At this time of year, we forum-dwellers tend to spend quite a bit of energy thinking about where we should donate. This year especially, the forum team has outdone themselves, running an interesting debate week on "global health vs. animals" —global health was trounced.. I still love you though, bed-net warriors! — followed by an action packed Giving Season:
While I personally find it very interesting to think about what the very best marginal donation would be, I think it's important to remember where the bigger opportunity lies..
Consider this: When we fine-tune our own donations or help other EAs do the same, the gains are probably quite modest. While there are likely meaningful differences between top charities[1], we can be far less certain about which charity is the very best than we can about which are in the top-tier and which are in the "meh"-tier. So factoring in this uncertainty, optimizing an existing donor's dollar might only generate about 5% of the value that could be achieved by inspiring a new donor to give their first dollar to a highly effective charity.
This points to an important conclusion: The most valuable dollars to aren't owned by us. They're owned by people who currently either don't donate at all, or who donate to charities that are orders of magnitude less effective than the ones we typically discuss here. A dollar that you can only direct to one effective charity by taking it away from another is far less valuable than a dollar that comes from a "meh"-tier charity or from someone's Uber Eats budget.
This insight should reshape how we think about our marginal effort. While it's valuable to help each other find the very best giving opportunities, we should probably do more personal outreach instead, on the margin.
You don't own the most valuable dollars, but you can still influence them!
Trying to influence people who aren't yet supporting effective charities might sound hard, but it's more tractable than you might think.
I've seen this work firsthand. To give a couple examples:
- 1-1 outreach: My own journey started with a single conversation during a car ride with a colleague. That discussion took me from not donating at all to 'earning to give', taking the 10% pledge, and eventually going to work in the non-profit sector myself.
- Scaled outreach: This recent Substack post from fellow forum dweller @Omnizoid has already directed >$5,000 to the Shrimp Welfare Project through our platform FarmKind – enough to spare 6.5 million shrimp from suffering at the end of their lives – plus another $1,000 to our other recommended charities.
I'd wager that the expected value of you attempting to encourage those around you to donate to effective charities this Giving Season far exceeds what you'll achieve through your own fine-tuning on the forum.
[To be clear, I really value the Giving Season 'festivities' that the forum team have arranged. They have an important role to play. I'm simply trying to bring more attention to a relatively neglected way to have impact at this time of year]
Tips for making it happen
- Have an audience? Use it! If you have followers on social media, a blog, or a professional network, you have a unique opportunity to introduce effective giving to many people at once. (FarmKind would love to partner with you to help you make this successful. Hit me up at aidan@farmkind.giving if you're interested)
- No audience? No worries! Focus on meaningful conversations with people close to you, like family and friends. The holiday season often creates some particularly good opportunities!
- Embrace relationship-based giving. Friends and family will often happily make a donation for the purpose of supporting you, rather than supporting a particular cause or charity (e.g. contributing to your birthday fundraiser). While it'd be even better if they were convinced to become effective givers, the value of a one-off donation is still super high!
- Connect emotionally. While philosophical arguments are persuasive for some, most people's primary motivation when donating is supporting a cause they feel personally and emotionally connected to. So help them connect to the issue! Meet them where they are, drawing connections between what they already know they care about and cause/charity you're recommending.
- Make it easy to take action. Have a specific charity recommendation in mind, with a simple, low-friction donation process. Send them a link to make it even easier.
The key ask, once more:
This giving season, try influencing the most valuable dollars: The ones that aren't owned by us.
Thanks for reading!
- ^
There's an argument that charity cost-effectiveness follows a long tail distribution, meaning the difference between the best and second-best charity could be even larger than the difference between top-tier and "meh"-tier.
Absolutely love this take! I'd love to see our community advocating for effective giving to their networks in ways that make sense for them!
I also see this as a reason to take a pledge with GWWC, even if you're already giving - by adding your name to the list of pledgers, and helping that list grow longer - you're showing that this is a real movement of people who are taking giving effectively and significantly seriously.
(Honestly, just scrolling through a really long list of names helped give me confidence to pledge despite not knowing anyone)
Help us reach 10,000 pledgers, so that the next 10,000 are easier for us to convince!
You can pledge here for Pledge Week
This seems likely to be incorrect to me, at least sometimes. In particular I disagree with the suggestion that the improvement on the margin is likely to be only on the order of 5%.
Let's take someone who moves from donating to global health causes to donating to help animals. It's very plausible that they may think the difference in effectiveness there is by a factor of 10, or even more.
They may also think that non-EA dollars are more easily persuaded to donate to global health initiatives than animal welfare ones. In this case, if a non-EA dollar is 80% likely to go to global health, and 20% to animal welfare, then by their own lights the change in use of their dollar was more than 3x as important as the introduction of the extra non-EA dollar.
Similarly if you think animal charities are 10x global health charities in effectiveness, then you think these options are equally good:
To me, the first of these sounds way easier.
The title and central claim of the post seems wrong, though my guess is you mean it poetically (but poetry that isn't true is I think worse, though IDK, it's fine sometimes, maybe it makes more sense to other people).
Clearly the dollars you own are the most valuable. If you think someone else could do more with your dollars, you can just give them your dollars! This isn't guaranteed to be true (you might not know who would ex-ante best use dollars, but still think you could learn about that ex-post and regret not giving them your money after the opportunity has passed), but I think it's almost always true.
The correct title and argument would be "influencing other people's donation decisions is often more valuable than improving your own", but I think that is a very different claim from the title and central bolded sentence.
"Thinking someone else's dollars are more valuable than your own" would IMO clearly imply that you would prefer the world where they had more money, and you had less money. But that's not what the post is talking about (and is I think wrong in almost all cases). Or maybe alternatively that you would prefer having their dollars instead of your current dollars (though given that dollars are fungible, that seems kind of weird).
FWIW given the context of previous discussions on the EA Forum, I read the title as meaning something like "influencing other people's donation decisions is often more valuable than improving your own" when I saw it on the frontpage.
I agree that this is what the post is about, but the title and bolded sentence do indeed not mean that, under any straightforward interpretation I can think of. I think bad post titles are quite costly (cf. lots of fallout from "politics is the mindkiller" being misapplied over the years), and good post titles are quite valuable.
I think this is a great point (though I also feel that reasonable people can disagree and it's hard to know for sure), and I really appreciate the call to action and tips! :) I definitely agree that personal outreach to people that know you can be quite valuable.
A few related points:
Great post! At GWWC we're currently looking for pledgers excited to help us shape our new Pledge Advocacy Programme.
We've found that word of mouth is one of the best ways for people to learn about the pledge! But, we’ve also heard from many pledgers that it can be difficult to bring up the pledge in conversation so we're launching a new Pledge Advocacy Programme to support our community members to have thoughtful conversations about pledging with their friends, family, and colleagues.
We're still in the pilot phase, but if you're keen to help shape this exciting new initiative then please sign up here!