From the notebook
Notes on giving, evidence and building EveryDrop.
Daily giving is meant to feel easy and even joyful. So why frame it as practice for sacrifice? Because the great challenges of our time, climate above all, will demand real sacrifice from the comfortable, and that's a muscle a society has to train. EveryDrop is a place to start.
The closer we feel to the act of giving, the more we give, and the more the people around us give too. In a polarised age, shared generosity might be one of the quietest, most underrated forces for rebuilding community and trust.
We pick the £14 lunch over the £10 one without a second thought. But if a single pound can be six months of vitamin A for a child, or a few pounds a malaria net, it's worth asking what our daily indulgences are actually buying us, and what else that money could do.
Before EveryDrop, I spent my best years making impoverished children laugh, wonder and believe in themselves. Losing that daily sense of impact is what set me searching for a way to keep doing good at scale. This is that story.
Effective giving is usually introduced through its most demanding ideas: the ten percent pledge, the price of a life, the obligation to act. There is an easier doorway for the people in your life, and it starts with how astonishing these charities already are.
AI is mostly pointed at efficiency and profit. EveryDrop is an experiment in pointing it somewhere else: one founder, no funding, building a charity's entire platform with AI as the engineering team.
Most habit apps are built on streaks, guilt and fear of loss. EveryDrop is deliberately bounded: a thirty-day giving journey with a real ending. Here's the design thinking behind that choice.
Philanthropy doesn't need to wait for billionaires. Ordinary people already give at enormous scale; what's missing are the tools to make everyday generosity intentional, informed and habitual.
Robust research shows that spending money on others makes you happier than spending it on yourself, gives life more meaning, and is even linked to lower depression. That finding dissolved a false trade-off I had carried for years, and it is the reason EveryDrop exists.
How a small charity can make defensible giving decisions using only public, verifiable evidence.
Why EveryDrop treats generosity as a calm daily habit rather than an occasional act, and what that changes.