Every year, thousands of people collect donations for good causes by promising to throw themselves out of planes. Sponsored skydiving sounds like a win-win: the fundraiser gets an exhilarating once-in-a-lifetime experience while raising money for a worthy cause. What could be the harm in that?

Quite a bit, actually. A study of two popular parachuting centres in Britain from 1991–1995 found that approximately 1,500 people went skydiving for charity, collecting more than £120,000. That sounds pretty impressive — until you consider a few caveats.

First, the cost of the skydiving expeditions came out of the donations. So of the £120,000 raised, only £45,000 went to charity. Second, because most of the skydivers were first-time jumpers, they suffered a combined total of 163 injuries, resulting in about 100 hospital stays with an average length of nine days.

In order to treat these injuries, the UK’s National Health Service spent around £610,000. This means the net effect of the fundraisers’ actions was to reduce resources for health services. Ironic, given that many of the charities supported focused on health-related issues.¹

Photo by Ann W, CC BY 2.0

Thankfully, skydiving is a lot safer today than it was in the nineties. And we suspect this study may have underestimated the amount of donations raised. But even if the true amount were five times higher, it would still be less than the healthcare costs. The paper remains a useful illustration of how many attempts to do good can feel intuitive while in reality being ineffective, or even making things worse.

A similar story can be told about volunteering. One problem is that volunteers need to be managed. If untrained volunteers use the time of trained managers, it’s easy for them to cost the organisation more than the value they add.

A big reason many volunteering schemes persist is because volunteers are more likely to donate. When the refugee organisation FORGE cut its volunteering scheme to be more effective overall, it inadvertently triggered a big drop in donations. While volunteering can be effective in the right circumstances, it’s not always guaranteed.

Finally, the most common advice is to focus on changing your behaviour and personal consumption, such as by cycling to work instead of driving, buying ethical products, and reducing your carbon footprint. The problem is many of these changes achieve very little.

All this said, in our research, we’ve found that anyone can do a huge amount to improve the lives of others. This is especially true for those earning an average graduate salary in a rich country. Best of all, they can do this without changing jobs or even making major sacrifices. But they need to be very particular about how they approach it.

Reading time: 10 minutes

1. Donating effectively

How can you take whichever job you’d find most personally rewarding and still do a huge amount of good? Give 10% of your income to the world’s poorest people. It’s as simple as that.

How much good could this do? Here’s a bare minimum.

Since 2008, GiveDirectly has made it possible to give cash directly to the poorest people in East Africa using only a mobile phone. We don’t think this is the most effective way to donate to charity, but it’s simple and quantifiable, so it makes a good starting point.

As we saw in part one, the more money you have, the less additional money will improve your life. The graph below shows some of the same data but now with some other countries added.² Across the world, it turns out that doubling your income is associated with about a half-point gain in life satisfaction on a scale of 1–10. However, that means that in countries where income is already high, you need to increase it by a lot more to get the same increase in life satisfaction.

Poor people served by GiveDirectly in Kenya live on about $800 per year.³ This figure is based on how much $800 buys in the US, meaning it already takes account of the fact that money goes further in low-income countries (“purchasing parity“).

Sometimes, people refuse to believe this figure. They say, “if your income were truly $800 per year in the US, it would be impossible to live, and you would die.” And in a sense, that’s right. The people who live on incomes this low do often die as a result.

Over the course of their career, the average US college graduate can expect an income of about $77,000 (in 2023) or $54,500 after tax.⁴ This means that if someone earning that average level of income were to donate 10%, they could double the annual income of seven people living in extreme poverty each year.

To be a bit more precise, if the relationship between money and wellbeing we described in part one holds, a dollar will do about 68 times more good if you give it to one of the poorest people in Kenya than it would if an average college grad spent it on themselves.⁵

The impact of this decision can be enormous. Take Grace, a typical recipient of donations from GiveDirectly. She’s a 48-year-old widow who lives with four children in Kenya. When asked what she would do with the money, she said:

Talking about her life in general, she said:

My proudest achievement is that I have managed to educate my son in secondary school. My biggest hardship in life is [that I] lack a proper source of income. My current goals are to build and own a pit latrine and dig a borehole since getting water is a very big problem.

GiveDirectly conducted a randomised controlled trial of their programme and found that recipients saw significant reductions in hunger, stress, and other bad outcomes for years after receiving the transfers. These results add to substantial existing evidence showing that cash transfers have significant benefits.⁶

How much sacrifice will this involve?

Often when we think of doing good with our careers, we think about paths like teaching or charity work. These roles often pay less than half what you could earn in the private sector and may not align with your preferences. Rather than dedicating 100% of your efforts to one of those paths, giving 10% of your income while doing work you enjoy could be a much smaller sacrifice.

Indeed, as we’ve seen, if you earn over $75,000 as an individual, extra income won’t increase your happiness that much. Doing things that help others, however, including giving to charity, will probably increase your happiness quite a bit.

The reason donations can be so effective is that it’s possible to send your money to the best organisations in the world. Although many charities aren’t effective, the best are. And while GiveDirectly is certainly an effective charity, there are others that are even better.

It’s common to hear charities claim things like “$2 can save a life,” perhaps because $2 is enough to pay for one vaccination. This is technically true in that there’s a small chance it could. But it’s totally misleading — it’s very unlikely that one extra vaccination prevents one fatal case of disease. However, when you vaccinate enough people, saving a life becomes likely.

GiveWell is a leading independent charity evaluator that has spent more than a decade searching for the charity that saves lives most effectively.⁷ They draw on academic studies, but also make their own, much more sceptical estimates, and vet the organisations they recommend with site visits.

They estimate that their top charities can, on average, save a life with about $3,000. For example, with that sum, London-based NGO Malaria Consortium can provide over 2,000 courses of antimalarial medication, which would protect about 500 children, which, given the prevalence of malaria in those regions, would probably prevent one of them from dying.⁸ In addition, this provides other benefits that come with not having malaria, such as increased income, which in turn has wider positive effects over time.

With a typical US graduate salary, donating 10% of your income to the Malaria Consortium could therefore save more than two lives every year. That would amount to over 80 lives saved over your career. In the previous section of the guide, we estimated that a typical doctor in clinical medicine saves three lives over their career. This means that by donating 10% of your income, you could achieve over 20 times as much impact on health as you could by becoming a doctor.

These kinds of proven, cost-effective health programmes offer such a good opportunity that even the most vociferous critics of aid have offered few arguments against them.

William Easterly is the author of The White Man’s Burden, perhaps the most famous examination of the ways large-scale, top-down foreign aid has failed to achieve its promise. However, he concludes by calling for governments to:

Put the focus back where it belongs: get the poorest people in the world such obvious goods as the vaccines, the antibiotics, the food supplements, the improved seeds, the fertilizer, the roads . . . This is not making the poor dependent on handouts; it is giving the poorest people the health, nutrition, education and other inputs that raise the payoff to their own efforts to better their lives.

Likewise, Dambisa Moyo is the author of Dead Aid, which argues that most aid is not only inefficient but actively harmful. However, she also emphasises that her argument does not apply to “emergency and charity-based aid” like the essential medical supplies we discuss here.⁹

That said, we agree there could be even more pressing issues than global health. If you agree too, then the case for donating is even stronger because you can support those even more pressing issues instead. For example, if you think it’s more effective to support systemic change than bottom-up empowerment, you could have an even greater impact by funding those systemic efforts. We’ll come back to which issues might be even more pressing than global health in part five of the guide, or you can read our separate article about how to pick the highest-impact charity.

Wherever you decide to donate, there is huge potential. If everyone in the richest 10% of the world’s population donated 10% of their income, the total sum would add up to $5 trillion per year.¹⁰ This would not only be enough to end malaria, but also to double scientific research funding, raise everyone in the world above the $2.15 per day poverty line, provide universal basic education, and still have plenty left to fund a renaissance in the arts, go to Mars… and invest another $1 trillion in mitigating climate change.¹¹

Read more about whether giving 10% will make you happier

How is this possible?

It’s astonishing that we can do so much good while sacrificing so little. But is it too good to be true? Consider one of the most important graphs in economics, the graph of world income:¹²

The x-axis shows the percentage of people in the world at each level of income, shown on the y-axis. Income has again been adjusted to indicate how much a dollar will buy in a person’s home country. If the world were completely equal, the line would be horizontal.

Citizens of wealthy countries tend to know they’re rich by global standards, but they don’t usually think of themselves as the richest people in the world — they’re not the bankers, CEOs, or celebrities, after all. But as of 2024, if you earn $70,000 per year after taxes, and don’t have kids, then globally speaking you are the 1%. If you earn over $20,000, then you’re still in the global top 10%.¹³

Find out how rich you are by using this quick calculator.

These numbers are approximate, but if you’re reading this you’re probably still somewhere in that big spike on the right-hand side of the graph (and perhaps even way off the chart). Most of the world is in the flat bit at the bottom.

There’s no reason to be embarrassed by this fact, but it does emphasise the importance of considering how you can use your good fortune to help others. In a more equal world, we could just focus on helping those immediately around us and making our own lives go well. But in the actual world, we have an enormous opportunity to help people further away with little cost to ourselves — and it would be a shame to squander it.

Should you save a person’s life or spend your money on adding more clutter to your home?

Take action right now

Many of the staff at 80,000 Hours, including myself, were persuaded by these arguments and have pledged to give at least 10% of our lifetime income to the world’s most effective charities. We did it through an organisation called Giving What We Can, which was founded by Toby Ord and Will MacAskill.

Giving What We Can enables you to take a public pledge to give 10% of your income to the charities you believe are most effective. You can take the pledge in just a few minutes, and it’s likely to be the most significant thing you can do right now to do more good with your life.

Pledge now

It’s not legally binding, and you get to choose where the money goes. If you’re a student, it only commits you to give 1% until after you graduate. You’ll be joining over 10,000 people who’ve collectively pledged over $1 billion.

The pledge is not for everyone. We’d recommend being cautious if you have significant debt or financial problems, if you’re not sure you can stick to it, or if you’re planning to work in a lower-paid job.

If you’re not quite ready yet, Giving What We Can allows you to take a “trial pledge” to give as little as 1% of your income for any period you choose, letting you see how it goes before making a long-term commitment.

2. Helping through effective advocacy

What about if you don’t want to give money? Just as the lottery of our birthplace can make us rich by global standards, we can also have political influence through blind luck.

Countries with large economies or populations have a disproportionate impact on issues like global trade, migration, climate change and technology policy. So if you live in a country that’s at least partially democratic, consider advocating for important issues.

We were initially sceptical that one person could make much of a difference through political advocacy — but when we dug into the numbers, we changed our minds.

Let’s take perhaps the simplest example: voting in elections. Several studies have used statistical models to estimate the chances that a single vote could determine the US presidential election. Because the US electoral system is determined at the state level, if you live in a state that strongly favours one candidate, your chance of deciding the outcome is effectively zero. But if you live in a state that’s contested, your chances rise to between one in 10 million and one in a million. That’s quite a bit higher than your chances of winning the lottery.

Remember, the US federal government is big — very big. Let’s imagine one candidate wanted to spend 0.2% more of GDP on foreign aid. That would be about $187 billion of extra foreign aid over their four-year term.¹⁴ One millionth of that is $187,000. So if voting takes you an hour, it could be the most important hour — in terms of its expected impact — you’ll spend that year.

You can make a similar argument for other rich countries. While smaller countries have smaller budgets, each vote has more chance of swaying the outcome, so your expected influence ends up about the same. See our full analysis on the impact of voting.

We’ve used the example of voting since it’s quantifiable, but we believe the basic idea — the very small chance of changing a very big thing — applies to other forms of advocacy, such as petitioning your representative, getting out to vote for the right candidate, or going to a town hall meeting — especially if you focus on the most important and more neglected issues.

3. Being a ‘multiplier’ to help others be more effective

Suppose you don’t have any money or influence, and you don’t see a route to getting any. What then?

One option is to try and change that. We cover how to invest in yourself — no matter what job you have — in our article on how to be more successful in any career.

Alternatively, you might know someone else with money, power, or notable skills, and that means you can make a difference by helping them achieve more.

Suppose you come across a high-impact job, but you’re not sure it’s a good fit for your skills. If you can tell someone else about the job, and they take it, that does as much good as if you had taken it yourself — even more if they’re a better fit for it than you.¹⁵ This is an example of being a multiplier. By mobilising and enabling others, it’s often possible to do more than you could through just your own efforts.

Likewise, it’s often possible to raise more for charity through fundraising than you can donate yourself. For instance, if you work at a company with a donation-matching scheme, you might be able to encourage other employees to use it.

Maybe you can think of other impactful people in your life and ways you could help them. For instance, if you can save a famous scientist one hour of time by helping them with admin, lab prep, or childcare, that would result in one hour of extra research. What matters is that more good gets done — not that you do it with your own hands.

Here are some additional ways you can become a multiplier:

Anyone can have an impact

So, good news: you don’t need to throw yourself out of a plane to do good. In fact, there are far easier (and safer) ways anyone can have a positive impact, which are also more effective.

Due to our fortunate positions in the world, there’s a lot we can do to make a difference without making significant sacrifices, whatever jobs we end up in. These include:

1. Give 10% of your income to effective charities.
2. Use your political influence, such as by voting.
3. Help others have an impact.

You might like to consider taking the 10% pledge right now. Or take a moment to consider how else you might be able to make a big impact with little sacrifice.

What if you want to make a difference directly through your career? If you can achieve so much with just 10% of your income, then what you could achieve with your entire 80,000 hours over decades could be huge.

That’s what we’ll cover in the next three articles, starting with how to choose a world problem to focus on.

Read next:  Part 4: How to choose which world problem to focus on

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