For the past few years, Jeff Kaufman has led Google Cambridge’s EAs in successfully lobbying to direct that money toward GiveWell-recommended charities. At between a quarter-million and a half-million dollars each year, this may be the largest fundraising event for GiveWell charities in the world.
This is worded correctly but is a bit hard to interpret: I don’t organize the fundraiser, I help organize the EA participation in it. Overall it looks like:
Each year, for the week of Giving Tuesday, there’s a company wide system of fundraising for charities.
I coordinate EAs across the company in finding other EAs with compatible interests in their location/business unit and send out reminders about deadlines.
In the Cambridge office we have a bake-off where employees bake, sponsors put in some amount per good baked, other employees donate in order to taste them, and another set of sponsors matches these donations. The more you donate the more votes you get. This is the fundraiser the post talks about.
The bake-off organizers are people who think highly of GiveWell, partly related to the advocacy of Boston EAs, but I think don’t identify as EAs themselves. They make the decision about what charities the bake-off should feature, and have chosen GiveWell top charities for the past several years.
The bake-off is built around matching and sponsorship, especially that the donations people make to eat/vote are matched. That matching has been provided by Google Cambridge’s EAs, and one factor in the bake-off organizers choosing GiveWell charities is that we’ve been able to provide a large match pool.
It’s not clear how counterfactual any of this is. Each year when I publicize it internally part of what I talk about is that my match isn’t counterfactually valid, and I’ll be donating my share whether or not others also donate. I use it as a time to talk about why you shouldn’t expect matches like this to be counterfactual, and present it as “please join us in funding” and not “you can unlock extra funding”.
By “fundraiser for Google”, I meant “fundraiser within Google”. Thanks for noting how that was confusing, and for more clearly explaining how the operation works! The bake-off system in particular may not be easy to replicate (you’d have to find EAs who baked), but the general “join us in funding” idea seems promising as a base.
Aaron wrote:
The post has:
This is worded correctly but is a bit hard to interpret: I don’t organize the fundraiser, I help organize the EA participation in it. Overall it looks like:
Each year, for the week of Giving Tuesday, there’s a company wide system of fundraising for charities.
I coordinate EAs across the company in finding other EAs with compatible interests in their location/business unit and send out reminders about deadlines.
In the Cambridge office we have a bake-off where employees bake, sponsors put in some amount per good baked, other employees donate in order to taste them, and another set of sponsors matches these donations. The more you donate the more votes you get. This is the fundraiser the post talks about.
The bake-off organizers are people who think highly of GiveWell, partly related to the advocacy of Boston EAs, but I think don’t identify as EAs themselves. They make the decision about what charities the bake-off should feature, and have chosen GiveWell top charities for the past several years.
The bake-off is built around matching and sponsorship, especially that the donations people make to eat/vote are matched. That matching has been provided by Google Cambridge’s EAs, and one factor in the bake-off organizers choosing GiveWell charities is that we’ve been able to provide a large match pool.
It’s not clear how counterfactual any of this is. Each year when I publicize it internally part of what I talk about is that my match isn’t counterfactually valid, and I’ll be donating my share whether or not others also donate. I use it as a time to talk about why you shouldn’t expect matches like this to be counterfactual, and present it as “please join us in funding” and not “you can unlock extra funding”.
By “fundraiser for Google”, I meant “fundraiser within Google”. Thanks for noting how that was confusing, and for more clearly explaining how the operation works! The bake-off system in particular may not be easy to replicate (you’d have to find EAs who baked), but the general “join us in funding” idea seems promising as a base.