How can I donate to Rethink Priorities? Which payment methods do you accept?

You can donate online via our donate page, where you’ll find options to support Rethink Priorities’ greatest need (unrestricted funding) or specific departments working in areas you care about.

We process online donations through Every.org, which accepts a wide range of payment methods, including credit card, PayPal, Google Pay, and Venmo. You can also donate via donor-advised funds (DAFs), cryptocurrency, or stock using the same platform.

If you prefer to donate by check, please make it payable to Rethink Priorities and mail it to:
Rethink Priorities
530 Divisadero St. PMB #796
San Francisco, CA 94117

We appreciate your support!
If you have any questions, please contact our development team.

Will my donation be tax-deductible?

For US donors:
Yes. Rethink Priorities is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit incorporated in the State of California (EIN 84-3896318). Donations made through our donate page or by check are tax-deductible in the United States.

For donors outside the US:
Tax-deductible giving options may be available depending on your country. Please see the How to make tax-deductible donations section on our donate page for details.

How is Rethink Priorities funded?

Rethink Priorities is supported by individual donors, grants from foundations and institutions, and revenue from services. These services include commissioned research and advisory work, in addition to our self-sustaining Special Projects Program, which provides fiscal sponsorship and operational support to scale high-impact projects. This broad funding base helps ensure our sustainability, resilience, and intellectual independence.

For a breakdown of sources and expenses, see our transparency page, where you can also find our financial statements and 990s.

How does Rethink Priorities handle fungibility?

Every donation to Rethink Priorities is allocated to maximize impact. We design our budgets and fundraising so that unrestricted dollars can finance additional work, earlier timelines, and/or larger scope. Moreover, every area we fundraise for has specific projects ready to begin if and when additional funding arrives. (Our Special Projects program is self-sustaining and not currently seeking donations.)

We handle fungibility in relation to donor intent by matching gifts to uses that keep impact additive. For larger gifts, we can typically explicitly increase the named department, sub-cause, or project’s budget by the exact gift amount. For smaller gifts (relative to total project cost), there may be practical limitations, but we’ll inform you if this is the case and will work with you to find a solution that honors your preferences. Importantly, all types of gifts – large, small, and in between – are valuable here, because a wide mix of supporters strengthens our independence and keeps ideas diverse.

If funding falls short of a target, we have several options to address fungibility:

• Seek co-funders, acknowledging both real and opportunity costs
• Delay or do not proceed if timing makes partial funding ineffective
• Deliver more slowly due to capacity limits (e.g., hiring, retention, operations)
• Use limited unrestricted reserves (in select cases) to keep a top priority moving

Unrestricted funding has historically unlocked our highest-impact opportunities, supporting cross-cutting and exploratory research that structured grants can’t easily accommodate. This is because most institutional funders operate with program-specific mandates that limit them to funding particular cause areas or predefined projects. Similarly, individual donors often prioritize supporting the specific causes they’re most passionate about. This creates a critical gap for transformative work that spans multiple domains, tests new approaches, and/or doesn’t yet fit neatly into established cause-area categories.

Unrestricted funding fills this gap by enabling us to:

1. Launch innovative projects with outsized potential

Substantial amounts of flexible funding let us pursue potentially high-reward research that may not perfectly align with any specific funder’s criteria but could deliver long-term impact.

Past examples include:

• The Moral Weight Project: Our research on comparing the welfare of different animal species has helped multiple funders make more informed allocation decisions, and has also contributed to the founding of new organizations focused on neglected species. This work was published by Oxford University Press, featured in Ethics, and praised by philosopher and The Life You Can Save founder Peter Singer.
• Digital consciousness research agenda: Our early scoping work attracted new funding sources. An early version of our Digital Consciousness Model was presented at New York University’s Center for Minds, Ethics, and Policy and discussed in several workshops with researchers from academia, major AI labs, and think tanks.
• Survey Team outputs: We consistently investigated the perspectives and priorities of movements working on global challenges, which informed important philanthropic and organizational decisions, such as the framing of effective altruism, the wording of important book titles, or movement-building strategies.
• Decision-making tools: We have developed and deployed digital tools, including our Cross-Cause Effectiveness Model and Moral Parliament Tool, to help philanthropists and the impact community make value-aligned decisions under uncertainty.

For details of similar projects that your support could enable, please contact our team.

2. Maintain the critical infrastructure that enables our high-impact work

Unrestricted support helps cover the essential costs of running Rethink Priorities: human resources, communications, development, and finance staff salaries and benefits, as well as monitoring and evaluation, technology, and other operating expenses. It also enables us to maintain a prudent financial runway, ensuring we can weather fluctuations in project-based funding and continue vital work without interruption.

For details on our revenues and expenses, see our financial statements.

How does Rethink Priorities decide what to work on and how to allocate funds?

Funds are allocated according to how funders choose to give:

• Unrestricted donations can be used across the organization and are allocated based on where we believe they will have the greatest impact.
• Donations designated to a department or cause area are used to cover the costs of that area, including operating expenses needed to run it effectively.
• Project-specific donations are used only for the costs of that project, including operating expenses needed to deliver the project.

When deciding which projects or initiatives to pursue, Rethink Priorities prioritizes neglected, tractable opportunities with high potential for impact. We prioritize work that has the potential to redirect substantial funding, change major funders’ strategies, or influence policy decisions, especially for overlooked or emerging issues.

Each year, we publish audited financials and a clear breakdown of how funds are used. Donations support:

• Direct program work across our major cause areas.
• Essential operations (e.g., research tools, finance, legal, and people operations) that make that work possible.

Exact allocations vary year to year based on priorities and the mix of funding we receive. You can see expenses by area and a visual breakdown of the most recent year on our transparency page, where you can also find our financial statements.

How does Rethink Priorities ensure donations are managed responsibly?

At Rethink Priorities, we have systems and policies to ensure that all contributions are managed with care, transparency, and integrity. Our financial policies track every grant and donation carefully, making sure we account correctly for any donor-imposed restrictions (e.g., a certain cause area, a particular initiative, or a specific timeline). This approach enables us to provide detailed reports showing exactly how restricted funds were spent over time.

In addition to our Board of Directors providing financial oversight, Rethink Priorities undergoes an independent audit each financial year, where all income received during the year is reviewed to ensure it was accounted for accurately and in accordance with donors’ intentions. Each independent auditor’s report and our audited financial statements from each tax year are posted to our transparency page.

How do you decide what projects to work on or which clients to work with?

We prioritize work that has the potential to significantly shift resources or decision-making within or between cause areas. Some of this work comes from ideas generated internally, exploring neglected areas where we might uncover impact opportunities and asking, “What’s a project someone should have done already?”

Similarly, when funders approach us with project ideas, we assess them by considering the counterfactual: a. what would happen without our involvement, and b. whether there’s an opportunity to influence major decisions or redirect significant funding. In this way, consulting is a key part of our impact in improving the strategic decision-making of our clients.

Most of these decisions happen at the department level, with research directors consulting their teams and leadership. However, we also pursue cross-departmental projects and organization-wide initiatives, such as our upcoming Interdisciplinary Research Hub, which will provide flexible, priority-driven research spanning different cause areas. For these, we pitch projects directly to donors or seek unrestricted funding to support them.

Why can’t you share details about all your projects and partners?

Some of our work is confidential because it involves sensitive data, unpublished research, or partnerships that require discretion. Like other research organizations and think tanks, we sometimes advise funders, governments, and institutions on issues that aren’t yet publicly disclosed. We prioritize transparency whenever possible, but protecting confidentiality allows us to maintain trust and pursue high-impact opportunities that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.

How do you track the impact of your work?

We assess impact with a mix of practical checks and concrete outcomes. After major projects, we:

• Run retrospectives to capture what worked, what didn’t, and what to improve in the future
• Follow up with funders, policymakers, and partners to learn whether our research influenced their decisions, such as reallocating grants, updating strategies, or launching pilot programs
• Track credible cases where our analysis changed someone’s view
• Conduct annual interviews with key stakeholders to understand what they found most useful and where we could improve

Going forward, we’re investing in rigorous monitoring and evaluation to help identify our most effective research and generate insights that we can use to increase the overall impact of our work. We plan to allocate some existing unrestricted funds to enable these efforts and welcome additional support to strengthen this endeavor.

Why fund research instead of direct programs or effective giving platforms and communities?

Our work has shown that funding research can be three to ten times more cost-effective than donating the same amount directly to top-rated charities, because it improves both the amount and distribution of giving by others.

High-quality research can multiply impact by influencing how billions of dollars are spent across global health, animal welfare, AI safety, and other cause areas. Independent analysis from think tanks like Rethink Priorities helps funders and policymakers direct resources toward the most effective interventions.

When comparing research organizations to effective giving organizations, it’s important to understand that effective giving multipliers are fundamentally limited by the underlying intervention’s cost-effectiveness. On the other hand, research by organizations like Rethink Priorities can improve the actual intervention itself, raising the cost-effectiveness baseline and amplifying everyone’s impact.

Optimism about AI progress doesn’t replace the need to improve human and animal well-being today. Even if transformative AI arrives soon, helping people and animals now remains high-value in expectation: the welfare we create today is beneficial and irreversible.

Moreover, there is no universal consensus on when transformative AI might arrive-or what it will actually deliver. It is not guaranteed to fix poverty, public health, or animal suffering quickly or at all, and the choices we make now shape the institutions, norms, and moral circle that future AI will inherit. In that way, supporting and doing global health and animal welfare work is not a substitute for AI work, but a complement.

Near-term interventions also create option value and resilience in the face of transformative AI: in the case of an AI-related catastrophe, one potentially wise strategy is to strengthen society on all other fronts-so that if we face AI upheaval, we do so as a healthier, wealthier, more unified world.

From a portfolio view, it can be prudent to invest in both AI safety/governance and near-term human- and animal-focused work: this hedges against uncertainty on AI timelines, ensures tangible impact each year until breakthroughs arrive, and entrenches humane norms that make better long-run outcomes-whether with powerful AI or not-more likely.

If you are interested in reading more about RP’s research on this topic, please see our blog post summary here and long form blog post here.

Minimum donation size

We’re grateful for donations of all sizes, however to maximize the impact of your gift, we suggest a minimum contribution of $50, as this helps us keep administrative costs low and direct more resources to our programs. If you’re considering monthly giving under $50, quarterly or semi-annual donations can be a great alternative that still allows you to spread your support throughout the year. We truly appreciate your generosity!

Processing fees

Every.org covers processing fees for ACH (bank) transfers, stock gifts, and DAF donations – so 100% of your donation reaches our organization when you use these payment methods. For credit card and PayPal/Venmo donations, we incur a small processing fee (2.2% + $0.30 per transaction), although you have the option to cover these fees.