I think there is a misconception here—when it is said that these charities will be fully funded anyway, what that can mean is that they will try to fundraise for a certain budget (perhaps with high/medium/low targets) and larger donors will often choose to fill the remaining gap in their fundraising late in the fundraising process.
This means you are often not really giving the charity extra on top of their budget, but in practice funging with the largest donors. The largest donors will then often give slightly less to them and give to their next best option instead.
As an individual, you are in this case redirecting funding from an organisation which agree with your priorities to whatever their next best option is.
For example, I personally made some donations to animal welfare charities this year which very likely funged to some extent with the EA Funds animal welfare fund. What that means is that the counterfactual effectiveness of my donation might be equivalent to whatever the last thing they chose to fund was (which I think is probably quite good in expectation).
Hello, thank you for clarifying. I didn’t know that the fundraising process is coordinated in this sort of way. I get the impression that many introductory materials on effective altruism don’t really explain this too well, leading to the sort of misconception I may have had when I wrote my question.
I think a lot of this coordination is implicit rather than explicit, and I don’t think it’s very well publicised (and there’s room for marginal donations to change whether the org gets funded to their high Vs medium target for example, and signalling value that individuals think this is good, so I do not mean to say that this is the only consequence of a donation).
I think there is a misconception here—when it is said that these charities will be fully funded anyway, what that can mean is that they will try to fundraise for a certain budget (perhaps with high/medium/low targets) and larger donors will often choose to fill the remaining gap in their fundraising late in the fundraising process.
This means you are often not really giving the charity extra on top of their budget, but in practice funging with the largest donors. The largest donors will then often give slightly less to them and give to their next best option instead.
As an individual, you are in this case redirecting funding from an organisation which agree with your priorities to whatever their next best option is.
For example, I personally made some donations to animal welfare charities this year which very likely funged to some extent with the EA Funds animal welfare fund. What that means is that the counterfactual effectiveness of my donation might be equivalent to whatever the last thing they chose to fund was (which I think is probably quite good in expectation).
Hello, thank you for clarifying. I didn’t know that the fundraising process is coordinated in this sort of way. I get the impression that many introductory materials on effective altruism don’t really explain this too well, leading to the sort of misconception I may have had when I wrote my question.
I think a lot of this coordination is implicit rather than explicit, and I don’t think it’s very well publicised (and there’s room for marginal donations to change whether the org gets funded to their high Vs medium target for example, and signalling value that individuals think this is good, so I do not mean to say that this is the only consequence of a donation).