Summary:: I want to convince campaign director Matt Fitzgerald to continue his work with #TeamTrees and #TeamSeas, by giving to GiveWell recommended charities. Please give feedback on the following pitch presentation, before Friday, the 11th of March.
Pitch Presentation and Cover Letter #TeamHumans
Project proposal
MrBeast and Mark Rober (110 million subscribers combined) have run two successful fundraising campaigns: #TeamTrees (raising 23 million $ for the Arbor Day Foundation) and #TeamSeas (raising 30 million $ for both the Ocean Conservancy and The Ocean Cleanup)
The goal of #TeamHumans is to convince both Mark Rober and MrBeast to focus their next fundraising campaign on two proven outstanding charities focusing on global health or development issues. Primary candidates would be the Against Malaria Foundation and Give Directly. At a 40 million fundraising target, this would avert 4400 childhood deaths from malaria, by distributing 4 million insecticide-treated bednets, as well as giving 16.6 million $ directly into the hands of households who need it.
In addition, both campaigns have reached a significant number of people: the two videos by Mark Rober and MrBeast alone have generated 75 million views for #TeamSeas and 85 million views for #TeamTrees, with many other content creators joining the conversation. There was also a wide reception on twitter with #TeamSeas gathering 60k followers, as well as a television appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live.
The main person to convince is Matt Fitzgerald, campaign director for both TeamSeas and TeamTrees. First step is to create a pitch deck, then decide on the best way to approach him. All in all, in the case that we are able to schedule a meeting with Matt, I give a high (60%) chance that he will invite us to a follow up meeting. I would estimate the total hours needed to convince Matt to be somewhere in the range of 40 hours, not much more. And the project itself should run without input from EAs, just connecting them to AMF/GiveDirectly.
It seems highly likely that another campaign will take place. But as far as I am aware no one is trying to make this happen more effectively.
If the project fails, only a low number of work hours are wasted. If it succeeds we have the possibility of gross missrepresentation / oversimplification of EA ideas. A suggestion is to therefore frame it as a “campaign to two outstanding charities” instead of framing the campaign as explicitly EA. This way, all messaging - and potential criticism and debate - is focused more on the interventions and the global health cause area, rather than on EA in general.
