Note: This post was crossposted from the Coefficient Giving Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
Subtitle: On vegan advocacy, effective altruism, and FIFA
I turn 40 today. Here are some hot takes.
On factory farming
1. Our biggest challenge is salience. If factory farming led the evening news, it wouldn’t last lo...
When speaking to candidates who are considering working with us at 80,000 Hours, I often hear people worry about replaceability.
The familiar version of the worry is about whether the organisation will hire someone else in your place. If it will, then the difference you make by taking the job is only the difference between you and them.
There are a couple of well-known answers to that. The person hired in your place probably cares about the world too, and would go on to do somethi...
> TL;DR: No, but you might, if you leave it too late: We’re hiring for seven roles, and the people who join now will shape what a much bigger AIM becomes. The first step is cheap -- an expression of interest form.
My worry
I rejoined...
Platform for Social Donation Matching?
Hey yall, does there exist some platform that allows you to post a donation matching campaign?
I would match all donations my friends/families make to a charity. I want the platform to ensure verification that I am actually matching the donations of my friends and vis versa.
Does anything like this exist? And if not, would you be interested in using one? I am thinking of making such a platform.
You could create a charity fundraiser on GoFundMe or Every.org and match the donations yourself.
If you want to automate the donation matching, I'd suggest batching the donations and only charging the fundraiser creator for the total amount every 14 days or when the fundraiser ends, rather than creating a matching transaction for every donation. That would cut down on payment processing fees.
You could also experiment with authorization holds on the user's credit card - they basically hold a certain amount of money hostage on the credit card to make sure that amount (or some lesser amount) can be charged to the card later. For example, you could authorize $200, and if the fundraiser only raises $150 by the time the hold expires, charge only $150 to the card.
There are some risks to the user that you might want to design around:
Interesting! Thank you so much for replying!
I'm interested in making it automated. It's a real pain to get the proper permissioning to hold funds in escrow so my initial pass would be to just have the campaign starter fully donate their amount at the start (since most people who make matching campaigns will ultimately donate the same max amount of money) and then have an 'unlock' that occurs as other people donate (with integration to every.org to verify the charity etc).
However the authorization holds is an interesting idea. Good if you want to actually have it just match what other people donate!
A consideration though is that authorization holds only last 7 days according to Stripe limiting the campaign time.