Your donations matter, but your colleague’s even more

If you're passionate about effective giving and want to help close the funding gaps for many charities, setting up an EA community within organizations might be your goal for this year.

Summary

Start an intracompany EA community to support EA organizations. By informing colleagues and those responsible for community engagement programs about effective giving, you can massively multiply your impact. The more donors prioritize effective charities, the more quickly we can collectively make a dent in the world's problems, improving the lives of many more people and animals. There are many opportunities inside large organizations to increase funding for effective organizations. We share from a real case example on how we convinced hundreds of colleagues with high incomes to donate more than $850k in just three years to effective charities and started a growing community with over 100 members.

Introduction

Talking about where to give (or why to give) can feel strange, or even scary, especially to your colleagues. At the coffee machine it is easier to discuss the weather or last weekend’s sports results than to discuss world problems and how to potentially solve those. Donating to effective charities is one powerful way to contribute to effective altruism. Giving What We Can estimated that individuals who took a pledge will donate over $100k in their lifespan. However, if you look around the table at your next weekly meeting, imagine the potential if everyone in the room took the pledge. According to GWWC and the Dutch organization Doneer Effectief, word of mouth is one of the major pathways people get to know effective giving.

More than 26 million people work for corporations that offer donation matching programs, including two-thirds of the Fortune 500 such as Microsoft, General Electric, and Coca Cola. Yet few nonprofits take advantage of this incredible fundraising opportunity, and if so probably these NGOs are the more known less effective charities (e.g., Unicef, Red Cross, etc.). By aligning campaigns and fundraising activities with the corporate calendars the effective organizations can benefit from the expected donation sprees. Most companies host matching events to encourage employees to support their favorite charities as a form of giving back to society and to boost its reputation. These companies donate $1 for every $1 their employees donate, but some companies give at a 2:1 or even 3:1 rate at special campaigns such as Giving Tuesday or company anniversaries.

Most effective charities lack funding to implement their interventions. It is estimated that $2 - $3 billion is donated through matching gift programs every year. However, $4-$7 billion in matching gift revenue goes unclaimed every year as employees tend to donate less than the maximum granted or not every employee uses the program. Canva recently committed $100 million to Give Directly in the next four years and already donated $50 million since 2021. If you are working at a large corporation you can take up the glove and challenge your organization to follow this example and inspire your colleagues. Below we share our experiences from a real case example and tips on how to get started.

Case example from a fairly large corporate (~40,000 fte)

Some relevant background info about the organization: global organization with entities in US, Europe and Asia, highly educated (>50% masters degree), most employees have an engineering background, wide variety of nationalities (>100 different nationalities), median salary gets you to >1% richest according to How Rich Am I calculator.

Community groups are an excellent tool

Many large organizations host a variety of employee communities, such as platforms for younger employees, women, and for employees to share their passions such as board games. Our employee community started, as many great ideas, at the coffee machine. As we discussed interesting podcasts and reads we consumed over the past few weeks we discovered that we shared interests in EA-related cause areas. To elevate our discussions over lunch with others, we checked for like-minded colleagues via the internal communication platform and hosted our first ‘EA lunch’. Ten colleagues showed up, and we asked everyone who showed up whether they would like help host our first ‘EA Talk’ to a broader audience.

As we were just a small group with limited bandwidth we collaborated with a larger employee community to help spread the word among their members. Together we hosted our first EA Talk on the principles of effective giving right in the middle of a double-matching campaign. Next to inviting our direct colleagues and spread the word through internal channels, we invited the full community engagement team to join the talk and get inspired. Over 100 people showed up physically or dialed in. At the end of the talk we urged the attendees to sign up for our newsletter, we asked them to consider effective charities during the giving season by providing a list of effective charities, and gave instructions on how to use the gift matching platform. In only one month we raised over $40k for effective charities. Every other month we hosted a talk on a range of topics, inviting charities to share their effective interventions. Hundreds of people attendanded these talks who are among the top 1% on the global rich list and most of them had never heard of EA principles or effective organizations before.

Making it part of the corporate strategy

Our ambitions didn’t stop there. Since we were now a group of likeminded people we got some leverage and invited ourselves to the director that was responsible for the corporate community engagement programs to discuss whether the organization was open to support EA charities. We initially propsed to pitch that the principles of effective altruism allure to most employee’s background as the majority have an engineering background and have to make fact-based decision making in their day-to-day activities. However, as many other organizations, the community engagement program was mostly focused on making an impact at the local community instead of solving world problems effectively. Yet it was the starting point of a fruitful collaboration since we created a win-win. 

From our end we helped employees getting familiar with the gift matching program, which was hardly known to most employees, and organized regular events to raise awareness for effective causes. Whereas the official team highlighted our efforts in their monthly newsletters and in internal news articles which led to a growing community. After three years since our start we raised over $600k to effective charities, on top of $250k that directly went from our company to one of our invited charities. Our ambition is to increase with double digits the total donations by employees to effective charities every year.

Tips to get started within your organization

• Find likeminded person(s) who share interests in effective altruism. Whether it’s a call-out on the internal channels or starting a conversation at a coffee machine, you might be surprised of how many heard of the basic concepts and want to make a positive difference in both work as private life.
• Connect to the team within your company that is responsible for the gift matching program. If you start early engagement you can identify win-win for both sides as the team most likely sets targets for % employees and budget allocated.
• Host a first low-entry event, two is a crowd, three is a potential team. You can think of a lunch where you open the conversation about what sparked the other’s interests and share read, watch, listening tips. Another great way to attract people who are less familiar in the first place to host a book club and discuss take-aways from well known EA-related books.
• Create a community feeling, make those who showed up or have shown interest part of a community. By gathering their contact details and sharing a newsletter exclusively to recipients where people can share reads or thoughts for example you make the first step of creating a community.
• Actively approach volunteers. Not everyone identifies themself as an event organizer, yet the power is to actively ask people for their support by investing their time. Some colleagues might want to learn new skills such as presenting, project management or writing and this community can give them this personal development opportunity.
• Make it a personal development goal, and discuss this with your manager so that you can allocate some working hours on building the community. Most larger organizations are keen on keeping their talents on board and personal development is an important driver for early to mid-career stage to stay at a company. Through community building you can obtain skills such as presenting, communication, stakeholder management, while building your network within the organization.
• Organize a large talk event, with enough volunteers you can start planning your first main event. This allows you to create momentum, attract new members, and share the message. Invite relevant and experienced speakers from your area, you can check if any local EA community can help you as well.
• Become visible on the gift matching platform, most companies use an external platform (e.g., Benevity, Bonterra, Bright Funds), where you can bundle several charities in one fund. By doing this you gain more attention as these are often displayed on the frontpage and are trustworthy as you created the fund as a colleague.

Our learnings and potential next steps

• Collaboration and networking is key, our most successful talks were when we co-hosted with the community that focused on accelerating climate action, whom already had 3,000+ members. Find mutual interests, from our experience some examples of the talks we hosted:
  • Together with the community for young professionals we presented the 80,000 hours concept
  • Together with the community that focused on climate action and environmental issues, we hosted an animal welfare presenter during their Veganuary promotional activities and a climate think-tank to elaborate on effective climate action interventions.
  • As a suggestion and yet still to be organized, with the women employee group we plan to host an organization on female empowerment and on family planning. Apologies for potential sexist framing, yet we discovered that women within the organization were more interested in global health and development related cause areas.
• Find a visible ‘sponsor’, a lot of senior management members are keen to support communities with their network and experiences. Since they are often well known in the organization they can share your message to their teams in all employee meetings and provide some basic funding for hosting events.
• Don’t be too technical from the start, postpone your judgement, and make it accessible for every entry level as this might be the first time for colleagues to hear about effective altruism principles.
• Align your activities with the responsible teams and their year calendar, for example host a talk at the beginning of a special campaign when matching is doubled.
• Make it fun! Sounds straightforward, but if you joined a fun event you most likely will join the next one as well. Providing some snacks and beverages as people will stick around and share insights.

We would argue that creating engagement with the team that is responsible for donation programs could be your largest lever. However, they might not listen to you as an individual since they get daily requests from employees and outsiders who seek funding for their (less effective) charities. Next to donating, spreading the word, and hosting talks you might want to consider organizing a volunteering event. Where employees can use their skills and knowledge to help effective charities, for example with communication strategies, developing websites, or in-depth analyses.

Building a community is not a one-man-job and we would like to thank everyone who contributed to this success. We hope this inspires you and feel free to reach out or comment below to learn more.

Additional note: the Dutch ‘Tien Procent Club’ is working on a toolkit to help professionals build a community within their working environment around Effective Giving, which will include several of the above strategies and support you to build your own.