The IMPACT portal: like a portfolio login, except the returns go to charity

Summary

Anyone who puts money into an investment account can log in at any time and see what became of it. For donated money that view almost never exists, and it is exactly what the IMPACT portal at impact.gfdw.eu provides: deposits, the current value of your own share of the fund, disbursements so far, and a projection whose assumptions you can adjust yourself. The difference from an investment account is the return, which does not flow back to you but goes to charitable organisations every payout period. Who receives it is your decision, from a vetted list of donation partners, and the whole thing can be explored without donating anything, through a demo login.

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A donation usually disappears into a black box. You transfer the money, you get a confirmation, and eventually an annual report full of figures in which your own contribution no longer appears. That is the ordinary experience, and it is why many people make a giving decision once and never revisit it.

With the Wealth for the World Fund a second difficulty is added. The fund invests donations passively in the global equity market and disburses 2 % of its assets to charitable organisations every payout period.¹ The effect of a donation is therefore spread across decades instead of showing up in next year's project report. Without a way to look inside, you would simply have to take that on trust.

Hence the IMPACT portal. It is the login you know from your bank, applied to donated money.

Like a portfolio login, except the returns go to charity

Anyone with an investment account knows the view: amount paid in, current value, development over time. The IMPACT portal shows the same for your donations. Every donation to the fund builds a personal share of the fund's assets, and that share is carried forward continuously, with the fund's return and with every disbursement already made from it.

Three things differ from an investment account:

• The return does not come back to you. What an investment account would pay out goes to charitable organisations here. The share stays visible regardless, because it is the basis of every future disbursement.
• You choose the recipients. No investment account asks where the payout should go. The portal asks exactly that, every payout period.
• No tax is charged. Because the association is a charity, it is exempt from corporation and trade tax, which also removes the 25 % capital gains tax that a private investment account pays on price gains and dividends.² The transfer to the donation partners is untaxed as well. Whatever the market earns keeps working in full, instead of being taxed along the way.

The rest of the experience is deliberately the same: log in, look, click on.

What you see once you are in

Donations lists every recorded donation, grouped by payout period, with totals. Donations to the fund and donations towards the association's operating costs are shown separately, because only fund donations build a share. Monthly and gifted donations are marked as such.

Impact puts three amounts side by side: the sum of your fund donations, today's value of your share, and the sum already disbursed from that share to donation partners. A table walks through each payout period with the fund's return, your donations, your share of the assets, the disbursement and the organisations that received it. A second tab shows the same views for the fund as a whole, so a personal share can be placed in context.

The benefit is unspectacular and works anyway: you do not have to trust an aggregate figure. You see your own line.

The projection runs on your assumptions, not ours

A fund with a horizon of decades rests on one assumption, the long-run real return of the equity market. Wealth for the World assumes 7 % per year, the long-run inflation-adjusted equity return across 16 economies and the years 1870 to 2015.³ Anyone who finds that too optimistic does not have to argue in the portal. They can calculate.

A slider extends the horizon from the present to as much as 100 payout periods. Under Edit assumptions there are two more: the expected real return between 0 % and 15 % per year, and a hypothetical recurring donation of up to €100,000 per period. Both feed every projected figure on the page at once, including the 25-payout-period figure in the overview.

That puts two insights inside the portal rather than in a brochure. First: at a 7 % return and a 2 % disbursement, assets grow by almost 5 % in real terms per period, and after roughly 25 payout periods the sum of all disbursements exceeds the capital paid in.¹ A euro given today becomes several euros of impact over the fund's lifetime. Second: set the return to 3 % and it takes considerably longer. Both stand visibly side by side, which is the real benefit of a projection you are allowed to adjust.

You decide who receives the money

The part no investment account has sits under Payouts, and it offers two routes.

• Follow the recommendation. Wealth for the World recommends the GiveWell All Grants Fund, which directs money to where GiveWell expects the greatest benefit. Anyone who makes no decision is treated as having chosen this route.
• Allocate it yourself. Select as many partners from the list as you like. Your share is split equally between them, and every selected card immediately shows the euro amount and the percentage falling to it. The selection can be changed as often as you want until the deadline.

Two kinds of recipient are available. First, individual organisations whose effectiveness is particularly well evidenced, mostly from the GiveWell recommendations on global health and poverty. Second, thematic giving funds from Effektiv Spenden covering fields such as climate, animal welfare, democracy and long-term risks. Exactly who is on the list changes with new evidence and ongoing research; the current line-up with descriptions is on the donation partners page and in the portal itself.

Two details make the difference. Disbursements are handled through Effektiv Spenden, so 100 % of every euro paid out reaches the organisation.¹ And the decision is not a one-off setting: it is made again every payout period, until 31 October, the end of the period. The disbursement follows in the month after, based on the assets at the close of the period.

Try it without donating

The portal can be explored in full before you donate anything. An open demo login is available at impact.gfdw.eu:

• Email: musterfrau@gfdw.eu
• Password: geldfuerdiewelt

It opens every view, from the donation list through the projection to the selection of donation partners. Anyone who has donated signs in with their own email address instead: the default is the login link the portal sends to your inbox, and a password is optional.

Footnotes

1. Wealth for the World, "Giving method". gfdw.eu ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. Section 5(1) no. 9 of the German Corporation Tax Act, gesetze-im-internet.de; section 3 no. 6 of the German Trade Tax Act, gesetze-im-internet.de ↩

3. Òscar Jordà, Katharina Knoll, Dmitry Kuvshinov, Moritz Schularick, Alan M. Taylor, "The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870–2015", Quarterly Journal of Economics 134(3), 1225–1298. academic.oup.com ↩