Merry Christmas, and thank you!

You made a difference in the lives of hundreds of people

Merry Christmas, to all of you who celebrate! We don’t have a post for you today, but we did want to share a brief update from GiveDirectly.

Last month, the Giving Tuesday fundraiser brought in $243,000 (from 1,048 donors), which provided enough funding to deliver cash transfers to 188 families. We teamed up with other Substackers for the fundraiser, but 833 of those donors (who contributed $222,000) were Slow Boring readers and others they shared the fundraiser with.

We know that many of you were already supporters of GiveDirectly and their fantastic work. But crucially, many of the Giving Tuesday donors were people that the organization had not previously reached — 88% (or 922) of them were new to direct giving/GiveDirectly, which GiveDirectly told us was more than they’d ever seen in a campaign like this. Based on their conservative internal projections, the organization estimates that these new supporters will give an additional $230,000 going forward. If that happens, the total impact of the fundraiser will be closer to $473,000 and reach at least 365 families in the months and years to come.

Thanks in large part to your response, GiveDirectly reached more new donors for its Africa programs on this year’s Giving Tuesday than they ever had previously, by a large margin:

Once our goal was met, you also rallied to support GiveDirectly’s Giving Tuesday match campaign, helping them bring in $1.4 million, which they told us was “completely unprecedented for us in campaigns like this,” and would allow them to deliver cash to more than one thousand families.

So thank you again! We are amazed by your generosity and so grateful to have you all as part of the Slow Boring community.

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If you would like to support GiveDirectly, but didn’t have a chance to do so back in November, they have a year-end campaign this month.