 | |
| Founded | November 2020 (2020-11) |
|---|---|
| Founders | Lucius Caviola, PhD &Joshua Greene, PhD |
| Founded at | Harvard University |
| Website | givingmultiplier.org |
Giving Multiplier is a donation platform promotingeffective giving. It was founded atHarvard University in 2020 by psychologistsJoshua Greene and Lucius Caviola.
Giving Multiplier was created as a research project in 2020 byJoshua Greene, a psychology professor atHarvard and Lucius Caviola, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard at the time. The goal was to introduce people to effective charities in a way that overcomes some of thepsychological barriers to effective altruism.[1][2] As of April 2025, Giving Multiplier has facilitated over 10,000 donations totaling over $4 million.[3]
Giving Multiplier uses research from charity evaluators[4] such asGiveWell,Animal Charity Evaluators,Founders Pledge, andOpen Philanthropy to select a list of ten "super-effective" charities addressing three cause areas:extreme poverty,animal welfare, andglobal catastrophic risks.
Giving Multiplier lets donors select their favorite charity and one of their super-effective charities (i.e., "with the heart and the head") to implement a donation bundling technique.[5] This innovation combines donors' seemingly conflicting preferences, namely, that they have their own favorite charities,[6] and they simultaneously care about effectiveness.[7] Moreover, Giving Multiplier uses donation matching to further incentivize donors to donate more effectively.[5][8] The original design by Caviola and Greene integrated donation bundling with a new technique called micro-matching.[9][5] Micro-matching works by adding matching funds on top of each donation, with a greater matching rate for a greater proportion allocated to the super-effective charity. Individual donors support the matching system to encourage others to donate, creating a "supply and demand" cycle of charitable giving.[10]
The proof of concept for Giving Multiplier was published as part of Greene and Caviola's academic research on splitting donations between favorite charities and effective charities. Their research found that including an option to split donations between a favorite charity and effective charity increased effective giving by 76%. The authors suggested that favorite-effective donation splits satisfies donors' dual motivations of supporting causes meaningful to them and effective organizations that have a big impact.[9]
As of April 2025, Giving Multiplier's list of super-effective charities (based on charity evaluators' recommendations) include: