Should you donate through funds?

Published November 2025

For most people, we think there’s a strong case for giving through grantmaker-led philanthropic funds rather than donating to specific organizations.

Examples of public philanthropic funds include

If you are looking to develop a significant philanthropic portfolio, we’d recommend contributing to private funds instead. We list some more popular funds below.

This post is based on Longview’s experience directing over $140M of donations through advising dozens of philanthropists and operating funds in AI safety, digital sentience, nuclear weapons policy, and global catastrophic risks.

Executive Summary

Why give to a fund? By giving to funds, you delegate your decision-making to expert grantmakers, which presents several benefits over donating directly to organizations:

Why donate directly to an organization? Direct grants can still make sense if:

  • Your donor identity (e.g. nationality) adds unusual value to the grantee
  • You have strong, divergent inside views on funding priorities
  • You have access to specific opportunities that aren’t on others’ radars
  • You’re interested in supporting political campaigns for elected office (which non-profit funds legally cannot advise on)

See more below.

What next? Unless you meet these criteria, you may want to choose 1–3 funds aligned with your goals and donate through them. You can pick funds by considering your alignment with their strategy and focus areas, past grants, and donation size (to ensure they can effectively absorb your donations). We list some popular funds below.

1. Grantmaker-led funds have an edge over individuals when picking grants

Key point: It’s easy to make ineffective donations when evaluating organizations quickly, once a year, with limited information.

We see a few reasons that donating to grantmaker-led funds can be massively more effective than donating to individual organizations:

  • Investing time and expertise in grantmaking. Professional grantmakers have the time and experience to thoroughly evaluate organizations. A single grant investigation may involve reading and reflecting on tens of pages of materials and speaking with many members of an organization, as well as references who have worked with them. This level of due diligence is difficult for individual donors to replicate. Additionally, dedicated staff who make many grants can more easily assess their track record and improve decision-making over time. Longview, for example, has 10 full-time grantmakers.
  • Keeping track of the details. Effective grantmaking requires not only good takes on the field, but also legwork, sustained attention to detail, and coordination across many moving parts. Many individual donors do not have up-to-date answers to crucial questions: cash on hand, burn rate, who else is likely to fund and on what timeline, what references say, and the details of an organization’s budget. Grantmaking organizations do this work full-time and keep these details up to date.
  • Proactive sourcing, Requests For Proposals (RFPs), and seeding new projects. Funds can attract new talent and shape fields by running open rounds backed by pre-capitalized funds. For example, our Hardware-Enabled Mechanisms RFP supports early engineering work on chip design, geolocation, access controls, and auditing for AI verification and governance. Funds can also identify gaps, scope new projects, headhunt leaders to run them, and support organizations getting off the ground—catalyzing work that ad hoc giving rarely achieves.
  • Acting during short windows. Urgent requests often determine whether a critical hire is secured or whether civil society groups can contribute to a live policy process. Funds with discretionary capital can evaluate projects, move within days, and report back later. Individual donors might never become aware of these urgent funding needs without deep, pre-existing networks.

2. Funds can solve donor coordination

Key point: Donating to funds that prioritize organizations that aren’t on track to be fully funded is a lot more impactful than displacing major donors’ funding.

Coordination between donors is a difficult and important problem in grantmaking that funds can help resolve.

  • One problem is “funging” other donors. If a donor doesn’t know who else is considering funding an organization, they might make a donation that displaces another donor’s funds, resulting in no net improvement in the grantee’s funding situation. Funds can help track other potential donors to avoid funging risk.
  • Another problem is the “waiting game.” If many donors would like to see a grantee funded, but they don’t want to funge each other, they’ll often wait to see who funds it first. This leaves the organization in financial uncertainty, despite a widespread belief that its work is worth funding. Pooled funds can split a gap across many contributors and fill it on time, rather than leaving each donor to guess whether someone else will step in.

3. Funds make giving easy

Key point: Instead of making lots of decisions on various organizations each year, make one decision—which funds to support.

Funds provide an end-to-end service. They investigate organizations, track the evolving ecosystem, update continuously as circumstances change, periodically check in on grantees’ fundraising, find founders for new projects, run active grantmaking processes, and maintain teams to handle legal, compliance, and due diligence work.

Individual donors rarely have the time to make optimal decisions on their own. Instead, donors can investigate a small number of funds by reviewing past disbursement reports and, for large gifts, meeting fund managers and speaking with peer philanthropists. Then, they can make one decision per year and let fund managers do the legwork—re-evaluating periodically with new reports in hand.

4. Why might this be wrong? When might direct giving be better?

We think direct grants can be the right tool if one or more of the following hold:

  • When your donor profile adds unusual value. For example, some EU policy organizations prefer European donors; some right-leaning US policy efforts look for right-of-center donors.
  • You have strong, divergent inside views. If your strategy or priorities differ from existing funds, direct grants may better reflect your views.
  • You want to support political campaigns, PACs, and super PACs. Non-profits cannot make or advise on such donations. We’re not aware of any currently existing funds that will fully handle these questions for you. (We can and often do make or advise on grants to 501(c)(4) policy advocacy organizations.)
  • You see opportunities others will likely miss. If you have specific domain expertise or relationships and can spot a neglected project—for instance, a person you know could pilot a promising idea with $30K—direct grants can fund opportunities that grantmakers miss.

Unless these considerations apply, we expect grants made through a strong discretionary fund to be materially more impactful on average than ad hoc direct grants (with the specifics depending on which funds you’d choose and which grants you’d otherwise make).

5. Next Steps

Unless you meet the above criteria, you may want to choose 1–3 funds aligned with your goals and donate through them. You can pick funds by considering your alignment with their strategy and focus areas, past grants, and size (to ensure they can effectively absorb your donations).

These are some popular funds you can consider:

We have not investigated the vast majority of these funds: including them in this list is not an endorsement. Feel free to list more funds in the comments!

How Longview can help

  • We operate a public fund: the Emerging Challenges Fund. It is focused on global catastrophic risks from emerging technology such as AI. We recently released our 2025 ECF Annual Report, which you can read if you’re interested in donating to global catastrophic risk reduction.
  • We also operate private funds and advise major donors. If you are a philanthropist looking to donate over ~$100K per year to AI safety or nuclear security, get in touch! We are happy to provide access to our private funds (in AI, digital sentience, and nuclear weapons policy) and give you personalized advice based on your situation. Please email advising@longview.org.

Note: As a non-profit, we cannot advise on donations to political campaigns, PACs, or super PACs. The advice in this post does not account for such donations. (We can and often do make or advise on grants to 501(c)(4) policy advocacy organizations.)

Our Funds

Delegate your decisions to our expert grantmakers and receive regular reports on our regrants, our reasoning for those grants, and programme updates.

Emerging Challenges Fund
A public fund managed by Longview Philanthropy that supports organisations that address global catastrophic risks from emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, and nuclear weapons.
See our Emerging Challenges Fund
Frontier AI Fund
A private philanthropic fund to prepare the world for frontier AI, intended for donors giving over $100,000.
See our Frontier AI Fund
Nuclear Weapons Policy Fund
A fund to reduce the risk of global nuclear war
See our Nuclear Weapons Policy Fund
Digital Sentience Fund
A private philanthropic fund that aims to understand and promote a reasonable and considerate relationship between human civilisation and potential digital minds.
See our Digital Sentience Fund