Counterfactual 2:1 match for $250k in animal welfare donations on October 22nd

Thanks! I'm only listing ones above who have asked me to and received confirmation (just in the spirit of caution), but many of these are great orgs and the matching might apply to them, so strong upvoting this!

They said it is to promote something called World Animal Month - I assume they just see part of their role as getting people excited about donating to charity, so maybe that?

Donation matching makes me skeptical too, and if it was up to me to decide how Every should use $500k it would not be to set up a donation match like this. Nevertheless, I think participating in this match may make sense for some people, as I commented here (and also offered my speculation for why they do this): https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vYgzjvwaS4t2Z8ZDB/counterfactual-2-1-match-for-usd250k-in-animal-welfare#aAmw4eR282By5TYW4

In particular, I think it's valuable to get anyone who is already going to be donating to these animal nonprofits regardless this year to participate in this match.

My understanding is that much (most? possibly a large majority?) of Every.org's operating funds and funds for donation matches like this one come from billionaire Uber co-founder Garrett Camp.

While I don't know exactly what Camp and Every's philanthropic goals are, I had a couple conversations with Every's Executive Director a few years ago in the wake of one of their other donation matches that a bunch of EAs participated in, and, based on my understanding developed then, my guess is that someone at Every.org just had the thought "How about we do an animal welfare donation match this giving season. A lot of people from the effective altruism community have participated in our past donation matches and I bet many of them would participate in this one, making it a successful way to attract more donors to our platform and get more people donating."

Whether the decionmaker(s) at Every needed approval from Camp on this $500k precisely or whether he just delegated them the authority to decide how exactly to use these funds I don't know, but don't think it matters much for the expected impact of participating in this match.

Regardless, my guess is that if the $500k doesn't get used up during this match, it will just stay in Camp's hands (or his nonprofit's hands, whether Camp.org or Every.org's hands, unspent anytime soon). That is, I don't think the money is being planned to be donated to these animal nonprofits regardless. Also worth noting that unlike the old Facebook Giving Tuesday matches, I don't think there is a plan for the money to be given away to an assortment of other nonprofits if people don't allocate it to these animal nonprofits via participating in the donation match.

So my guess is that participating in this match increases the overall amount of Camp money going to nonprofits in the near future, and that it is unclear where the Camp money would eventually be spent if it's not allocated to these animal nonprofits as a part of this match.

(It's possible these matching funds are coming from somewhere besides Camp, so again note that this is just my guess.)

So I think there is a true counterfactual impact here, and that for example, if someone thinks that one of these animal nonprofits is the most cost-effective giving opportunity, then now may be a particularly worthwhile time to donate, even if one wasn't planning on donating $2000 more to the nonprofit now before year end, since it will seemingly indeed lead to the nonprofit receiving 3x your donation amount.

Note: If you think that one of the animal nonprofits is only, say, 50% as cost-effective as the best giving opportunity you can identify, I'd discourage you from giving to that animal nonprofit in this match despite the naive expected value calculation (3*50%=150%) suggesting that donating to the animal nonprofit with the match will lead to more good than donating to the best giving opportunity without a match. One reason I'd give for this is that I don't think that we should let large donors incentivize us to allocate our giving budgets to less cost-effective giving opportunities, since that seems like a bad incentiblve. Instead I'd say to the large donor, "It's nice that you are wanting to donate your money, including to these nonprofits that are very cost-effective, but I think it would be better if you donated your money to this other nonprofit instead that will use the money to do even more good. You could also donate to both if you want and that'd be completely fine, but in either case I am going to respectfully decline your match offer in order to allocate my limited donation budget to where I think it will do the most good." In other words, I'd decline to play the matching donor's game and let them know why in the hope that they might decide to change their behavior to support the more cost-effective giving opportunity. If we did a more sophisticated EV calculation than the naive one above, I'd expect this course of action of still donating to the most cost-effective giving opportunity you can identify despite the match offer for donating to the half-as-effective nonprofit with a 2:1 match to come out better. (Note that in addition to declining to participate in the match yourself, you could always find and reach out to the existing donor base for these 50%-as-effective nonprofits and encourage them to participate in the match, assuming they're not open to donating to the best giving oppotunity that you can identify that you're giving to.)

I suppose we don't know perfectly well!

I think the default is that the matching funds go to non-effective animal charities that are good at marketing or have big donor bases. So depending on if those are net-positive or net-negative, there might be a slight cost to the counterfactual.

The funds themselves presumably come from Every.org's operating funds, which aren't particularly impact-oriented. But maybe they came from a more effective donor!

I'd guess the counterfactualness is similar to EA Giving Tuesday (which sadly doesn't happen anymore).