EA NZ Operations

Support our work on effective altruism

Effective Altruism NZ — the nonprofit behind this website and donation platform — is a community of effective givers. We offer Kiwis the support and information they need to do the most good with their time, money, and other resources. Donating to our operations fund supports this work.

We don’t take a cut of donations made to our high-impact partner charities, so dedicated funding is essential for our operations to continue. Your donation both directly supports our work and acts as a vote of confidence, demonstrating the value of what we do to other potential funders.

Why donate to EA NZ?

Our Impact

As of March 2024, our community members have donated more than $4.5 million NZD to effective charities, and more than a dozen have transitioned into high impact career paths and study areas. We further estimate that, from 2022 to 2024:

  • EA NZ generated over $660,000 NZD in additional, counterfactual donations to highly-effective charities. (Donations which would not have been made in our absence)

  • The average dollar spent on our operations generated an additional $5-10 in value for high-impact charities. Please note that this isn’t a claim that your additional dollar will have a 5-10x multiplier, even though we think it will still add a lot of value.

  • Over 2000 people attended our events, used our donation platform, received a free book, or otherwise benefitted from our programmes.

All of this has been achieved on a small budget with extremely low overhead costs. (Though note that low overhead costs aren’t necessarily a good measure of impact). Our work was run entirely by volunteers from 2016-2020, and with part-time personnel from 2020-2022. In the 2022/23 financial year— our first with someone in a full-time paid role— we raised >$1M NZD, on a total operational budget of ~$60,000 NZD.

Need for Funding

Historically, the majority of our operational funding has come from institutional grant makers like the EA Infrastructure Fund and Meta Charity Funders. However, available funding has become increasingly constrained. Further, many institutional donors prefer to offer only short-term or partial funding. For example, Meta Charity Funders note that:

A number of grants seemed good …but nevertheless did not receive funding because they seemed unlikely to be able to fundraise enough to sustain their budget long-term. While we are okay with funding a large portion of a project’s budget as a one-off grant, we do not want organizations to depend on us for long-term funding….

This makes individual donor contributions very important to the success of our operations. Your donation both directly supports our work and acts as a vote of confidence, demonstrating the value of what we do to other potential funders.

If you’d like to see EA NZ’s work continue, please consider supporting our operations below.

Donate

loading...

Please note that, to save on transaction fees, we take donations via direct bank transfer. If you’d like to give another way, please get in touch with us.

Image: Rowan sending thank-you postcards to donors

FAQ

  • Our general policy is to hold enough operational funding to support our work for about two years (based on relatively conservative calculations). Once we pass that level, we reallocate any further funds to grantmaking. This means that any “excess” dollars will go to the most impactful charities we’ve found. We’re grateful for the generosity of our donors, and we’re proud that we can increase our impact through this granting process.

    You can find more information, including our full operational funding policy here.

  • Things like:

    • Personnel time (our largest expense)

    • Software subscriptions

    • Website hosting and domain names