As a chapter, your goal is to motivate people to take The 1% Pledge. Therefore, you need to understand what the pledge is, why we encourage people to take a giving pledge, and how to sign people up.
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Key Resources and related pages
What is the 1% Pledge?
The 1% Pledge is a commitment to consistently donate one percent of your current or future income to highly effective charities that are chosen by One for the World and GiveWell.
While we call it the '1%' pledge, it is up to donors how much they choose to donate. Some pledgers give 2% or 3%, and some even give 10%! We use 1% as a starting point because this amount allows most people to participate in effective giving, not just the top 1%.
Why take a giving pledge?
Our goal is to create a culture of giving which prioritizes the beneficiaries of our donations, and what helps them the most. As it turns out, giving pledges increase the amount that is donated, and they are more effective because charities can rely on semi-consistent funding rather than varying one-off donations.
A giving pledge has a lot of advantages:
You are more likely to donate consistently
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By having a clear commitment, you don’t face the constant burden of needing to decide each and every year whether and how much to donate.
When you take a giving pledge, all you need to do is stand by your commitment.
Pledges help us think about percentages of our income, rather than $10 increments
- $20 seems like a lot. We might think that’s pretty generous. But if we are earning $60k per year, $20 is just 0.4% of our income, which suddenly doesn’t seem that generous in context. And if our salary increases to $100k, we’d be giving just 0.2%. Clearly we can afford to give more and we’ll have a much bigger impact if we give what we can - so pledging a percentage helps us do that.
Pledges keep us honest to our values, even as we grow older
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If we take a pledge now, we can be sure we’ll still be donating and donating effectively even if we’re starting a family or buying our first home or progressing in our career.
Pledges help us build movement to take on huge problems like extreme poverty
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Together we can accomplish difficult goals that we might have trouble achieving alone. We can provide accountability and support, share research and ideas, and pool our resources to fund outstanding giving opportunities.
This also helps to change our identity, we can see ourselves as committed effective givers, this helps us to live up to our values of effectively helping others.
By pledging, we can inspire others to join us and therefore increase our own impact
- When we zoom out to the level of society, we find that taking a public pledge helps inspire others to follow suit. Together we can forge a world in which giving effectively and significantly is a common practice.
- Recent work in social psychology found that individuals are more likely to donate larger amounts to charity when they are aware others are doing so. This is why we think taking a public pledge is likely to do more good than donating privately.
- By joining an effective giving community, you could be an inspiration to others. Not only could you increase the total amount of charitable giving, but you encourage it to be directed towards the world’s most effective charities which could result in orders of magnitude more impact.
