Atheist groups (e.g., the Secular Student Alliance) may be particularly receptive to EA ideas since they’re already somewhat consequentialist and rationalist in their thinking. Charity Science has tried to network with atheists and didn’t find it as high impact as other things they were trying, but maybe someone else would have better success, maybe someone with more atheist connections.
I don’t have any concrete detail because no one has had time to really think it through. Basically it seems like atheists might be a receptive niche market for fundraising / marketing EA ideas. But someone would need to come up with the details themselves.
Charity Science used to do this by going to local atheist meetups and talking to people there and by going to atheist conferences.
Charity Science used to do this by going to local atheist meetups and talking to people there and by going to atheist conferences.
That seems totally unquantifiable—were they actually going to track how many donations it led to, or just say that one in X people (for some high value of X) seemed like they were/”must” be convinced of effective charities and then mark down a guess at their whole lifetime giving to them as impact?
It’s not too difficult to track donations, I think, since we were going to suggest that donations be made through the Charity Science page. In fact, at the time, we were even pivoting more toward “donate to Charity Science” than “donate to AMF”, which would have made the case more solid.
Our actual plan for tracking was to offer a donation matching campaign if people sent in their donation receipts (even if they donated from before the campaign), so we thought that if all else fails we had a good chance of figuring out who donated after that.
And to be clear, at no point was the plan to come up with some X and then claim lifetimes of impact. If we did that, we’d still be out there networking full time. ;)
Isn’t Charity Science Canadian? Organisations like that and GBS in Switzerland seem to have an advantage in that (domestic) donors often have to give through them, whereas in their home countries the charities strongly prefer donors to give directly to them. That’s not particular replibable though, though donation matches are more so.
[Marketing EA to Atheists]
Atheist groups (e.g., the Secular Student Alliance) may be particularly receptive to EA ideas since they’re already somewhat consequentialist and rationalist in their thinking. Charity Science has tried to network with atheists and didn’t find it as high impact as other things they were trying, but maybe someone else would have better success, maybe someone with more atheist connections.
What would this involve exactly?
I don’t have any concrete detail because no one has had time to really think it through. Basically it seems like atheists might be a receptive niche market for fundraising / marketing EA ideas. But someone would need to come up with the details themselves.
Charity Science used to do this by going to local atheist meetups and talking to people there and by going to atheist conferences.
That seems totally unquantifiable—were they actually going to track how many donations it led to, or just say that one in X people (for some high value of X) seemed like they were/”must” be convinced of effective charities and then mark down a guess at their whole lifetime giving to them as impact?
It’s not too difficult to track donations, I think, since we were going to suggest that donations be made through the Charity Science page. In fact, at the time, we were even pivoting more toward “donate to Charity Science” than “donate to AMF”, which would have made the case more solid.
Our actual plan for tracking was to offer a donation matching campaign if people sent in their donation receipts (even if they donated from before the campaign), so we thought that if all else fails we had a good chance of figuring out who donated after that.
And to be clear, at no point was the plan to come up with some X and then claim lifetimes of impact. If we did that, we’d still be out there networking full time. ;)
Isn’t Charity Science Canadian? Organisations like that and GBS in Switzerland seem to have an advantage in that (domestic) donors often have to give through them, whereas in their home countries the charities strongly prefer donors to give directly to them. That’s not particular replibable though, though donation matches are more so.