We help you increase the impact of your donation.
Imagine you have US$100 to give to a charity of your choice. Now imagine that, instead of giving that $100 donation directly to your charity, you have the option to “invest” that $100 donation in a way that would increase it by seventeen times its original value — in other words, from $100 to $1,700. What if you had the option to invest a donation of $10,000 in the same way and increase it to $170,000 — or a donation of $100,000 to $1,700,000? Would you take it?
It may sound too good to be true, but our metrics show that donating to The Life You Can Save can multiply your donation in precisely this way. If you invest in us, we can help you increase your impact.
How can we be sure? To determine how investing in our work increases your impact, we rely on a metric we call our “leverage ratio.” If you take all the money we raise annually for our nonprofits and divide that number by the money we spend operating our organization, you get what we call our “leverage” for a single year. To gauge our impact over time, we rely on a “3-year leverage ratio“ which is simply the average annual leverage over the past three years.
From 2019-2021, our 3-year leverage ratio was 17:1. That means that for every $1 we invested in spreading our message and helping others discover and donate to effective charities over the last three years, we raised an average of $17 for our recommended nonprofits.
We are very proud of our 3-year leverage ratio, and we believe it’s one of the main reasons that we saw the number of voluntary contributions to The Life You Can Save itself more than triple in 2021. To be sure, our annual leverage ratio fluctuates from year to year. But our three-year average indicates it is a reliable measure of our impact. It is also a relatively conservative estimate of our impact since it does not reflect donations to sister organizations like GiveWell or Giving What We Can that our work may inspire, only donations to our recommended charities.
3-year leverage ratio 17:1
We are an impactful, cost-effective organization ready to scale.
At The Life You Can Save, we strive to be impactful and cost-effective just like the charities we recommend. Though we have a global footprint, we are a small team of just 13 full-time employees, 7 part-time employees and many generous volunteers. Over the last three years, our annual operating expenses have averaged just under a million dollars.
While we aim to be cost-effective, based on our track record, we believe that we have the potential to grow our organization significantly and maintain and even improve the performance of vital metrics like our leverage ratio. Since The Life You Can Save became an official nonprofit organization in the US in 2013, we have also seen steady growth across two other key metrics: “Total Money Moved” (money generated for our recommended nonprofits) and “Net Impact” (money generated for our recommended nonprofits minus our expenses).
With your support, we hope to increase our budget and expand our operations so that we can reach more people and raise more money for effective charities.
Net Impact US$21.4 million
