities of Animal Charity Evaluators – among them Animal Equality, Good Food Institute, and The Humane League.
Honorary Mentions
These are charities that do tremendously important work but are not listed above because they are, at the time of writing, relatively well funded already.
- Oxford’s Global Priorities Institute, which conducts highly foundational global priorities research, i.e. the sort of research that could completely change the organizations listed on this page.
- The Centre for Effective Altruism, which serves as an incubator for highly effective charities or metacharities.
- 80,000 Hours, which provides career coaching for everyone who wants their life to have the greatest possible positive impact.