See, e.g., Ribon—an app that gives you points (“ribons”) for reading positive news (e.g. “handicapped walks again thanks to exoskeleton”) sponsored by corporations; then you choose one of the TLYCS charities, and your points are converted into a donation.
Ribon is a Brazilian for-profit; they claim to donate 70% of what they receive from sponsors, but I haven’t found precise stats. It has skyrocketed this year: from their informed impact, I estimate they have donated about U$ 33k to TLYCS – which is a lot for Brazilian standards. They intend to expand (they gathered more than R$ 1 mi – roughly U$250k—from investors this year) and will soon launch an ICO. Perhaps an EA non-profit could do even more good?
I’d never heard of this app before—thanks for bringing it to my attention!
The most prominent “EA donation” app I’m aware of is Momentum, which has multiple full-time employees and seems to be pushing hard to get American users. I don’t know what their user acquisition numbers are like thus far.
I love Momentum—to me, it’s like a kind of cosmic pigouvian tax (“someone has to pay when Trump tweets, and this time it’s gonna be me”); it still demands some kind of committment, though. Ribon is completely different, it’s not an app that only altruistic people use; actually, that’s why I didn’t really like it at first, because it didn’t ask people to give anything or to be effective… but then, perhaps that’s why it scales well—particularly in societies without an altruistic culture. It’s a low-hanging fruit: we already see lots of ads on the internet, for free, and usually (most) don’t read but the headlines of news like “Shelly-Ann breaks a new record”… so why not game it all a little bit (you have points, can gain “badges”, compete with your friends...) and make companies pay for your attention (ads) in donations?
The Life You Can Save is working with an app-development company called Meepo (which is doing pro bono work) to build a non-profit donation app, which is currently in beta. You can learn more about this project, and how to download the beta version, here.
Why don’t we have an “Effective App”?
See, e.g., Ribon—an app that gives you points (“ribons”) for reading positive news (e.g. “handicapped walks again thanks to exoskeleton”) sponsored by corporations; then you choose one of the TLYCS charities, and your points are converted into a donation.
Ribon is a Brazilian for-profit; they claim to donate 70% of what they receive from sponsors, but I haven’t found precise stats. It has skyrocketed this year: from their informed impact, I estimate they have donated about U$ 33k to TLYCS – which is a lot for Brazilian standards. They intend to expand (they gathered more than R$ 1 mi – roughly U$250k—from investors this year) and will soon launch an ICO. Perhaps an EA non-profit could do even more good?
I’d never heard of this app before—thanks for bringing it to my attention!
The most prominent “EA donation” app I’m aware of is Momentum, which has multiple full-time employees and seems to be pushing hard to get American users. I don’t know what their user acquisition numbers are like thus far.
I love Momentum—to me, it’s like a kind of cosmic pigouvian tax (“someone has to pay when Trump tweets, and this time it’s gonna be me”); it still demands some kind of committment, though. Ribon is completely different, it’s not an app that only altruistic people use; actually, that’s why I didn’t really like it at first, because it didn’t ask people to give anything or to be effective… but then, perhaps that’s why it scales well—particularly in societies without an altruistic culture. It’s a low-hanging fruit: we already see lots of ads on the internet, for free, and usually (most) don’t read but the headlines of news like “Shelly-Ann breaks a new record”… so why not game it all a little bit (you have points, can gain “badges”, compete with your friends...) and make companies pay for your attention (ads) in donations?
The Life You Can Save is working with an app-development company called Meepo (which is doing pro bono work) to build a non-profit donation app, which is currently in beta. You can learn more about this project, and how to download the beta version, here.