Effective Altruism Meets Tennis: Marcus Daniell of High Impact Athletes

While Marcus Daniell was in hard quarantine before his 2021 Australian Open campaign, we had some time to talk over Zoom. Now 31, there’s no question he’s been playing some of his best tennis over the last few years, emerging as one of the most consistent and successful players in New Zealand’s tennis history. He achieved a career-high doubles ranking of 34 back in 2018 and earned ATP doubles titles in both 2019 and 2020. Although his on-court performance has been remarkable, it was not the topic of our call.

Marcus is the founder of High Impact Athletes, a platform for athletes to engage in effective altruism by pledging to donate a percentage of their annual earnings to worthy charities. Over the course of our Zoom, it was clear that selflessness wasn’t a task for Marcus, but rather a mindset. Marcus sees his career through the lens of maximizing his earnings to maximize his donations. At the start of 2021, he pledged to donate 10% of his earnings for the rest of his life, and he hopes that HIA will create a snowball effect for those around him to give back as much as possible.

1. How did you get the idea to start High Impact Athletes?

In 2015 I reached a point where I had amassed some small savings and was no longer terrified that I was going to end each year in the red. With this sense of increased security came an existential questioning of my career path and the balance of what I was giving to and taking from the world.

From this place of questioning, I did some online research into giving back. I discovered the Effective Altruism movement and an organization called 80,000 Hours and became fascinated by the ideas involved and the practical advice for any given career. The EA principles of earning to give and building a platform for advocacy gave me a grander purpose in pursuing the heights of tennis. 

Living by the principle of earning to give means that if I do well in tennis, not only do I feel great personal satisfaction, but by earning more prize money I have the capacity to give more to those who need it the most. Furthermore, along with success in sport comes an advocacy platform from which to more widely spread the idea of giving effectively. It’s a beautiful fact of charity that every extra person brought on board with effective donations is a multiplier of one’s own impact. 

These realizations were a true breakthrough for me. Since discovering Effective Altruism I have donated between 5-10% of my own annual winnings to effective charities, all of which are represented by High Impact Athletes.

In 2020 this didn’t feel like enough. During the first stages of the Covid pandemic I spent a lot of time thinking about how I could have a greater positive impact on the world. I didn’t feel like I could donate any more of my own earnings, particularly considering I had essentially just lost my job with the pausing of the ATP Tour. In search of ideas, I enrolled in Peter Singer’s free Princeton Effective Altruism course and started learning and thinking. After many weeks of brainstorming and conversations with folk in the EA field I landed on the idea of using my position as an athlete to bring the ideas of Effective Altruism into the sporting world, and from there to athletes’ followers. High Impact Athletes was born.

2. You recently announced you’re giving away 10% of your lifetime prize money. That’s a pretty large portion of your earnings. What was the motivation behind that and was that a hard decision to make?

This decision wasn’t completely out of the blue. I began my giving journey in 2015 with a small, tentative donation, then the next year I took a pledge to donate 1%. That felt really good, so the year after I donated 5%. Over the years I steadily increased that percentage until, in 2020, I founded High Impact Athletes and donated 10%. And now we’re here.

3. You’ve spoken about effective altruism in the past, which is about maximizing the impact one can have. How do you make sure the money that’s pledged is going places that will have the most impact?

There is extensive research that goes in to identifying the most cost-effective charities in the world. Organizations like GiveWell, Founders Pledge, and Animal Charity Evaluators are considered the gold standard charity evaluators in the areas of extreme poverty, climate change, and animal welfare respectively. If donors are concerned about the efficacy of their donations, they can dive incredibly deeply into research reports found publicly on each of those organizations’ websites. In many cases, years of research is done before a charity is decided to be worthy of a recommendation or not.

4. How do you plan on getting more tennis players as well as other athletes involved in the movement?

In the main part I plan to do a large amount of outreach myself. I think it’s powerful to approach other athletes from a position of equality and ask them to join me in giving effectively, rather than asking a non-professional athlete to do the same job. High-profile athletes receive thousands of requests a year, so it’s imperative to stand out. I’m also relying on my friend network to be able to speak directly to athletes rather than to agents or managers. It’s important to get face-to-face with people, because when they hear about the ideas of effective altruism and HIA many athletes light up immediately.

5. How do non-professional athletes contribute to the movement?

HIA is not exclusive at all! My goal is for athletes to start a wave of donations spreading amongst their followings. All the matters in the end is that the charities that are doing the best work in the world have the funding to do more of it. A dollar donated has the same value whether it comes from me, or you, or LeBron James.

6. What is your vision for High Impact Athletes?

My vision is a world where everyone who can give, gives effectively. I would like pledging a percentage of annual income to become a norm in the sporting world, and I would like athletes to be looked up to not just for their sporting prowess, but for their leadership in philanthropy.