We’re excited to share several updates since our last briefing.
The milestones we share below are yours, too: Thank you to everyone who contributed to a fantastic giving season for Rethink Charity’s effective giving platform, RC Forward. Together, you donated $1.9 million CAD in Q4, 2020! This comprised the lion’s share of the $2.6 million CAD total donated through RC Forward in 2020.
Our work is primarily funded by donations and grants. If you’ve ever donated to Rethink Charity or one of our projects, thank you so much for your support. It makes a real difference in our ability to keep our high-impact projects running!
Recent headlines
Rethink Charity: Tee Barnett has transitioned to advisory and board roles, and we recently welcomed two new staff members, Megan Jamer and Ilva Ravinska. Our major RC Forward systems overhaul represents a funding opportunity to increase this effective giving platform’s cost effectiveness and impact.
RC Forward: Canadians donated $1.9 million CAD over giving season 2020 and surpassed $9.4 million CAD all-time donations to effective charities! We’re looking forward to celebrating the $10 million CAD milestone with you. Check out RC Forward’s new donation tracking page, updated tax credit calculator, and the 39 high-impact charities we currently partner with.
Fiscal Sponsorship: Open Philanthropy recently recommended a $1.1 million USD grant to Dao Foods via Rethink Charity, to support work promoting plant-based meat in Asia. (Fiscal sponsorship is a key part of our revenue-generating work to move Rethink Charity towards financial sustainability, so that we can continue to operate high-impact projects.)
EA Giving Tuesday: Over 440 donors gave record amounts ($1.6 million USD) to effective nonprofits, raising an estimated $411k USD in counterfactual matching. Learn more at eagivingtuesday.org.
Rethink Charity updates
News and changes affecting all of Rethink Charity’s present and future projects
Team: Tee has moved on from Rethink Charity’s staff but remains a part of our team in an advisory capacity and on our Board of Directors. Although we’ll miss him on our core team, we think it’s fantastic that Tee is leveraging his passion and skill for coaching in a new way by leading Counterfactual’s talent development and coaching! We’ve recently welcomed Ilva Ravinska as our fiscal sponsorship project manager, and Megan Jamer as our communications manager.
Runway and funding gap: We are fully funded to the end of 2021, but only if we find funders to support our work to build out our new infrastructure, described below. Currently, we plan to fund this critical upgrade by displacing 3 to 4 months’ worth of our runway. We’ll share more analysis of our financial position in the coming months!
Building a better RC Forward: RC Forward’s simple website belies its complexity and the resources required to run it. To aid us in our growth, we’re overhauling how RC Forward operates behind the scenes, an upgrade that includes building a new CRM system and donor platform. We’re looking for funders that could help us raise the $80,000 USD needed to complete this infrastructure overhaul, so that we aren’t forced to displace 3 to 4 months of our current runway. We think that funding this project is a great opportunity to have an impact, because these improvements will help us maximize Canadian donations to the dozens of high-impact partner charities featured on RC Forward. We hope you’ll consider supporting our work to build a better RC Forward, so that it can continue to play an important role in the growing, global infrastructure that supports the effective giving community!
Our project updates
RC Forward
Four new partner charities: New Incentives, Ought, Faunalytics, and Mercy for Animals have joined RC Forward’s list of 39 high-impact partner charities, which means that they’re featured on the RC Forward platform and that donations from Canada are eligible for official donation receipts!
Seriously generous Canadians: RC Forward donors gave $1.9 million CAD to our partner charities during giving season 2020! This would be remarkable under any circumstances, but is all the more so in the context of a global pandemic.
All-time milestone: As of January 1, 2021, RC Forward has moved $9.35 million CAD to our high-impact partner charities since late 2017! We’re thrilled to be nearing the $10 million milestone significantly sooner than anticipated.
La version française de RC Forward: Thanks to a meticulous and dedicated team of volunteers, RC Forward’s French website is now live at fr.rcforward.org! Merci, bénévoles!
Volunteer contributions: We are very grateful for the contributions of several skilled and dedicated volunteers, whose work has greatly benefited our projects. Thank you especially to Marek Sklenka (for his incredibly industrious website development help), Litawn Gan (for his enthusiastic help and creative thinking with several data projects), Helena Lang (for her hard work on revenue-generation and translation projects), and Sophie Pelland and Louise Verkin (for their meticulous handling and execution of translation projects)!
Acting on feedback: We improved our FAQ with new information about tax receipts and Charitable Impact, the donor-advised fund we partner with for the international regranting process. We also built a new donation tracking page that gives more information about where your donations are in the international regranting process.
Our revenue-generating projects
Rethink Charity is a small charity primarily funded by donations and grants. We owe our success to the donors and organizations that have supported us over the years. Given our funding needs, we are pursuing revenue-generating initiatives in tandem with active efforts to raise philanthropic funds. Our pursuit of these initiatives is solely to help us grow towards financial sustainability, so that we can continue operating and incubating high-impact projects.
Rethink Charity fiscal sponsorship
We’re currently sponsoring Dao Foods, Stella Labs, and AI Safety Support (AISS). We previously sponsored and incubated Rethink Priorities until they were able to become a standalone 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
Our fiscal sponsorship services leverage our expertise (developed through our sponsorship of Rethink Priorities and others) to help projects navigate crucial early growth stages. Whenever possible, we fiscally sponsor projects aligned with effective altruism.
We are very happy that Open Philanthropy recently recommended a $1.1 million USD grant to Dao Foods via Rethink Charity. We fiscally sponsor Dao Foods (see our case study), and the two-year grant supports work promoting plant-based meat in Asia.
Another recent win for our fiscal sponsorship program was the amount of significant positive interest and feedback we received during the EA Global: Reconnect 2021 conference.
If you know of a project that might benefit from being fiscally sponsored by Rethink Charity, reach out to Ilva Ravinska, our project manager ([email protected]).
RC Forward private regranting services
We’re testing the returns on leveraging RC Forward’s infrastructure to offer private regranting services to eligible organizations. This project is part of our work to ensure Rethink Charity remains in a financial position to operate and incubate high-impact projects.
EA Giving Tuesday Donation Matching Initiative
Since 2017, EA Giving Tuesday has organized EA donors around the shared goal of directing more money to highly effective nonprofits. The initiative supports these donors so that they can have the best chances of directing Facebook’s Giving Tuesday counterfactual matching funds. Learn more at www.eagivingtuesday.org.
As a project of Rethink Charity, EA Giving Tuesday receives regranting infrastructure and team bandwidth, plus help with securing funding. Here are the highlights from EA Giving Tuesday 2020:
Funding recommended by EA Infrastructure Fund: We’re delighted that EA Giving Tuesday received a $13,000 USD grant from an individual based on recommendations from the EA Infrastructure Fund.
Record donated amounts: More than 440 EA donors gave more than $1.6 million USD during the Facebook match, the largest amount ever donated through this initiative!
Effective nonprofits received $411k USD in matching! EA nonprofits all together received an estimated $411,693 in counterfactual matching through Facebook’s matching program. The match was extremely competitive in 2020, and our very own Megan from the EA Giving Tuesday team is leading work on the retrospective report for the EA Forum.
Next steps in 2021
We’ve already embarked on our Salesforce training in preparation for RC Forward’s behind-the-scenes infrastructure overhaul, which will be completed over the next 5 to 6 months. We’re also growing our fiscal sponsorship program, and are progressing multiple projects to direct more money to effective charities.
We are also actively fundraising for RC Forward’s overhaul. This project, described above in “Updates from Rethink Charity,” will cost approximately $80,000 USD. This upgrade will benefit our high-impact partner charities by ensuring that RC Forward is resilient, cost effective, and more useful for both our partner charities and their Canadian donors.
We’d love you to consider supporting this project. If we don’t receive project-specific funding, we will need to displace funds from our operational runway. Our RC Forward overhaul will go ahead regardless, but how we fund it will make a significant difference to where we direct our focus in 2021 and 2022. If you’d like more information about this, we’d be delighted to have a conversation, please reach out to Baxter at [email protected] or book a time chat via his Calendly.
If you’re in Canada, the best way to support Rethink Charity is to donate here!
If you’re outside of Canada, please visit rethinkprojects.org to see your donation options. Thanks for considering us in your plans this year!
Thanks for reading
— The Rethink Charity team (Baxter, Siobhan, Marisa, Jacob, Megan, and Ilva)
P.S. Did you know...
Rethink Charity has been a remote, international team from the beginning. It’s a happy coincidence that five of our team members (Baxter, Siobhan, Ilva, Megan, and Jacob) currently live in southwest British Columbia, Canada! We’re looking forward to real-life coworking at some point in the future.
These days, the “juggling” emoji in Slack brings to mind our collective wonder at Marek’s acrobatic talents, as captured by Tee during a Rethink Charity social for staff and volunteers.