The Most Valuable Dollars Aren’t Owned By Us

At this time of year, we forum-dwellers tend to spend quite a bit of energy thinking about where we should donate. This year especially, the forum team has outdone themselves, running an interesting debate week on “global health vs. animals” —global health was trounced.. I still love you though, bed-net warriors! — followed by an action packed Giving Season:

While I personally find it very interesting to think about what the very best marginal donation would be, I think it’s important to remember where the bigger opportunity lies..

Consider this: When we fine-tune our own donations or help other EAs do the same, the gains are probably quite modest. While there are likely meaningful differences between top charities[1], we can be far less certain about which charity is the very best than we can about which are in the top-tier and which are in the “meh”-tier. So factoring in this uncertainty, optimizing an existing donor’s dollar might only generate about 5% of the value that could be achieved by inspiring a new donor to give their first dollar to a highly effective charity.

This points to an important conclusion: The most valuable dollars to aren’t owned by us. They’re owned by people who currently either don’t donate at all, or who donate to charities that are orders of magnitude less effective than the ones we typically discuss here. A dollar that you can only direct to one effective charity by taking it away from another is far less valuable than a dollar that comes from a “meh”-tier charity or from someone’s Uber Eats budget.

This insight should reshape how we think about our marginal effort. While it’s valuable to help each other find the very best giving opportunities, we should probably do more personal outreach instead, on the margin.

You don’t own the most valuable dollars, but you can still influence them!

Trying to influence people who aren’t yet supporting effective charities might sound hard, but it’s more tractable than you might think.

I’ve seen this work firsthand. To give a couple examples:

  • 1-1 outreach: My own journey started with a single conversation during a car ride with a colleague. That discussion took me from not donating at all to ‘earning to give’, taking the 10% pledge, and eventually going to work in the non-profit sector myself.

  • Scaled outreach: This recent Substack post from fellow forum dweller @Omnizoid has already directed >$5,000 to the Shrimp Welfare Project through our platform FarmKind – enough to spare 6.5 million shrimp from suffering at the end of their lives – plus another $1,000 to our other recommended charities.

I’d wager that the expected value of you attempting to encourage those around you to donate to effective charities this Giving Season far exceeds what you’ll achieve through your own fine-tuning on the forum.

[To be clear, I really value the Giving Season ‘festivities’ that the forum team have arranged. They have an important role to play. I’m simply trying to bring more attention to a relatively neglected way to have impact at this time of year]

Tips for making it happen

  1. Have an audience? Use it! If you have followers on social media, a blog, or a professional network, you have a unique opportunity to introduce effective giving to many people at once. (FarmKind would love to partner with you to help you make this successful. Hit me up at aidan@farmkind.giving if you’re interested)

  2. No audience? No worries! Focus on meaningful conversations with people close to you, like family and friends. The holiday season often creates some particularly good opportunities!

  3. Embrace relationship-based giving. Friends and family will often happily make a donation for the purpose of supporting you, rather than supporting a particular cause or charity (e.g. contributing to your birthday fundraiser). While it’d be even better if they were convinced to become effective givers, the value of a one-off donation is still super high!

  4. Connect emotionally. While philosophical arguments are persuasive for some, most people’s primary motivation when donating is supporting a cause they feel personally and emotionally connected to. So help them connect to the issue! Meet them where they are, drawing connections between what they already know they care about and cause/​charity you’re recommending.

  5. Make it easy to take action. Have a specific charity recommendation in mind, with a simple, low-friction donation process. Send them a link to make it even easier.

The key ask, once more:

This giving season, try influencing the most valuable dollars: The ones that aren’t owned by us.

Thanks for reading!

  1. ^

    There’s an argument that charity cost-effectiveness follows a long tail distribution, meaning the difference between the best and second-best charity could be even larger than the difference between top-tier and “meh”-tier.