Rethink Priorities
Cross-Cause Fund
Allocate your donation to the highest-impact funds
based on rigorous, cause-neutral research
The problem
Where should you give
to do the most good?
Most advice focuses on picking the best charity within a cause, but the deeper challenge is knowing how to value very different outcomes, e.g., helping current humans, future generations, or animals. Across these areas, interventions vary enormously in cost-effectiveness and in their chances of success. Prioritization can significantly increase the impact of your donations, but getting it right is genuinely difficult. Most donors don't have time to do the necessary research, and few resources exist to help them navigate these decisions at scale.
The solution
Cross-Cause Fund
The Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund pools donations from multiple donors and allocates them across cause areas, such as Global Health and Development, Animal Welfare, and Global Catastrophic Risks via research-vetted, high-impact giving funds. Rethink Priorities has spent almost a decade building the research infrastructure to take this problem seriously.
We start from the question of where a marginal dollar is likely to do the most good across all cause areas we cover, and we allocate accordingly.
The Cross-Cause fund is designed to be:
Rigorous and cause-neutral
Driven by cost-effectiveness
Transparent and accountable
Cross-Cause Fund
recommended
allocations
Your donation to the RP Cross-Cause Fund is guided by our ongoing research and analysis, directing your gift toward the highest-impact giving opportunities we've identified. Our recommended allocation for donations across these cause areas reflects our best all-things-considered judgment on where a marginal dollar does the most good. The allocation across these funds is updated periodically as new cost-effectiveness data becomes available and as our research on cause priorities develops. The GCR fund-level split has lower confidence than the others, as it depends on highly uncertain assumptions about the relative x-risk posed by each area. We plan to include more funds and cause areas (e.g., climate change mitigation, democracy preservation) in the future. Check here for the latest updates and improvements.
The Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund currently covers the following funds:
Animal Welfare
-
EA Animal Welfare Fund
Interventions to improve the welfare of the
most neglected farmed and wild animals -
The Navigation Fund - General Farm Animal Fund
Interventions to help farmed animals
-
The Navigation Fund - Cage-Free Fund
Interventions aimed at upholding the implementation of cage-free policies for hens worldwide
COI: RP has received grants from Longview Philanthropy, EA Animal Welfare Fund, Navigation Fund, and Coefficient Giving (CG), and has done commissioned research for GiveWell and CG. RP plays no direct role in these organizations’ grantmaking decisions and conducts independent cost-effectiveness analyses of funds included in the Cross-Cause Fund.
Factors considered
Our allocation considers a wide variety of factors, including:
Donor Compass
Not sure if the default allocation reflects your values? Use our interactive Donor Compass! Answer a few quick questions and explore how your moral and empirical assumptions translate into a personalized allocation across our recommended funds.
“ This is an ambitious and well-executed cross-cause modeling exercise. Rethink Priorities is well placed to do this work, given their quantitative expertise and years of research across each of the causes being compared. For donors who are undecided on how to allocate across causes, I think this is a serious contribution and a valuable tool for structuring their decision. I'm impressed with how thought-through the model is. There are modeling choices I would have made differently, but I'm only able to identify them because they've done a good job of explaining their model structure and assumptions, and soliciting feedback for continued improvements. ”
“ I decided to direct my annual donations to the Cross-Cause work at Rethink Priorities because I think cause prioritization is one of the most important questions in philanthropy. The empirical and moral uncertainties involved are genuinely hard to navigate as an individual donor, with existing advice relying heavily on personal judgment rather than formal frameworks. RP is one of the rare organizations with the research track record and rigor that make them well-positioned for this work. ”
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Support Rethink Priorities
The research behind the Cross-Cause Fund and Donor Compass was made possible by individual donors. If you find these tools useful, consider supporting us so we can keep refining our models and updating our data.