Launching Euzoia: Beeminder for Effective Charities

TLDR: We built Beeminder for effective charities. Access it here.

Commitment Contracts don’t work with effective charities

Commitment Contracts are simple: You commit to pay money if you don’t do something. Then, when you don’t do the thing, you pay the company offering these contracts. This hurts, and that’s why it works.

Commitment Contracts are surprisingly effective for behaviour change: A large-scale study from stikK showed that contracts with money staked are 60 percentage points more likely to succeed.

That’s why there are plenty of organisations offering commitment contracts already: Beeminder, stickK, and forefeit. However, they either take the staked money or donate it to a portfolio of average NGOs.

We built an app that fixes that

We developed an app that applies this concept but donates the staked money to effective charities. It takes two minutes to set up and works in your browser and on your phone.

Worried that it’ll be less effective that way? You’re right. It’ll “hurt less” than donating the money to the NRA. But that’s easy to fix. Just stake more money, and it’ll hurt just the same.

Not sure that’s the best way to change behaviour? You’re right again. Check out our full post on behaviour change. Commitment Contracts should only be part of it. But it can be a great boost.

Give it a try

Access it here, it takes two minutes to set up.

This was built by Cameron and Christoph 🔸. We used to be accountability buddies long ago, did AIM’s Founding to Give program together last year, and wrote weekly posts about effective habits for a good life.