Effektiv Spenden takes over EAF’s donation regranting service

First written: Dec 2020
Last update: Nov 2021

After over two years of preparations, we are excited to announce that the organization Effektiv Spenden will take over our donation regranting service in Germany and Switzerland. As of now, taxpayers in Germany and Switzerland can support a wide range of effective charities worldwide through Effektiv Spenden in a tax-deductible way. Effektiv Spenden has all the infrastructure required to offer a reliable and safe regranting service, and it will build on and expand our efforts to increase awareness of highly effective projects among donors in Germany and Switzerland. In this way, they hope to mobilize millions of euros per year to these causes. We will discontinue our regranting service to focus on our research project, the Center on Long-Term Risk.

If you would like to support Effektiv Spenden’s valuable work and contribute to raising awareness of highly effective charities in the German-speaking world, you can do so here.

What does this mean for me as a donor?

If you donate or have donated to effective charities through us, this is what these changes mean for you.

• If you had a monthly donation set up with us, we have already canceled it for you (unless you donate via bank transfer, in which case you should cancel your monthly standing order as soon as possible). You should have received an additional email from us with all details. We stopped receiving donations on behalf of other organizations from donors in Germany on Dec 31, 2020, and in Switzerland on Dec 31, 2021. Any further donations we receive after these dates will be allocated to our main project, the Center on Long-Term Risk.
• If you would like to continue donating to your preferred project, we kindly ask you to set up a new donation on this website (German taxpayers) or this website (Swiss taxpayers). Effektiv Spenden will now manage your donations, which will continue to be tax-deductible. We are sorry for the inconvenience that this may cause on your end!
• You will receive a tax receipt from us in early 2022 for all donations you made in 2021. For all future donations you make, Effektiv Spenden will issue a tax receipt for you.
• If you would like to get your donations matched by your employer, you can continue to do so through Effektiv Spenden. Of course, we will still regrant any donations received until now (including matching contributions we receive within the next couple of months).

A brief overview of our regranting service

In 2014, we started offering donors in Switzerland (and later Germany and the Netherlands) the opportunity to support effective charities all over the world in a tax-deductible way entirely for free. The response from donors has been exceptional: From 2014 to late 2021, we received and processed over 28,000 donations from over 6,000 donors in 62 different countries, totaling over 19 million euros and supporting almost 50 different organizations tackling some of the world’s most pressing problems. In 2017, we developed a software system that automatically processes all incoming transactions to handle the overwhelming number of incoming donations, thus ensuring that we can grant out the funds reliably and without delays. Over time, however, our priorities shifted, causing us to decide to allocate fewer resources to our regranting service. We still took pride in a smooth and reliable service but did not expand its scope.

About Effektiv Spenden

Effektiv Spenden (effektiv-spenden.org) is a donation platform that aims to help donors maximize the impact of their charitable giving by introducing them to projects widely endorsed by the effective altruism community. Launched in Germany in April 2019 by Sebastian Schwiecker, it has already raised more than one million euros for charities working on development aid (recommended by GiveWell), animal welfare (recommended by ACE), and climate change (recommended by Founders Pledge and Let’s Fund). Effektiv Spenden aims to make some core ideas around effective charitable giving as accessible as possible to a broad audience by publishing condensed reports on these cause areas and recommending highly effective projects to support. Through their website, donors in Germany can support any of nine featured organizations (or let Effektiv Spenden decide how to allocate their donation best) and get an official receipt for tax purposes.

Our collaboration with Effektiv Spenden

When we came in contact with the team at Effektiv Spenden in 2018, the potential synergies between the organizations became clear. With us shifting our focus away from fundraising and Effektiv Spenden set on expanding its reach and functionalities, it became increasingly evident that Effektiv Spenden would be well-suited to take over our efforts, thus centralizing this service in one place. Since then, we have been offering advice to Effektiv Spenden on best practices around fundraising and grantmaking. In mid-2019, we decided to take the final step and have only one organization dedicated to maintaining and optimizing this service. After more than a year of collaboration, Effektiv Spenden will now be in charge of raising and regranting donations to highly effective charities in Germany and Switzerland. Jonas Vollmer, co-founder of EAF and now head of the EA Funds, is an associate of Effektiv Spenden and will continue to offer them strategic advice in this capacity.

If you have used our donation regranting service, we would like to use this opportunity to thank you for the trust you have given us and for your support of highly effective projects. We are humbled by the support of so many of you over these past seven years!

If you have any questions, please get in touch at info@ea-foundation.org.