Donate Your Christmas to GiveWell Charities!
“People often ask us how they can help spread the word about effective charities. One way is to ask friends and family members to donate to effective charities in lieu of giving presents during the holiday season.”
‘Donate Your Christmas’ is happening for its second year and has already raised ~$40,000 (not counterfactually adjusted yet).
You may consider joining because:
- Each fundraiser raises, on average, $750 for GiveWell recommended charities with minimal effort (the time it takes to set-up a page and share it with your friends).
- Last year the most successful fundraisers raised tens of thousands of dollars, so the potential upside is large.
- It gives you an opportunity to talk to your friends and family about effective charities.
- May especially suit people who have free time, but little free money (e.g. students), or people with wealthy social contacts, so they can raise more money with the same effort).
You can fundraise through any of Charity Science’s Christmas Fundraiser pages to any GW charity:
American signup—christmas.causevox.com
British signup—ukchristmas.causevox.com
Canadian signup—cachristmas.causevox.com
(select the country where most of your donors will be donating from)
Or if you want to fundraise for AMF specifically (or want to make use of tax-deductibility outside of the three countries listed above) you can create a fundraiser directly on AMF’s website:
https://www.againstmalaria.com/Register.aspx
All you have to do is:
- Sign up
- Tell your friends and family that instead of material gifts, you’d love donations.
- Post about it on Facebook and email the fundraiser to your friends and family
I have a gift wish list and I’ve put donations to EA charities on it. I think this is in general a great idea, though I can see why many people might be uncomfortable with it:
Gift-giving is a sacred ritual for some people, something we do to bond as family/friends, and a little “treat yourself” moment that happens once or twice a year. There are good psychological reasons behind it, in other words, and it is not clear that giving money to charity accomplishes all the same goals. The spectre of the “altruist who is so committed that they don’t have a life anymore” looms.
I think the response to this is to acknowledge the truth behind it, but then point out that we are a very long way from that extreme “don’t have a life anymore” situation. The status quo is currently zero charitable donations on the holidays; surely it won’t hurt much to change that a bit. Indeed, by giving something to charity at the same time that we bond and treat ourselves, we might actually improve the bonding and the treating.