Donate to 80,000 Hours
Table of Contents
This page has information about us and our track record, which we think would be useful to potential donors.
We will be opening our next fundraising round soon and would welcome donations through our Giving What We Can donation page. We are also excited to hear from potential donors – just email [email protected].
About us
At 80,000 Hours, we provide research and support to help people have high-impact careers.
Our goal is to get talented people working on the world’s most pressing problems. We focus on problems that threaten the long-term future, including risks from artificial intelligence and catastrophic pandemics.
To achieve our goal, we:
- Reach people who might be interested through marketing, engaging and user-friendly content, and word-of-mouth.
- Introduce people to information, frameworks, and ideas which are useful for having a high-impact career and help them get excited about contributing to solving pressing global problems.
- Support people in transitioning to careers that contribute to solving pressing global problems.
We provide four main services:
Our CEO is Niel Bowerman (you can read the announcement about the decision here).
80,000 Hours is currently a project of the Effective Ventures group, though we are in the process of spinning out into our own entity. You can read more about Effective Ventures’ plans here and our own plan here.
Our track record
We think that donating to 80,000 Hours is a promising way for people with similar priorities as us to have an impact.
We have a strong track record of encouraging people to change their career plans to focus on pressing problems, helping them find impactful positions, and introducing them to the effective altruism community.
Here, we’ll go through a few recent sources of evidence about our impact. You may also want to explore our repository of organisation evaluations, which cover our historical impact and progress. You can also reach out to [email protected] if you have any questions.
Plan changes
We have tracked hundreds of cases where people have made a major decision to pursue a higher-impact path — such as deciding to go to grad school, switching causes, or taking a particular job — which they say they might not have done without us.
We call these plan changes. Because careers are so long, we think an average plan change influences how someone spends tens of thousands of hours. We estimate that this is equivalent to hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of value to the world over the course of each person’s lifetime.
As of the end of 2022, we had tracked 604 plan changes. We estimate that the true number of plan changes for this period was closer to 2,000, because we only expect to find out about a fraction of all plan changes.
Here are four examples of plan changes:
Placements
Top organisations working on global catastrophic risk reduction regularly tell us that we’re their best source of referrals.
The table below shows some of the roles people have found on our job board between 2018 and March 2024 — though we expect this to underestimate the true number of placements attributable to us.
We also know about 29 times when our headhunting service introduced an organisation to a candidate who they hadn’t already been considering and then that person was hired for the role.1
Open Philanthropy’s 2020 survey
Open Philanthropy recognised 80,000 Hours as one of seven organisations and individuals that “seemed to have been most impactful on our respondents robustly, across multiple metrics,” highlighting the influence of all of our programmes.
According to Open Philanthropy’s overall impact-weighted measure2 of how influential different factors were in the years up to 2020:
- Engagement with 80,000 Hours was tied as the most mentioned factor in the free text questions about what increased respondents’ positive impact on the world. When respondents were asked to name the top four of these factors that influenced them, 80,000 Hours was the 4th most mentioned factor.
When respondents were prompted to assign influence to a list of factors, 80,000 Hours was the 2nd most influential factor.
For their 2023 survey, Open Philanthrophy have shared with us that we positively influenced the careers of a similar proportion of survey respondents over the years 2020-2022.
2022 EA survey
When survey respondents were asked which factors were “important for getting involved in EA,” 58% mentioned 80,000 Hours, making it the most commonly mentioned factor.
When respondents were asked which factors had helped them have an impact and connect with other EAs, 31% mentioned 80,000 Hours, making it the 2nd most commonly mentioned factor.
80,000 Hours’ work on AI safety
Some of our donors have asked whether 80,000 Hours is a strong donation opportunity from the perspective of AI safety. This section outlines some of our work in this area.
Right now, we think that the risk of an AI-related catastrophe is the most pressing problem that many of our users could work on.
Here’s a snapshot of the progress we made in the realm of AI safety during 2023.
- We had around 204,000 clickthroughs from our job board to AI safety and policy roles.
- We also think that many of our career development roles will also be useful for people planning to work in AI roles in the future.
- Historically, people have found jobs at GovAI, Redwood, Constellation, DeepMind, and OpenAI through our job board.
- We released 14 podcast episodes on AI. Some of our favourites were:
- We released 4 new career reviews specifically on AI topics:
- We moved information security in high-impact areas and expert in AI hardware onto our list of priority career paths this year.
- We’ve sent 12 research newsletters about AI. Our newsletter has more than 400,000 subscribers.
- We’ve covered news topics like new governance initiatives and promoted our AI-focused podcast and website releases.
- We’ve carried out 60 headhunts for AI-focused roles at 30 different orgs.
- We had advising calls with many people excited about working on AI, helping them to think through their uncertainties, test out their fit, and build their network in AI.
This kind of work means that we have a history of helping people on their path to working on AI safety. Neel is one example of this.
If you’d like more information about our work on AI or another particular cause area, please contact [email protected].
Growth over time
While the information in our track record above gives a better picture of our historical impact, the lead metrics here are also useful for understanding our current engagement and output. We estimate there’s a 1–4 year lag between the primary year that people engage with our service and the time of their plan change, so our lead metrics ar ea proxy for how our impact might grow in the future.
Here are our annual lead metrics for 2021-2023:
A visualisation of the full-time-equivalent staff working on 80,000 Hours over the same period:
How to donate
We provide our services free of charge, so we are dependent upon the support of generous donors. Our largest donor is Open Philanthropy, but we value being able to support ourselves with a range of funding sources and are excited to grow our network of donors.
If you’d like to donate, you can:
Notes and references
- Note that most (>70%) of these placements are attributable to our headhunting efforts between 2018 and 2020. In 2023, we began re-investing in headhunting, but don’t yet have much placement feedback for these due to hiring lead times.↩
- Open Philanthropy reported both weighted and unweighted rankings for each of the different influence factors. The rankings reported above are based on the weighted rankings, which include Open Philanthropy’s quantitative assessment of the value of the respondents career.
Here’s a breakdown of how 80,000 Hours’ ranking differ when using the unweighted rankings:
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