Cause areas such as global poverty, public health, and animal advocacy already have sick children, and cute baby animals, for charities to tell donors they’re heroically saving. That gets lots of warm fuzzies. Lots of other charities engage their donors, especially larger and more regular donors, and the general community they’re in touch with. This includes fostering a sense of community, expressing gratitude, and evoking positive imagery for them being involved. Effective altruist organizations that I’m aware do this are the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, the Center for Applied Rationality, Giving What We Can, and The Life You Can Save. One effective altruist organization I wish would do more and better community engagement is 80,000 Hours.
For more abstract cause areas, like helping huge populations that exist in the far future, Brienne Strohl of the CFAR and Leverage Research wrote a guide for Explaining Effective Altruism to System 1 in each of our own brains. Figuring out how to induce an affect like this in donors across multiple mediums of expression could be useful. I don’t know how to do that, so maybe try contacting Ms. Strohl about it.
I’m looking for more concrete suggestions that orgs could (and would hopefully be willing to) A/B test. Most of the charities EAs are encouraged to support do help sick/suffering children/animals, but I don’t think they’re taking advantage of it in the same ways the mainstream orgs are (nor are the meta-charities/evaluators that are pitching them).
About five years ago, a family member donated to SmileTrain on my behalf. I received a sheet of before-and-after photos of a child who’d had the cleft palate surgery with his first name and the date of his surgery written underneath. I had an extremely positive emotional response to this and ended up pinning it to my fridge, where roommates and house guests saw it on a daily basis. I still have more visceral happy-feels for SmileTrain than for most of the charities I support now.
I’d love to see EA groups running experiments on that sort of thing.
Evoking warm fuzzies from others rather than feelings of guilt or being overwhelmed probably works better.
Effective altruism doesn’t work best by mechanically telling others ‘look how effective this altruism is!’. Promoting effectiveness among donors is important as well, and doing so with positive reinforcement could be more effective than what we’re currently doing.
Effective altruists should run experiments with this to figure out what works best.
Mason, yours is a worthy concern, and it’s not enough to have it buried in a comment thread. The problem isn’t getting solved, so let’s make an open call for effective altruists to experiment. I’ll write a post about this. If anyone wants to get involved, or provide feedback, send me a private message.
Cause areas such as global poverty, public health, and animal advocacy already have sick children, and cute baby animals, for charities to tell donors they’re heroically saving. That gets lots of warm fuzzies. Lots of other charities engage their donors, especially larger and more regular donors, and the general community they’re in touch with. This includes fostering a sense of community, expressing gratitude, and evoking positive imagery for them being involved. Effective altruist organizations that I’m aware do this are the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, the Center for Applied Rationality, Giving What We Can, and The Life You Can Save. One effective altruist organization I wish would do more and better community engagement is 80,000 Hours.
For more abstract cause areas, like helping huge populations that exist in the far future, Brienne Strohl of the CFAR and Leverage Research wrote a guide for Explaining Effective Altruism to System 1 in each of our own brains. Figuring out how to induce an affect like this in donors across multiple mediums of expression could be useful. I don’t know how to do that, so maybe try contacting Ms. Strohl about it.
I’m looking for more concrete suggestions that orgs could (and would hopefully be willing to) A/B test. Most of the charities EAs are encouraged to support do help sick/suffering children/animals, but I don’t think they’re taking advantage of it in the same ways the mainstream orgs are (nor are the meta-charities/evaluators that are pitching them).
About five years ago, a family member donated to SmileTrain on my behalf. I received a sheet of before-and-after photos of a child who’d had the cleft palate surgery with his first name and the date of his surgery written underneath. I had an extremely positive emotional response to this and ended up pinning it to my fridge, where roommates and house guests saw it on a daily basis. I still have more visceral happy-feels for SmileTrain than for most of the charities I support now.
I’d love to see EA groups running experiments on that sort of thing.
I understand what’s going on:
Evoking warm fuzzies from others rather than feelings of guilt or being overwhelmed probably works better.
Effective altruism doesn’t work best by mechanically telling others ‘look how effective this altruism is!’. Promoting effectiveness among donors is important as well, and doing so with positive reinforcement could be more effective than what we’re currently doing.
Effective altruists should run experiments with this to figure out what works best.
Mason, yours is a worthy concern, and it’s not enough to have it buried in a comment thread. The problem isn’t getting solved, so let’s make an open call for effective altruists to experiment. I’ll write a post about this. If anyone wants to get involved, or provide feedback, send me a private message.