What is an Effective Giving Initiative? The model that multiplies your impact
Picture two ways to give €100 to fight malaria. You can send it straight to a top charity. Or you can give it to a small organisation whose only job is to raise money for that same charity, and whose track record suggests every euro it spends sends several more its way. The second route sounds like a detour. Founders Pledge research suggests it can be the shorter path. Organisations built around that idea have a name: effective giving initiatives. Mieux Donner is one of them.
What effective giving actually means
Effective giving starts from a plain observation: when you give to help others, where you give matters as much as whether you give.
Charities are not equally effective. Working on the same problem, the best are estimated to be up to around a hundred times more effective than the average. What decides this is mostly the problem a charity takes on and the method it uses, not how hard its staff work or how little it spends on running costs. So the same €100 can save or improve very different numbers of lives depending on where it lands.
Effective giving takes that seriously. It means choosing where to give from evidence about results, rather than from habit or the pull of a good fundraising story. We have written separately about where this idea comes from and why it holds up. This article is about the organisations built to act on it.
What is an effective giving initiative?
An effective giving initiative is an organisation that helps people in one country give well to the best charities anywhere in the world. It runs no programmes of its own. Its product is your donation, sent further and better than you could easily manage alone.
Four jobs in one
In practice it does four things at once. It recommends a short list of charities already vetted by independent evaluators, so you are not left to sift through thousands of options. It takes your donation and regrants it to those charities, acting as the bridge between you and organisations that are often based abroad. It secures tax-deductibility where the law allows, so eligible gifts cost the donor far less. And it explains the reasoning, through guides and one-to-one advice, so you can decide for yourself rather than accept a recommendation on trust.
How it differs from a crowdfunding page or an ordinary charity
A crowdfunding platform is neutral about where your money goes. It will carry a donation to almost any cause, effective or not, and usually takes a percentage on the way. An effective giving initiative is the opposite kind of intermediary. It is opinionated on purpose: it only forwards money to charities that have cleared a high evidence bar. Depending on its model, an initiative may or may not take a commission to cover its costs, but it is transparent about which. Mieux Donner takes none: 100% of what you give is passed on, and our running costs are funded separately.
It is also not an ordinary charity. A typical charity asks you to fund its own work. An effective giving initiative funds other organisations' work, the programmes that independent researchers judge to be among the most effective anywhere. That is why you cannot measure one by what it spends on itself. You measure it by how much it moves to others, and by how good those others are. That second test, the quality of where the money lands, is the heart of the model, and it is what the rest of this article explains.
The effective giving ecosystem
The movement's main organisations, grouped by function: evaluators, incubators, funders, infrastructure and national initiatives.
Not an exhaustive list: the ecosystem includes other organisations, and some listed here are not mentioned elsewhere in this article.
Where the idea came from: a short history
From Peter Singer to Giving What We Can and GiveWell
The argument is older than the movement. In 1972 the philosopher Peter Singer wrote that if we can prevent something very bad at little cost to ourselves, we ought to, and that physical distance does not weaken the obligation. He made the case again for a general readership in his 2009 book The Life You Can Save, which asks people to direct their giving to where it saves the most lives.
Two organisations turned the argument into infrastructure. In 2007, Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld, then working in finance, grew frustrated that they could not find solid evidence on which charities did the most good per dollar. They left to build that evidence themselves and founded GiveWell, now one of the most trusted evaluators in global health. In 2009, at Oxford, the philosophers Toby Ord and William MacAskill founded Giving What We Can, a community whose members pledge to give at least 10% of their income to high-impact charities. It launched with 23 people and has grown into a worldwide community of givers.
Both were research and pledge organisations. What was still missing was a way for an ordinary donor in a given country to act on the research easily: in their own language, in their own currency, with tax relief where it exists. That is the gap effective giving initiatives fill.
The model spreads
The first one appeared in Germany. In early 2019, Effektiv Spenden launched as the first effective giving initiative of its kind in continental Europe, built to take the work of evaluators like GiveWell and turn it into simple, tax-deductible donations for German-speaking donors. It worked, and others followed.
In 2022, Doneer Effectief opened in the Netherlands. It raised 1.4 million euros in its first year, partly by working with public figures such as the historian Rutger Bregman to reach an audience well beyond the usual circles. France's turn came in 2024 with Mieux Donner. By then the pattern was established enough that the people who train charity founders had begun launching these initiatives deliberately, which is the subject of a later section.
Effective giving initiatives around the world
Mieux Donner is one node in a growing network. Most of these initiatives are independent organisations, often small and volunteer-led to begin with, each adapting the same model to its own country: local language, local tax rules, and the same vetted charities at the receiving end. Giving What We Can keeps a public directory of them.2 Here are the country-based initiatives, in case you, or someone you know, would find it easier to give through one closer to home.
| Country or region | Effective giving initiative |
|---|---|
| Australia | Effective Altruism Australia |
| Belgium | Effectief Geven |
| Brazil | Doebem |
| Canada | RC Forward |
| Denmark | Giv Effektivt |
| Estonia | Anneta Targalt |
| Finland | Lahjoittaminen.fi |
| France | Mieux Donner (that's us) |
| Germany, Austria, Switzerland | Effektiv Spenden |
| Italy | Benefficienza |
| Netherlands | Doneer Effectief |
| New Zealand | Effective Altruism New Zealand |
| Norway | Gi Effektivt |
| Poland | Wiécej Dobra |
| Spain | Ayuda Efectiva |
| Sweden | Ge Effektivt |
| United Kingdom and worldwide | Giving What We Can |
| United States and international | The Life You Can Save, One for the World |
| By interest, not country | High Impact Athletes, The Jewish Effective Giving Initiative |
If you live somewhere without a local initiative, you can still give through an international one such as Giving What We Can or The Life You Can Save.
The giving multiplier: the core idea
Here is the claim the whole model rests on, in the words of the people who study it. Founders Pledge, a research organisation that evaluates high-impact charities, calls an organisation a giving multiplier when its main output is causing more money to reach high-impact charities than it costs to run.1 The framework was developed largely by their former researcher Sjir Hoeijmakers.
The logic is almost too simple to trust at first. If it is good to send €100 to an excellent charity, then it is better still to spend €10 on something that causes €100 to be sent there. You have turned €10 into €100 of impact. An effective giving initiative is built to be that something.
Two questions decide whether it really works: how much extra money does it actually cause, and how good is the destination? Founders Pledge answers them with two ideas.
Counterfactual money moved
Imagine an initiative reports that 500 donors gave a million euros through it last year. Impressive. But suppose 200 of those donors already knew the same charities and would have given anyway, just by a different route. The initiative did not cause those gifts. It only carried them.
This is why the figure that matters is counterfactual money moved: the donations that would not have happened without the initiative. A gift counts only if the initiative is the reason it exists, because the donor discovered effective giving through it, or gave more than they otherwise would have. Money that would have reached the charity regardless does not count.
It is a demanding test. It stops an initiative from claiming credit for generosity it did not create.
What a euro of running cost really buys
Founders Pledge weighs an initiative on three things at once.
The first is the plainest: how many euros it moves for every euro it spends running itself. Spend €10, cause €100 of counterfactual donations, and that ratio is ten to one.
Second, the people who run an initiative could be doing something else with their time, including earning a good salary and giving the money away themselves. That forgone alternative is a real cost, even though it never appears on a budget. Founders Pledge counts it, roughly, by assuming a skilled person could have earned and given perhaps twice their wage elsewhere. That ratio varies from one country and one person to the next.
The third one is the quality of where the money lands. A euro sent to one of the very best charities is worth many euros sent to a mediocre one, so equal amounts are not equally valuable. Take a concrete case. Suppose a GiveWell top charity is judged to do about three times as much good per euro as a direct cash transfer. Then money raised for GiveDirectly, the cash-transfer charity, carries a quality factor of about 0.33 compared with that benchmark: a third of the value, euro for euro, of money sent to the top charity.
Taken together, these give what Founders Pledge calls a net multiplier: counterfactual money moved, adjusted for the cost of people's time and for the quality of the destination.
A word on precision. Founders Pledge is explicit that these are rough estimates, the kind that can be wrong by a factor of two or three, and they publish broad bands rather than exact figures. The aim is not to claim that an initiative is precisely 5.4 times better than giving alone. We treat our own numbers the same way, which is why the figures below are an estimate, not a promise.
Why Ambitious Impact deliberately launches these initiatives
From Charity Entrepreneurship to AIM
The first effective giving initiatives were started by people who arrived at the idea on their own. The newer ones, Mieux Donner included, were started on purpose.
In 2018, Joey Savoie and Karolina Sarek founded Charity Entrepreneurship, a programme that does the reverse of waiting for good charities to appear. It researches which interventions are most cost-effective, then recruits and trains people to launch them. It has since helped start more than fifty charities, which together have raised over 68 million dollars, several of them now rated among the most effective in their fields. In 2024 it widened its scope and renamed itself Ambitious Impact, or AIM.
By 2023, AIM had noticed something. The few effective giving initiatives already running, Effektiv Spenden and the others, were quietly among the highest-return efforts in the field: each was moving several euros to excellent charities for every euro it spent. Yet most countries still had none. So, together with Giving What We Can, AIM built a dedicated programme to launch more of them, aiming to start around six new initiatives in 2024 in countries chosen for their promise. France was one of them.
How Mieux Donner was born
In June 2024, Romain Barbe and Jennifer Stretton joined that programme: a competitive three-month course that pairs co-founders and sends them off to launch a high-impact organisation. They came out of it as Mieux Donner and secured 86,000 euros to fund the first year. The brief was narrow and clear: bring effective giving to French-speaking donors, in French, in euros, with the same vetted charities at the receiving end.
That is the part worth holding onto. Mieux Donner did not invent a model. It is a deliberate local version of one that already worked elsewhere, which is why it could start moving money in its first year rather than its fifth.
Mieux Donner in 2025: the model in practice
The numbers, and what they do not claim
In 2025, Mieux Donner moved 944,753 euros3 to charities chosen for their measured impact. That figure covers donations made through our platform and donations we can show we influenced, even when the money did not pass through our account.
It came from 330 new donors. 209 of them gave at least 100 euros, and 121 gave less. More than 60% of the total came from a small number of large gifts, the rest from many smaller and recurring ones. There is no single typical donor.
Now apply the factors from earlier. The counterfactual estimate keeps only the donations we can reasonably claim to have caused, not those that would have happened anyway. The quality factor is 1, since the money goes to charities already rated among the best, so there is no discount for a weak destination. Set that counterfactual money moved against our running costs, under 120,000 euros for a team of two, and you reach our giving multiplier: an estimated five to six euros moved to effective charities for every euro we spent. Read it as a rough band, not a precise figure.
Where the money goes
A multiplier only means something if the destination is good. That is the quality factor from earlier, and it is why Mieux Donner does not choose charities on instinct. It defers to independent evaluators: GiveWell for global health, Giving Green for climate, the EA Animal Welfare Funds for animals, with further advice from organisations such as Longview Philanthropy for work on global catastrophic risks. The recommended list is short on purpose, and 100% of what you give to it is passed on. You can read how those charities are chosen, and give to them, on our site.
Should you give through an initiative or directly?
Honestly, you do not have to. What we care about is impact, not whether a donation passes through us. If you have found a reliable way to send your money to the most effective charities, and to the right programmes inside them, go ahead. Mieux Donner exists to make that easier, to bring it into one place, and to add a few things that are hard to arrange on your own.
One of them is precision. Many donors want to support a GiveWell-recommended charity but have no way to tie their gift to the specific, most effective programme GiveWell actually funds. Give to the charity's general account and the money can end up anywhere in its budget. Routing through Mieux Donner is a way to make sure it lands where the evidence points.
Another is tax relief. For some charities there is no simple route for a French or Swiss donor to claim a tax reduction on a direct gift. We can unlock it for several of them, which lowers what the donation costs you, or lets you give more for the same outlay.
The third is having it all in one place. Give through us and your donations sit together: you can watch your total impact build over time, across causes and years, instead of tracking scattered receipts. You also join a community of people who give this way.
How to take part
If the model makes sense to you, there are a few ways in, in rising order of commitment.
You can make a one-off or regular donation through Mieux Donner to a charity we recommend, and all of it will reach that charity. If you would rather think it through first, you can book a free conversation with our team about where your giving could do the most good. And if you want to make effective giving a habit, you can pledge to give a set share of your income each year.
Wherever you begin, it comes back to the choice we started with: the same euro, pointed more carefully, helps more people.
Make your next donation go further
Give through Mieux Donner to a charity vetted by the world's leading independent evaluators. 100% of your gift is passed on.
Give effectively →Frequently asked questions
What is an effective giving initiative?
It is an organisation that helps donors in one country give to the most effective charities anywhere. It recommends charities vetted by independent evaluators, regrants your donation to them, secures tax-deductibility where the law allows, and explains the reasoning so you can decide for yourself. It runs no programmes of its own.
Is it better to give through an initiative or directly to the charity?
What matters is impact, not the route. If you can already direct your money to the right programme inside the right charity, do that. An initiative simply makes it easier: it can tie your gift to the specific programme the evidence points to, unlock tax relief that may not exist for a direct gift, and gather your giving in one place.
Does Mieux Donner take a cut of my donation?
No. 100% of what you give through Mieux Donner is passed on to the charity you choose. Our running costs are funded separately, so the giving multiplier sits on top of your donation rather than coming out of it. Effective giving initiatives vary on this point, but each is transparent about its model.
What is a giving multiplier?
It is the amount of money an initiative causes to reach effective charities for every euro it spends running itself, counting only donations it genuinely caused and weighting them by the quality of the destination. Founders Pledge developed the framework. In 2025, Mieux Donner's multiplier was an estimated five to six, which we treat as a rough band rather than a precise figure.
Which effective giving initiative should I use if I am not in France?
Most countries with an initiative have their own: Effektiv Spenden in the German-speaking world, Doneer Effectief in the Netherlands, Ayuda Efectiva in Spain, and others listed above. If none covers your country, you can give through an international one such as Giving What We Can or The Life You Can Save.
- 1 Founders Pledge, Giving Multipliers (Koji Flynn-Do, August 2022; framework largely by Sjir Hoeijmakers). founderspledge.com
- 2 Giving What We Can, Other effective giving organisations. givingwhatwecan.org
- 3 Mieux Donner, 2025 Activity Report. Read the report