Jason
Bio
I am an attorney in a public-sector position not associated with EA, although I cannot provide legal advice to anyone. My involvement with EA so far has been mostly limited so far to writing checks to GiveWell and other effective charities in the Global Health space, as well as some independent reading. I have occasionally read the forum and was looking for ideas for year-end giving when the whole FTX business exploded . . .
How I can help others
As someone who isn't deep in EA culture (at least at the time of writing), I may be able to offer a perspective on how the broader group of people with sympathies toward EA ideas might react to certain things. I'll probably make some errors that would be obvious to other people, but sometimes a fresh set of eyes can help bring a different perspective.
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The EA equivalent could be things like discounted or early access to EAG(x) events, member-only discussion groups, or eligibility to complete advanced courses offered by national EA associations.
Maybe, but this sounds to me a lot like erecting new pay gates for engagement with the community (both the membership fee and any extra fee for the advanced courses, etc.). Maybe that's unavoidable, but it does carry some significant downsides that aren't present with a mountaineering club (where the benefits of participation are intended to flow mainly to the participant rather than to third parties like animals or future people)
It also seems at tension with the current recruitment strategy by increasing barriers/friction to deeper engagement. And it seems that people most commonly become interested in EA in their 20s, an age at which imposing financial barriers to deeper engagement may be particularly negative. While I think people would be okay lowering pay gates based on certain objectively-applied markers of merit or need, I am not confident that this could be done in a way that both didn't impede "core" recruitment and that "supporter" members experienced as fair and acceptable. Most people don't want to pay for something others are getting for free / near-free without a sufficiently compelling reason.
I don't really understand what would be in it for the corporation, but I haven't thought very deeply about it. (This is all from a US perspective. I'm using Coca-Cola as the company in my examples given its use in the post, and GiveWell as the potential charity).
Under I.R.C. 170(b)(2)(A), most corporations can deduct charitable contributions up to 10% of their taxable income. More discussion here. Maybe companies could try claiming their matching donations as an employment-related business expense instead of as a charitable donation per se, but I doubt (e.g.) Coca-Cola is running up against that 10% cap on the latter. I suspect that few corporations need the matching program to get credit for donating more from a tax perspective.[1]
If Coca-Cola wanted to give money to GiveWell (conditioned on strangers also giving money), trying to do this through an employee-matching system rather than through a more direct method seems awfully convoluted to me. I'm guessing Coca-Cola would prefer to give in a way that maximized the reputational benefits flowing it to / made its donation look as big as possible, and that experts in fundraising could tell them how to best accomplish that. I'm not sure why Coca-Cola would want to reinvent the wheel here.
If for some reason Coca-Cola wanted to give more money through employee matching in general, then it would have the option of increasing the generosity of their matches for authentic employee donations. From its perspective, that seems a superior option in light of the usual goals of an employee-match program. To the extent that the corporation thinks there is PR benefit from higher employee donations, that isn't going to fly when it comes to light that the employees were acting as mere conduits for strangers. Moreover, one would expect more of an employee morale/retention boost for charities the staff strongly cared about (and their willingness to donate some of their own money is a signal about existence and intensity of staff preference).
So I'm not sure I see a clear use case here unless an employer (1) wants to give money to specific charities we endorse, (2) wants to do that through an employee-matching program for reasons that I am not predicting, and (3) feels that public disclosure of what is going on would not undermine the employer's objectives. If I'm missing something, then figuring out what it is might be helpful in thinking through strategy.
If a company is willing to match $10,000 per employee per year, they may be flexible about whether the money comes from the employee or others in the community — the company’s contribution is the same either way and the company still enjoys the upsides of giving.
That being said: I assume that a company that is willing to match up to $10,000 per year first obtained projections on how much that policy would actually cost on a per-employee basis. I doubt they budgeted close to $10K/employee/year for this, although I don't know what the participation rates are in reality. This site suggests ~31.25% of matching funds might be claimed.
- ^
The most obvious exception would be those without taxable income. But even then, I suspect there may be less risky ways to justify charitable donations as an ordinary business expense than through what sounds a whole lot like straw donors. Cf. Marquis v. Comm'r, 49 T.C. 485 (1968) (charitable deductions allowed as business expenses, albeit under somewhat unusual circumstances).
(US perspective)
There's a limit of $50 for anonymous cash donations to a candidate. They could be annoying enough to account for -- and vaguely disreputable enough -- that they are of no meaningful benefit to the candidate. I don't recall ever seeing a candidate provide a clear mechanism for such donations, and that may be why (although my experience is limited).
Donating through a straw donor to evade campaign-finance laws is an excellent way to end up in trouble with the feds.
I think an organization like that is plausible, but I get the sense that it is a much different animal than the Dutch mountaineering association.
Although the financial breakdown is sparse (and I can't read Dutch), a glance at the website suggests the association offers a lot of activities and other sources of value for its members -- which I am guessing are significantly more costly than a card, sticker, e-mail, and so on. If you're even moderately interested in mountaineering, it makes sense that joining would provide you with a lot of value. Thus, I wouldn't be surprised that a large fraction of people who are moderately interested in mountaineering join.
That doesn't strike me as the right joining-percentage base rate for an organization in which members don't get much to show for their membership fees. For example, one might consider the number of individuals who support the free / open source software movement versus the number who are paying members of a FOSS software organization. If the conversion rate of interested people into membership of a sticker-and-card organization is rather low, you need a rather large group of interested people to end up with a sizable membership.
Don't get me wrong; a membership organization with 80,000 people would be great! I just don't see that a low-cost membership organization as a likely way to reduce net funding pressures.
I suspect that a delayed-allocation model is going to add a lot of complexity (and potentially create user-trust issues). It seems to me that such a model would require significantly more engineering and legal/operational work than a model in which GoodWallet transfers money directly from the donor to the creator's preselected charity ("immediate model"). It requires the user to have more trust in GoodWallet as custodian of the funds, [1] and is likely to either cost the donor a potential tax deduction or require GoodWallet to jump through some hoops to qualify as a proper charity in its own right. And I think would-be donors do consider the tax-deductibility of a donation as a signal that things are on the up and up.
The advantages of such a delayed-allocation model over an immediate model are not clear to me. In particular, even if the universe of eligible charities is drawn from GiveWell's recommended-charity list, the possible choices are not that different from each other and I suspect few creators would place much value on the ability to defer a decision on which one to point their supporters to.
As for "mini-DAF functionality for everyone": as I understand it from a US perspective, the classic reason for DAFs is to allow donors to take the tax deduction now while letting the donation grow for a while and deferring the choice of charity until later. Especially with changes to the US tax code a few years ago, people with modest sums to give aren't generally in a position to itemize donations anyway, and I didn't see anything about offering investment opportunities. So I'm not sure who the target audience is for this functionality.
- ^
As a potential donor with limited knowledge of anyone involved, I'd be relatively less worried about GoodWallet's leaders being dishonest but relatively more concerned about whether those leaders had structured things in a way that protected funds intended for charitable purposes from GoodWallet's potential creditors.
On the income side of the ledger, having more members might help. But the more members you have, the more you need to spend on member-service activities (i.e., whatever it is that you're offering that makes people want to pay the membership fee).
On the one hand, I don't think that member-service activity expenditure would scale linearly with increased membership. On the other hand, current spend on meta / community building activities is far more than €50/involved person. So my assumption is that -- at best -- the marginal costs of serving additional members would be equal to the membership revenue. A meta in which the spend per average member was anywhere close to that would be a very different meta indeed.
I wouldn't rule out the possibility that making a partisan donation could be an issue for some non-governmental roles either. I don't have a strong sense of that, but recall that people looking to assert that an organization has a partisan bent will search their employees' contribution records and then report that as evidence of bent. So I were trying to come across as a non-partisan organization, I might be concerned about hiring a bunch of people who had all donated to the same team.
That's admittedly speculative . . . but probably not more speculative than a ~$10 donation being outcome-determinative in a major US political race, either.
More like: If EA is healthy, then groups that have been getting a consistent level of support should be as a class either stable or growing. That's why I suggested looking at non-EOSP elite university groups -- them being at least stable as a class would be evidence of general health. On the other hand, if their output is dropping despite holding investment steady, that would not be a great sign.
How much paid staff time was devoted to content development work in the past? I briefly skimmed the list of top posts in years past, and I didn't get the impression that the Forum was a "bulletin board" in years past. If there were less paid staff time devoted to content development in years past, it would make me think it less likely that reducing that effort now would trigger a meaningful loss of Forum quality. It's of course possible that something is different now -- either to justify a greater or lesser level of content work than for years prior.
My guess is that the optimal number of FTEs working on the Forum is greater than 0.0 (let's please not go to Reddit) and less than 3.0. But it's hard for me to say where I think it should be within that range.