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How to earn and give more for animals

Some practical things to consider

This article provides guidance on how to contribute to animal causes in a way that does the most good for animals. We suggest you focus on long-term impact with your donations by:

Earning more
Spending wisely
Giving generously

Below, we cover:

Practical steps you can take for achieving financial stability that allows you to donate more.
How to make strategic decisions given the varying impact of different charities. You’ll consider factors like a charity’s track record, intervention strength, leadership quality, organisational culture, and cost-effectiveness.Whether to donate to managed funds or directly to individual charities.
How you can inspire others to follow your example and multiply your impact beyond your donations.

Earning more

Not everyone is motivated to donate to charities. This could be for a lot of reasons, but for some people, it’s simply due to having a low income and concern about financial stability. This is a fair point! Being cautious about giving money to charity when you are not sure about your long-term financial security is normal (and responsible!). Fortunately, we can solve this over the long term — by taking practical steps to achieve a higher income and more financial stability.

Increasing your income has much more impact than reducing your spending

When considering how to be more charitable, we tend to think about sparing money for giving rather than earning more. This is reasonable for one-off donations, since you can’t change your income overnight. But if you think about your potential to donate over a long period, this dynamic changes. If your conditions allow, you may be able to earn more than you currently do. And if you happen to accumulate more wealth, you can donate much more easily than you currently do.

Focusing on cutting spending has a lot of limitations:

A lot of spending is necessary: housing, healthcare, childcare, education, utilities, basic necessities, etc.
It’s a good idea to have adequate savings for some level of financial security.
It can be unpleasant and difficult to give up certain things you enjoy, which can make you feel resentful and less likely to do it.

On the other hand, even modest increases in income can allow you to donate more while not affecting your welfare (assuming you like the job that comes with increased pay). If you can make your donations more frequent and more significant, you’ll donate much larger amounts than you could by cutting your spending.

Pay varies a lot between sectors, organisations, and positions

To some extent, your income is related to the effort and time you put in. But even more importantly, your income is highly dependent on where you work and which position you have. The average and maximum salaries in certain fields, organisations, and positions may be many times higher than in others. So if your goal is to earn more to donate more, it’s a good idea to know about these differences and consider them alongside your other preferences.

For example:

Average and maximum salaries in finance and engineering are typically high. Big companies like Google, Amazon, and Apple, along with successful startups, offer great career opportunities with high earning potential, especially in the long run.
Certain competitive positions that require highly in-demand skills can also be financially rewarding. These may include management and leadership positions, as well as certain expert positions that are exceptionally important and rare.
Seniority is also an important factor for higher pay. As you get promotions, your salary increases.

In all cases, it’s crucial to investigate different career paths, seek out and apply for better job opportunities, and negotiate with employers to receive fairer and better pay.

A lot of people shy away from requesting a pay raise. People often feel uncomfortable or even guilty about this, even if they perform well at their work and deserve a higher salary. But this is counterproductive. Most employers are happy to have these conversations openly with employees they want to keep. And it’s worth keeping in mind that if you do get a pay raise, you can use it to help more animals by donating more — so consider framing the conversation as doing this for animals, if that makes it easier to face.

Saving and investing

Your salary is crucial, but the things you own can significantly boost your financial strength for donations. So it’s reasonable to aim for certain savings goals and allocate a fixed amount of your earnings to save for the future.

If you can accumulate enough wealth to acquire things like stock shares, real estate, or high-interest savings accounts (and make good investment decisions), they may generate more value than your salary. This is especially true in the long term, because savings and investments compound over time.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you should follow every stock on the market and follow every world currency like a trader. But it makes sense to know the basics about what to do with your spare money, and be careful to make sound decisions when buying a house or investing in an index fund, for example.

The risk here is real: a lot of people lose their hard-earned money because they make reckless decisions when it comes to investment. Investing aggressively in expensive stocks, taking on extensive loans for specific real estate, or not having a well-diversified portfolio can be very risky, given all the uncertainties. It’s imperative to seek professional guidance from someone you trust to avoid these pitfalls.

Earning more in the long run is usually more important

Animal liberation is going to take a long time, and animal advocacy organisations will need support over decades. So it’s important to make long-term plans instead of just thinking about your income and donation budget for the next month or year.

Taking a long-term perspective can change your strategy about how to use your time and energy. In particular, it makes sense to be patient about things that can potentially increase your income in the future.

For instance, investing in your education or skill development may require significant upfront costs (both money and time), but it could easily pay off in the long term — as long as you’ve researched how it changes your career prospects.

Entry-level salaries in some career paths can also be unimpressive — but it’s a good idea to judge these by their future financial prospects. For example, some positions set you up well to progress in the sector into much higher-paying roles, while other positions may have a cap on how much you can earn, even if you put in years.

This can also apply to entrepreneurship: founding your own company may be less profitable than a job at first, but if it’s successful, it can generate much more wealth in the long run. (If you’re interested in this approach to earning more to donate more, check out Ambitious Impact’s Founding to Give programme.)

Spending less

In order to donate, you also need to save some of the money you earn. But that doesn’t mean you have to be extremely frugal. Simply being smart about your spending can allow you to donate significant amounts.

Also, cutting spending doesn’t mean you need to sacrifice your happiness. Charitable giving can be a great source of personal satisfaction, as well as a great way to do good.

Prioritise cutting big spending, not small expenses

It might seem extravagant to buy an expensive coffee, but in the big picture, it’s just a small fraction of your overall spending: having occasional treats won’t have a large impact on your budget.

To get a clearer picture of what does have a large impact on your budget, you’ll first want to assess what you spend your money on. Things like rent, mortgage, healthcare, childcare, education, groceries, utilities, or credit paybacks probably comprise a large portion of your budget. After these necessities, see where you’re spending the most. Things like travel, eating out, or buying clothes can become large items if there is a pattern that adds up. You might be surprised by which expenses impact your budget the most.

Once you identify where you spend more, then you can see where you can make reasonable cuts. When done right, you can make decent cuts without necessarily affecting your personal welfare, such as:

Renting a cheaper flat or sharing costs with a roommate
Remortgaging for a better rate
Seeking insurance with a better rate
Buying your usual items when they’re on sale
Cancelling unused subscriptions
Sticking to a budget that you endorse for things like entertainment, clothes, and restaurant meals

Budgeting in advance and setting reasonable limits

Sometimes it’s hard to control our spending. Many consumer goods can be tempting, and they’re marketed in a way that encourages us to make impulse purchases. And even when we succeed in controlling ourselves, it can be exhausting to constantly think about what counts as a “reasonable” purchase.

Setting spending limits for different categories in your budget can help you stick to it without worrying about every small expense, allowing you to enjoy treats like your latte. Of course, you might need to adjust your budget from time to time — that’s fine. The idea here is that, by setting certain limits beforehand, you’re more likely to be aware of your spending, make wise financial decisions, and stick to what you decided.

Spending less in the long run is usually more important

Just like with your salary and investments, it’s important to make long-term plans instead of just thinking about your spending and donation budget for next month or year.

Donations accumulate impact over time, so prioritising your current spending might not be the best strategy in the long run. There may be a lot of instances where spending more now can allow you to save more in the long run. For example:

Buying durable products may cost more now, but you won’t have to replace them in the future.
Depending on the housing market, it might be a good idea to take out a mortgage to buy a house or a flat rather than continuing to pay rent.
Spending money on insurance can save you much more in the long run.

Balancing frugality with your wellbeing

People often see being frugal as a virtue. This may be partly true, since a lot of consumer spending is superficial and unnecessary. On the other hand, it’s completely reasonable to spend some money for your own pleasure. Things like going on vacation, buying something nice, and having an occasional dinner in a nice restaurant are not in contradiction with caring for animals and doing good.

Constantly obsessing over your spending can be very stressful, which can affect your wellbeing as well as your productivity. Some spending can be important for your happiness, and cutting it might not be worth it. And if you feel deprived, you run the risk of spending even more than before to improve your mood.

You can think about frugality like committing to a healthy diet. Almost all healthy diets require some form of calorie restriction — we can’t live a healthy life only eating cookies and potato chips — but calculating the calories of every single meal you have or never allowing yourself some treats is not sustainable and probably leads to failure. More successful forms of dieting allow some flexibility and room for personal pleasure.

Committing to a reasonable amount of frugality is similar. Tracking and limiting your overall spending is good, but overkill is neither necessary nor impactful in the long run.

Giving more and giving more effectively

Donating even the slightest amount to any charity is an act of goodness that deserves appreciation. And a lot of people feel that this should be the only threshold for our consideration: just giving some money to some charity.

But this is a short-sighted view, and leaves a lot of impact for animals on the table:

Many people can give more — much more than what ordinary donors give.
They can also make a greater impact for more animals by taking the time to find the most effective giving opportunities.

So we think the ideal threshold should be higher: giving more and giving more effectively. But how can we do that?

You can give much more than you think

A lot of good-intentioned people only make one-time donations that are quite low compared to their earnings and savings. This often isn’t because they’re ungenerous: a lot of people simply do not think about how much they can realistically donate. Once you calculate it more carefully, it might become clear that donating 1% to 10% is a realistic range — depending on your earnings, savings, and spending, as well as your ambition.

Making this kind of significant donation monthly or annually can easily be many times higher than typical one-off small donations — and can make a huge difference for the organisations working to improve animal welfare.

But 10% (or even 1%) is much more than most people think about donating, so it can feel strange at first. We think you’ll find that if you make a solid budget and a good plan, there is nothing weird about it. It simply makes sense to give more if you can afford to give more. It’s also extremely empowering to do something that can help so many animals.

Impact varies a lot between different charities

Many charities can easily fail to have an impact for animals, even when they have good intentions and put in a lot of hard work. Animal advocacy work is complex, and in a lot of cases there are no clear feedback or accountability mechanisms: a charity’s survival depends less on its ability to make an impact than on having a stream of funding that allows its operations to resume.

Unfortunately, most donors don’t put a lot of effort into investigating whether charities make an impact, and how that impact compares to other charities’ work. Instead, often people make their donation decisions based on prominent advertising or name recognition. As a result, there are probably a lot of charities that continue to raise money but don’t make a significant difference with their work. So you shouldn’t simply assume that any charity that has good intentions actually makes the large impact they claim they do. It’s important to be cautious when deciding where to donate.

On the other hand, many charities succeed in making a huge impact, or have a very strong chance of doing so if given enough support. Some of them may communicate this opportunity and convince people to support them, but that’s not always easy — given limited resources, outreach and marketing may be minimal for even very effective charities.

This means you might have to spend some time researching donation opportunities to make informed and reasoned decisions that will impact animals the most. Randomly choosing a couple of charities you’re familiar with, or making prompt decisions with limited research and thinking, can result in very low impact for animals.

Imagine you were going to buy a phone or a car. You would likely spend a lot of time and effort researching your options to make the choice that serves you best. Choosing which charity to donate to should be no different: just as you would not randomly buy a phone because you like the colour, or buy a car because you like the advertisement, it is also unreasonable to pick a charity because it “feels good.”

Savvy donors prioritise factors like:

A track record of success
Evidence-based or promising interventions
Capable leadership
Strong organisational culture
Cost-effectiveness (which is particularly important, because the impact of your donation is directly tied to how cost-effective the interventions are)

This may seem overwhelming for some people — if that’s the case, you might want to consider donating to managed funds rather than to individual organisations (more on that just below). We also highly recommend taking a look at Giving What We Can’s giving guides to have a better understanding of effective giving.

We estimate that your donations can be more than 100 times more impactful than typical donations if you make the right decisions about where to give your money. Join us in helping animals in need today! Take the pledge to donate and advocate for animal welfare.

Should you donate to managed funds or individual charities?

Choosing where to donate can seem complex and challenging, especially if you don’t have the necessary skills, time, or expertise for in-depth research. For this reason, some donors prefer to donate to “funds” that pool donations from multiple donors. These funds are run by fund managers who decide how to allocate donations from multiple donors. Fund managers have expertise and experience in grantmaking, as well as the time to evaluate and weigh the funding needs of different animal charities.

If you want to donate to a fund, consider these:

Effective Altruism Funds: Animal Welfare Fund was recently recommended as one of the best giving options by independent evaluators Giving What We Can.
Animal Charity Evaluators also has its Recommended Charity Fund and Movement Grants Fund.

By deferring to these funds, you can save a lot of time and avoid making big errors, especially if you don’t have much knowledge about different organisations and interventions in animal advocacy.

On the other hand, if you trust your judgement and believe that you have the necessary level of information, you might want to pick the organisations to donate to yourself. This could be a good approach if you:

Strongly support a specific charity or animal advocacy field that you believe is not well represented in funds’ portfolios.
Have a better understanding of certain organisations in your own country or network. This may be especially true for new and small organisations in certain regions where receiving funding from abroad is particularly hard and legally limited. In those cases, individual donors may be better positioned to select and support high-impact opportunities than major funders. Seed funding in cases like these can also be incredibly impactful, as it can be the difference between a project happening or not.

Multiply your effect by influencing others

A lot of people believe that their charitable giving should be quiet or anonymous. Their concern is understandable: bragging about giving goes against the very idea of charity.

But we think there are good reasons that you should share your charitable giving, even if at first you find it uncomfortable. Not sharing your charitable giving experience might mean missing the chance to inspire others who might start donating themselves.

We are all social beings, and all of us are influenced by what other people around us do. We think the world would be a better place if it was a social norm to give generously to effective organisations. Unfortunately, both charitable giving and effective charitable giving are currently rare acts.

For more people to adopt this mindset and practice, they need to see other people doing it too. Publicly sharing about our giving, especially effective giving, is crucial to raising awareness and establishing effective giving as a social norm.

That’s why we think publicly sharing your experience and thoughts about effective giving when talking with your friends and colleagues or on social media has the potential to create a lot more impact for animals — even if you are only using your message, not your money.

Imagine that only one other person decides to give more to effective charities after hearing your story. If they matched your donation, that would double your impact. And that person can also influence other people too, which can further multiply the impact.

As you can see, simply sharing your experience and encouraging others to follow suit can deliver much more impact than increasing your donation even by a significant amount, since you can literally multiply your impact by inviting other people to join you.

Note, however, that people mostly follow other people’s actions when they regard them highly. As mentioned above, coming across as arrogant and vain would probably do more harm than good — so when being public about your effective giving, keep it modest and humble.

What if each of us who cares about animals donated a small portion of our income to support these organisations? Imagine the collective impact we could create! If only 100 people commit to donating just 10% of their income, they can fully fund an entire animal charity, making an astonishing impact for animals in need. This is even more impressive when we think that, individually, it wouldn’t even significantly affect our finances.

What truly matters are the animals who need our help and the actions we can take to support them. By taking simple, meaningful steps, we can make a real difference. Join us in helping animals in need today!