What are Giving Funds?

We have been offering donation funds since our founding in 2019. These have been extremely successful ever since. As of 2026, more than 22,000 people have donated over 46 million euros to one of our donation funds. Their growing popularity is also evident in the fact that, for the first time in 2023, not only did over 50% of all donations go to a donation fund via our website, but more than 50% of the total donation volume did as well.

We are very pleased about this, because we believe that this is the most effective way of donating and that we can do even more good together this way.

Nevertheless, the concept of a Giving Fund is new to many people, which is why we are often asked what Giving Funds actually are, how exactly they work and why we believe them to be so effective.

Ultimately, Giving Funds work in a similar way to equity funds. Instead of deciding for yourself where your money goes, you leave this to experts.

When it comes to donations, such an approach seems even more sensible to us than with conventional investments. Mainly for 2 reasons:

1. The donation market is still much less transparent and a lot less efficient than the traditional capital market. This makes it much more difficult to gain an overview. Instead of more or less objective return criteria, all you are often left with in the non-profit sector, especially as a layperson, are anecdotes and emotional images.

2. Donations are not about benefiting yourself, but people or animals in need. But that makes it much more difficult to assess the price-performance ratio of offers and thus also the quality of charities as a whole than with companies whose products or services you use yourself.

However, this argument could of course also be used to donate directly to the charities we recommend. After all, these have been evaluated by external research institutes and have also been rated as exceptionally effective in an international comparison.

You can’t really go wrong with such an approach, but our Giving Funds offer additional advantages because they are:

Even (a little) more effective
With the Giving Funds, we can respond flexibly to the respective situation of the organizations and use the funds where they currently make the biggest difference. For example, an initiative may have just received a large donation from another source and therefore requires fewer additional funds at short notice. Or, due to natural disasters or changing political conditions, more or fewer donations may be needed in the short term. Another possibility of the Giving Funds is to support promising but, for example, still very young initiatives with pinpoint accuracy and for a limited period of time, even if we do not (yet) list them permanently as a top recommendation on our website.

Even simpler and more up-to-date
Even though you can’t go wrong with our top recommendations, the “agony of choice” may be off-putting for some people. For example, if you don’t want to decide for yourself whether to use mosquito nets or preventative medication to fight malaria, you can use our Giving Fund: Fighting Poverty and yet still be highly effective in helping people in need. For regular donors in particular, our Giving Funds also ensure that the funds are always used for the most promising organizations at any given time. While there are always changes in the composition of the charities we recommend due to new findings, our Giving Funds always remain up to date.

So much for the theory, but how do our Giving Funds work in practice? What they all have in common - regardless of the subject area - is that we decide at least twice a year together with external researchers how to distribute the donations and then transfer them to the relevant organizations (incidentally, without charging any direct or indirect fees → in this respect, our Giving Funds are more like index certificates or ETFs).

If you have any questions or would like to find out more about our Giving Funds, please write us an e-mail, call us at +49 (0)30 / 260 355 19 or book a free and independent donor advisory.