Sophisticated donors hopefully know to ignore āmatchingā pitches (but if not, itās certainly helpful to spread awareness that itās basically just a marketing gimmick).
But my sense is that relatively few people are sophisticated donors who could accurately be described as āallocating their charity budgetā. Rather, I model most peopleās philanthropic motivations as unstable impulses that come and go as emotions hit them. Marketing gimmicks can be very helpful for exciting such donors, and motivating them to do something good rather than nothing.
If anything like my model is accurate, then asking effective charities to forego marketing gimmicks seems like a bad idea. It just means that the unstable impulses of the hoi polloi will be exclusively activated by less-effective charities that have no such anti-marketing scruples.
(If we could secure a world where no-one engaged in marketing gimmicks, that would indeed be preferable. But I take it that we canāt secure such an outcome. All we could achieve is unilateral disarmament, which makes things overall worse, not better.)
But my sense is that relatively few people are sophisticated donors who could accurately be described as āallocating their charity budgetā. Rather, I model most peopleās philanthropic motivations as unstable impulses that come and go as emotions hit them. Marketing gimmicks can be very helpful for exciting such donors, and motivating them to do something good rather than nothing.
I agree that many people arenāt very smart about their donation choices, though I would be surprised if itās worth the tradeoff to alienate and engage in a more deceptive relationship with the people who are being smarter about their donation choices, and an article on donation matching that doesnāt go into that at the very least seems incomplete.
In as much as the EA community has norms or standards by which it evaluates the behavior of people, I think ādeceptiveness about the cost-effectiveness of donationsā seems like one standard that makes sense for us to apply. Maybe it makes sense for GiveDirectly to do this (though I am skeptical), but that shouldnāt deflate me being disappointed, and it of course makes it less likely that I recommend people donate to GiveDirectly, especially people who arenāt as careful about donation decisions.
Sophisticated donors hopefully know to ignore āmatchingā pitches (but if not, itās certainly helpful to spread awareness that itās basically just a marketing gimmick).
But my sense is that relatively few people are sophisticated donors who could accurately be described as āallocating their charity budgetā. Rather, I model most peopleās philanthropic motivations as unstable impulses that come and go as emotions hit them. Marketing gimmicks can be very helpful for exciting such donors, and motivating them to do something good rather than nothing.
If anything like my model is accurate, then asking effective charities to forego marketing gimmicks seems like a bad idea. It just means that the unstable impulses of the hoi polloi will be exclusively activated by less-effective charities that have no such anti-marketing scruples.
(If we could secure a world where no-one engaged in marketing gimmicks, that would indeed be preferable. But I take it that we canāt secure such an outcome. All we could achieve is unilateral disarmament, which makes things overall worse, not better.)
I agree that many people arenāt very smart about their donation choices, though I would be surprised if itās worth the tradeoff to alienate and engage in a more deceptive relationship with the people who are being smarter about their donation choices, and an article on donation matching that doesnāt go into that at the very least seems incomplete.
In as much as the EA community has norms or standards by which it evaluates the behavior of people, I think ādeceptiveness about the cost-effectiveness of donationsā seems like one standard that makes sense for us to apply. Maybe it makes sense for GiveDirectly to do this (though I am skeptical), but that shouldnāt deflate me being disappointed, and it of course makes it less likely that I recommend people donate to GiveDirectly, especially people who arenāt as careful about donation decisions.