How it works
What these organisations do
Some of the most effective charities work directly on problems like: distributing bed nets, vaccinating children, distributing vitamin A. The organisations on this site work one step removed from that. Instead of running programs themselves, they help move more money or more skilled people toward the charities and projects doing that direct work. Some do this by running donation platforms that pool and redirect gifts to well-evaluated charities. Some evaluate and recommend which charities are most effective. Some regrant funds to vetted projects. Some help people choose higher-impact careers. Because they sit upstream of the direct work, a small amount of support for one of them can, in principle, influence a much larger amount of money or talent downstream.
"To put the idea simply: If I donate to a meta-charity with a counterfactual X-factor of 10×, my donation is estimated to unlock 10 times as much additional funding for effective charities as if I had donated the same amount directly.
In other words, I can help channel more money to effective charities that would otherwise not have received it.”
What a "giving multiplier" or "X-factor" means
A giving multiplier is an estimate of how much additional money (or, separately, how much additional skilled time) an organisation directs toward effective work, compared to what it costs to run that organisation. A multiplier of "5x," for example, would mean the organisation is estimated to move roughly five dollars to effective charities for every dollar spent on its own operations. It is not a measure of how much total money passed through the organisation — it is specifically about the additional amount its work is estimated to have caused.
Metric types: why figures are not ranked together
Every published figure is labelled with a metric type and period. An unadjusted figure (gross leverage) is the money raised or moved, divided by what the organisation spends to run itself; it does not remove donations that would have happened anyway. Linked funding (attributed leverage) is money linked to or steered by the organisation, divided by the same running costs; some of it might have been given anyway. An adjusted estimate (counterfactual multiplier) is the extra giving the organisation caused for every dollar it spends on running itself. An impact-adjusted estimate (impact-equivalent multiplier) also takes into account how much good the donors' next-best choice would have done. A forecast (projected multiplier) is based on the organisation's budget and plans, not on a past result. Where no adequately supported public estimate exists, the card says "Assessment pending". Only counterfactual and impact-equivalent donations-only figures are ranked against each other; other types, and cross-domain models that mix careers and giving, are shown in separate groups.
Why "additional" impact matters
Not every dollar that flows through one of these organisations represents a dollar that wouldn't have gone to charity otherwise. Someone who already planned to donate $100 to an effective charity, and simply did so through a donation platform instead of directly, hasn't created $100 of additional impact for that platform — the platform helped route the gift, but the donor was likely to give anyway. A credible multiplier estimate tries to separate money or talent that was genuinely caused to move (because of the organisation's outreach, advice, or pooling of funds) from money that would have gone to an effective cause regardless. This is often called "counterfactual" impact, and it's one of the hardest and most important things a real evaluation has to estimate.
What a multiplier does and doesn't measure
Moving money and moving talent are different kinds of impact, measured in different ways. A career advice organisation that helps someone switch into higher-impact work hasn't "moved money" in the same sense that a donation platform has — the value of a career change depends on assumptions about the impact of that career path, which is a very different kind of estimate from tracking donations. This site never combines a money-moved multiplier and a talent-moved multiplier into a single number, and treats them as separate, non-comparable measures. A multiplier also doesn't tell you anything about the quality or effectiveness of the specific charities the money eventually reaches — that's a separate question, usually answered by a charity evaluator rather than the meta-organisation itself.
Understanding uncertainty
Every multiplier estimate rests on assumptions, and those assumptions carry uncertainty. In plain terms: some numbers going into an estimate are directly observed (like total donations recorded on a platform), while others are estimated (like what fraction of donors would have given anyway). When an evaluation reports a range — for example, "our best guess is between 3x and 8x" — that range is meant to communicate how much the estimate could reasonably vary given what is and isn't known, not that the true number is definitely inside that range. Where a range comes from a statistical model with a defined confidence level, this site labels it as such (for example, a "5th–95th percentile" interval). Where a range instead reflects a few plausible scenarios rather than a statistical distribution, it is labelled as a "scenario range" so it isn't mistaken for a formal confidence interval. Where no numerical range is available, uncertainty may be described in words, or marked as not yet assessed.
How organisations are included, and independent vs. self-reported data
Being listed in this catalogue does not mean Leverage Giving has vetted or endorsed an organisation. In this version, the figures shown are those the organisations have made public themselves, not third-party evaluations. Where independent assessments become available, cards will clearly distinguish them from information the organisation reports about itself. An "independent assessment" means the estimate was produced or checked by a party without a financial or reputational stake in the result. A "self-reported" figure comes from the organisation describing its own work. Both can be useful, but they carry different levels of confidence, and this site aims to always say which one you're looking at.
Sources and corrections
Each organisation's card lists when its identifying information (name, website, links) was last checked. As this site moves from a prototype to a fully researched catalogue, this section will link to the underlying sources and methodology notes behind each real estimate, along with the date it was last reviewed. If you spot something that looks outdated or wrong, corrections are welcome.