EA's On-Ramp Gap: The Most Effective Charity Isn't Always the Easiest to Recommend

Published on October 22, 2026 7:55 PM GMT The easiest on-ramp to effective altruism is donating to effective charities. Yet ever since Peter Singer's TED Talk, with its relatable example of helping the blind via... seeing-eye dogs VS. curing through cataract surgery... there has been too little attention paid to this approach. We should utilize that OG example, or similar ones, far more often... alongside easy steps people can take to give to the relatable charities that do these kinds of relatable actions. With EA getting more mainstream press, including an upcoming Netflix series, it's high time to highlight EASY and RELATABLE on-ramps to effective giving. The problem Imagine walking up to a stranger and asking them to donate money, to give children chemo, to prevent a percentage of them from later getting malaria. Would that be an effective way to get more people into effective giving? Of course not. It evokes more questions and doubts than answers and easy actions. What's malaria? How many get it? How many die from it? Chemo? Like, you give them the same chemo drugs that cancer patients get? What percentage of kids benefit from these drugs? Do the drugs have negative side effects? (Yes, sometimes, but it's worth it.) I'm not sure I'd even give this to my own kids in this situation. Does that make sense? Yet GiveWell, One for the World, and Giving What We Can all highlight this as the very first recommended intervention to donate to (Malaria Consortium's Seasonal Malaria Chemoprevention), followed by just a few other charities, whose work can similarly evoke more questions than quick actions. Perhaps this is the right approach for people already deeply engaged with EA.  But is it the best way to reach everyone else? The on-ramp gap EA has become very good at identifying charities that do the most good per dollar. But the best charity to recommend to an experienced EA donor isn't necessarily the best charity to introduce someone to effective giving. Consider charities that help restore sight through cataract surgery (Seva; Fred Hollows), or cure incontinence due to untreated birth trauma (Fistula Foundation). These are relatable problems with understandable solutions. Doesn't this Three Friends story just stir your heart?  For someone new to effective giving, this can be a much easier starting point than trying to understand a medical intervention for a condition that no one even knows about. And once people start giving effectively, they may become interested in other areas of EA, too—including malaria charities etc, as well as animal welfare, and existential risks. What if effective giving were not just an end in itself, but one of EA's most powerful gateways to broader engagement? Infatuation vs love The current calculation: infatuation 95% of attention goes to roughly four charities. Appeals to: primarily to EAs and other Ivy League-oriented people. Result: billions of dollars directed toward those few charities. A better calculation: devoted love, but more well-rounded 75% focus on the “Top 4,” especially within the EA community; 25% focus on the “Top 26+,” especially for people outside the EA community. Appeals to: both EA and non-EA oriented people. Result: billions of additional dollars directed to high impact charities, most of which would not have otherwise went to any high impact charities.   The point isn't to abandon cost-effectiveness... it's to reach ordinary people across income brackets who are more likely to donate to causes they relate to or can quickly understand. Why? 1. We're missing out on a potentially enormous amount of giving. The pool of potential donors outside the EA community is enormous. Many people are willing to give, but we may be losing them by focusing so heavily on people who are already EA-oriented. 2. We should be ready for more funding. If more money is expected to enter philanthropy, and that causes charity rankings to change in ways that aren't always straightforward—as Rethink Priorities recently discussed—why not be ready to share that money with a broader range of highly effective charities? 3. Even within EA, the top four charities aren't universally agreed upon. Rankings depend on which metrics and philosophies you prioritize. Many EAs will agree with the current approach; I don't completely. That's a topic for another post, but sample questions include:  + Isn't it better to uplift more areas of suffering simultaneously?  + Can "calculated risk for reward" apply to more fully encouraging a broader range of effective charities, in hopes of a few of them having unpredicted outsized impacts or chain reactions when entire communities are empowered out of suffering?  + Can fully encouraging people who are still getting off the ground in high-impact work, (but which might not be currently in the exact range of effectiveness of the Top 4), end up being more powerful that it's realized? I'm thinking specifically of Brazil's evaluator Doebem and China'