Recommended Funds
"When I enter a Magic tournament, I bring the best deck I can build. When I donate, I look for the best charities I can find. It's the same mindset."
— Aaron Gertler, Magic: The Gathering 2020 Grand Finals Runner-Up and DreamHack Anaheim Arena Open 2020 Champion
Using the principles of effective altruism, Effective Giving Quest has currently selected three cause areas to prioritize: animal welfare, global health and development, and the long-term future.
However, even after identifying impactful cause areas to prioritize, there are still a plethora of ways you can address these problems: For example, to help animals you might coordinate adoptions of companion animals, you might rehabilitate wildlife, or you might advance legal protections for farmed animals. Even within each of those more specific areas, there is tremendous variation in impact depending on the specific methods being used.
Thankfully, there are charities and fund managers that are experts in their respective fields who evaluate giving opportunities so that you don’t have to. That’s where our recommended funds come into play.
Our Recommended Cause Areas and Their Respective Funds
Animal Welfare
Animal Charity Evaluators’
Recommended Charity Fund
Global Health
GiveWell’s
Top Charities Fund
Long-Term Future
Giving What We Can’s
Longtermism Fund
Animal Charity Evaluators’ Recommended Charity Fund
Animal Welfare
Animals on farms and in the wild suffer tremendously at numbers so large that they are difficult to understand. Helping to reduce their suffering is one of the best deals we know about.
Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) has a proven track record of finding excellent giving opportunities in the animal protection movement. Each year, ACE does a broad search of charities, selects those that seem likely to be most effective, asks them to participate in a comprehensive evaluation, and then publishes a list of Top and Standout Charities supported by in-depth reviews. Their Top Charities work in ways that are most likely to produce the greatest gains for animals, actively evaluate and improve their programs, and have a demonstrated need for more funding. Their Standout Charities are also vetted as strong giving opportunities who for one reason or another fell short of the Top Charity recommendation. ACE’s Recommended Charity Fund distributes donations between their Top and Standout Charities, keeping a close eye on each charity’s room for more funding and the expected value of marginal donations.
GiveWell’s Top Charities Fund
Global Health
Helping people in high-income countries is expensive, but helping those in the developing world is often cheap, already well understood, and incredibly impactful.
GiveWell is in many ways the gold standard of an evaluative organization, utilizing best practices, deep research, and unrivaled transparency. Publishing highly detailed reports that seek to understand the true efficacy of various interventions and charities via randomized controlled trials and in-depth models, GiveWell provides a great service to all donors who seek to help others the most in the area of global health and development. GiveWell targets low-income countries and includes interventions that have a highly understood evidence base. GiveWell’s Top Charities Fund includes recommended charities that represent some of the most cost-effective ways to save and improve human lives.
Giving What We Can’s Longtermism Fund
Long-term Future
Some risks represent an existential threat to life itself. Even if the chance of game over is low, we must work now to ensure that the worst doesn’t have a chance to happen.
Giving What We Can hosts the Longtermism Fund, which seeks to reduce existential and catastrophic risks—such as those coming from misaligned artificial intelligence, pandemics, and nuclear war—while advancing key longtermist ideas. While a relatively new fund in this space, the host organization Giving What We Can was one of the first effective altruism organizations founded, and thus has a strong track record of thoughtful evaluation and transparency over the last decade. Additionally, the Longtermism Fund is managed by Longview Philanthropy, which works closely with other organizations in the field and is therefore positioned to efficiently direct funding to the most cost-effective opportunities. With exceptional levels of expected value, the Longtermism Fund provides an excellent giving opportunity for those who are thinking about longtermism.
Support the Recommended Funds
If you work in the game industry, we strongly encourage you to learn about the Effective Giving Quest Alliance before donating. Joining the EGQ Alliance provides many additional benefits and provides the best way to get the absolute most out of your philanthropic gifts.
For individuals, EGQ provides a clear channel to direct your donations to any combination of our recommended funds through our donate page.