What Resources Does Giving What We Can Offer to Learn About High-Impact Philanthropy?

Giving What We Can offers a structured set of learning resources for people who want to give more effectively: an introductory course (Effective Giving 101), in-depth guides and articles, research explaining how charities are evaluated, interactive tools such as "How Rich Am I?" and "Birth Lottery," plus community stories and member motivations. These resources are aimed at newcomers who want to understand effective giving before choosing where to donate, and at members who want to deepen their practice. The site does not present these as a formal curriculum with prerequisites; you can start with any entry point and move between them.

Start with the basics: Effective Giving 101

The site's "Learn" section lists Effective Giving 101 as an introduction to giving effectively. This is the natural first stop if you are new to the idea that some donations do far more good than others. It sits alongside a broader "Resources" area that also includes in-depth guides and articles, so you can move from a short introduction to longer material on specific topics.

A practical way to use this: read the 101 material first to understand the core idea, then use the guides to answer a specific question you have, such as how to compare cause areas or how tax relief on donations works.

Research and charity evaluation

Giving What We Can publishes how it evaluates charities under "Research & Approach," and its research team maintains top charity recommendations (the site references recommendations for 2026). This matters for learning because effective giving is not only a philosophy but a method: the organization's approach to assessing charities is itself a learning resource. If you want to understand why a charity is recommended rather than just which ones are, this section is the place to look.

The site organizes cause areas into three buckets you will encounter throughout its materials:

• Global Health — save and improve lives
• Animal Welfare — reduce animal suffering
• Existential Risk — protect future generations

Reading across these categories is a useful exercise in itself, because it shows how the same evaluation questions get applied to very different problems.

Interactive tools: How Rich Am I? and Birth Lottery

Two tools turn abstract ideas about global inequality into something you can see for yourself:

• How Rich Am I? compares your income with global income levels.
• Birth Lottery asks what your life would look like if you were born again, illustrating how much of your circumstances depend on where you were born.

These are best used as a starting point for reflection rather than as research outputs. For example, if you are deciding whether a 1% or 10% pledge is meaningful for you, running your own income through "How Rich Am I?" gives you a concrete reference point before you read the pledge options.

Community stories and member motivations

The "Community" section includes Members (who has pledged), Live Motivations (why members give), and member stories from people who decided to give more effectively. For a learner, these serve a different purpose from the research pages: they show how real people translate the principles into a personal decision, including the trade-offs and hesitations involved. If you are considering a pledge but unsure whether it fits your situation, reading motivations from members is a low-commitment way to test the idea against others' experience.

Pledge options as a learning pathway

The pledge structure itself functions as a set of graduated entry points, which is useful if you want to learn by doing rather than only by reading:

The site describes a community of 11,377 people who have pledged, with $396 million donated and $603 million moved. These figures are the organization's own reported totals; treat them as context for the scale of the community rather than as a measure of any individual gift's impact.

How to sequence these resources

If you want a workable order:

1. Read the Effective Giving 101 introduction.
2. Use "How Rich Am I?" to ground the numbers in your own situation.
3. Read the Research & Approach material and the current top charity recommendations for the cause areas that interest you.
4. Browse member motivations and stories if you are weighing a pledge.
5. Choose a pledge level — trial, student, or 10% — that matches where you are now.

The main limitation to keep in mind is that this is a learning ecosystem, not a single course: the value comes from combining the conceptual introduction, the evaluation method, and the community perspective. If you only read one page, the introduction gives you the core idea; if you want to actually decide where your money goes, the research and charity recommendations are the parts you should not skip.