A Grand Evening – How would YOU donate €1000?

Effective Giving Ireland presented another donation event on November 19^th: A Grand Evening – How would YOU donate €1000?

The format of the event was to start with €1000 put up by a generous donor (not from EGI donations or funds) and to analyse the various ways this money could be donated – analogously to the way you might analyse how best to invest €1000. Because ultimately, when you donate money, presumably you want that money to help as many people (or animals) as possible, as much as possible.

We were thrilled and honoured to have Steve Thompson present the session and lead the discussion, and even more delighted when we saw the excellent presentation he prepared especially for the event.

We had a very engaged audience, as always, with lively and passionate discussion – we even had some protests (you had to be there!).
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Receiver Focus vs. Giver Focus

One chart beautifully captures a critical concept behind effective giving, which is a change in focus. Traditionally, we Irish have always been among the most charitable people on Earth. Which is truly great. And what we want to show is that we can do even better. By shifting our focus just a little. When we think about donation, we often think about it from the perspective of the giver– because we are the giver. What does it cost me to give? What sacrifices am I making? Does it make me feel good? Do I see the results? Do I experience gratitude? Do I gain respect? And so on.

Giving effectively means thinking instead about what the Receivers need most. If we do this, we often see ways to make our donations much more impactful, so that we can help more people, more effectively.

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Enabling Girls to attend School

However, it's not always obvious what is the most effective way to donate. For example, imagine you have the very noble objective of enabling more girls to attend school in a poor country. Which of the following ideas do you think will make the biggest difference?

- Cash Incentives

- Free Uniforms

- Merit-based Scholarships.

They are all great ideas, they all feel right. If you had the choice, you might be tempted to split your donation between all three. It feels fair, especially if there are very good people working on all three ideas. But given that you don't have infinite money, isn't it better to do research and give all your donation to the most effective intervention? In this case, the data are extremely compelling, and quite surprising: 

But ...that's still not the complete picture ...

If you take the research a bit further, you discover a far, far more impactful intervention: De-worming!

There are very generous donors supporting cash-incentives or merit-based scholarships to enable more girls to attend school. And it all helps. But if we could convince them to support de-worming programs instead, the impact of their donation might be 100 times as great. Because worms infect 1 in 5 humans every year. With just $100 donated to a de-worming program, they could enable one more girl to have a complete education.

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Three Buckets

Another concept people found particularly powerful was the “3 Buckets” idea. It is a bridge between the idealistic theory of effective giving and impact maximisation, and the reality that we are all humans, not robots, with our own preferences and with personal connections to particular charities.. Charity for most of us is a very complex and emotional decision. For me personally, the St. Vincent de Paul Society will always have a special place in my heart because my late father volunteered with them while I was growing up. Each of us has a connection like this.

The 3 buckets concept is to imagine you have a certain amount of money left over – perhaps at the end of the year – when all your essential items have been paid for. What should you do with that money? A good way to think about it is that there are three buckets, and you can divide the money among them:

1. Some money for personal things – for yourself, your family, your friends.
2. Some money for your favourite charities – maybe the local charity where your cousin volunteered, or the Nursing Home that cared for a sick relative.
3. Some money for effective causes to maximise its impact.

The point is: we do not ask people to give every spare euro they have to the most impactful charities – although some people do, and that is wonderful! Rather we realise that most people tend to focus exclusively on the first two, and we ask them to consider adding an effective charity to the mix – it can still be one in any area they are passionate about.

What Charities did the Audience Choose? 

At the end of the day, after a very lively discussion, our donors decided to divide the money among three highly effective charities:

• Animal Charity Evaluation top Animal Welfare Recommendation (10 votes) (€323)
• Founders Pledge Climate Fund (7 votes) (€226)
• GiveWell Max Impact Fund – global health and development (14 votes) (€452)

We were thrilled to discover that our donation to the Animal Charity was doubled, enabling our €1000 donation to provide more than €1300 of highly impactful support for very deserving causes. Truly a grand evening by any standards! 

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What's Next? 

Feedback from the event was very positive – although, being evidence-focused, we are conscious that the people who chose to attend our event were not necessarily a representative sample of the population 😃 – and we’re hoping to run another similar event in early 2026. If you attended and have any feedback (especially about how to improve it), we’d love to hear from you. And if you’d like to join a future session, please contact us or join our mailing list and we’ll keep you up to date. Or just watch our website.