HIP Pledge Club

The 🔸10% Pledge is a commitment to donate 10% of your annual or monthly income to high-impact charities. We believe 10% strikes a meaningful balance — it’s a substantial contribution that acknowledges the importance of global challenges and the need for real action, while still being manageable for most people from wealthy countries.

We're often asked how exactly to calculate income — should it be pre-tax or post-tax? Generally, we recommend choosing the option that makes the most sense to you. However, we encourage choosing pre-tax if your donations are tax-deductible (for example, GiftAid counts towards your Pledge!) and post-tax if they are not.

With a 🔹Trial Pledge, you choose the percentage of income you wish to give (which could be as low as 1%) and how long you want your pledge to last.

The 🔹Trial Pledge might be a great option for you if:

• You want to commit to contributing a portion of your resources to high-impact charities

• You want to first see how regular giving feels (try it out!) before taking the full 🔸10% Pledge

• You have outstanding financial commitments that would make giving 10% of your income difficult

No, a giving pledge is not a contract and is not legally binding.

It is a public declaration of lasting commitment. A pledge is a promise, or oath, made with the intention of following through. However, if you decide you can no longer keep your pledge, you can resign from it.

While we believe the 🔸10% Pledge is a good fit for most of the people reading this, clearly it will not be the right choice for everyone.

Here are some reasons it may not make sense to take the 🔸10% Pledge at this point:

• You will soon be undertaking, or plan to undertake, a resource-intensive project like founding a startup or nonprofit — in this case, consider the Founders Pledge instead.

• Your employment or health situation is unstable.

• You expect your student debt to be particularly heavy, such that the years after graduation will be especially financially tight.

• You have family obligations that require much of your money.

Taking the pledge isn’t required to be part of our community, and no one should feel pressured to do so just to feel accepted. We appreciate the many ways people contribute both here and in the wider world — the 🔸10% Pledge is just one of many meaningful ways to make a difference.

Many people lump all charities into one "doing good" bucket. But your choice of where to donate can lead to significant differences in the impact of your donations. In fact, many of us can easily 100x our impact by choosing charities where our money goes further.

You can choose to donate to any charity when you take the pledge; we don't police where. But we do see the pledge as a commitment to give to the organizations you believe to be highly impactful.