How would you allocate donations across Doneer Effectief's four cause funds?
Doneer Effectief is the Netherlands' effective giving platform, enabling Dutch donors (with tax benefits) to support highly cost-effective charities across four carefully selected cause areas using recommendations from leading independent EA-aligned charity evaluators.
Doneer Effectief currently offers four cause-area funds:
- Global Health & Poverty – Supports highly cost-effective interventions that improve health and reduce extreme poverty, such as malaria prevention, vitamin A supplementation, and direct cash transfers. Recommended charities are primarily informed by GiveWell (All Grants Fund).
- Climate – Funds organisations working on the most promising climate interventions, with an emphasis on high-impact policy, innovation, and systems change rather than traditional offsetting. Recommendations are primarily based on Giving Green.
- Animal Welfare & Food Transition – Supports organisations that improve the welfare of farmed animals and accelerate the transition to more animal-friendly food systems. Recommendations draw primarily on Animal Charity Evaluators and related research.
- Women's Empowerment – Supports evidence-based interventions that improve women's agency, health, education, economic opportunities, and protection from violence, focusing on programs with strong empirical evidence and high expected impact. Recommendations are based on GiveWell and Founders Pledge.
Within each fund, donations are pooled and reallocated quarterly to the charities expected to have the highest marginal impact, allowing recommendations to evolve as new evidence becomes available.
My question is about how to allocate donations across these funds.
My intuition is that these funds represent the best opportunities within each cause area, but not necessarily equally impactful opportunities overall. For example, GiveWell's top global health charities seem to have a stronger evidence base and higher cost-effectiveness than the best climate interventions, while animal welfare depends more on one's moral weights.
Would you:
- Donate 100% to Global Health & Poverty because you believe it has the highest expected impact?
- Split between Global Health & Poverty and Animal Welfare?
- Spread donations across all four cause areas to hedge against uncertainty?
- Or use some other framework?
I'd be especially interested in hearing how people in the EA community think about cross-cause allocation, rather than within-cause charity selection.