My suggestion is that you use the money for influence matching. Influence matching (A term I am borrowing from give well) is where you use the large amount of money you have as an opportunity to combine the boring option with some a donation matching scheme specifically targeted at a group of people who are not currently within the Effective Altruism community—attempting to draw them in and use the matching as a “hook” to educate and bring new people into the community—over time having a multiplying donation effect.
I would imagine a good group to do this with is an online or offline community with some commitment to charity—but not one where EA is well known (For example a University Club, a Church or local humanist group, a non-EA blog readership or message board) . A recent good example is that Bill Gates partnered with a prominent youtuber (John Green) to produce an educational video on African nutrition and then offered a $100,000 donation matching scheme for the community of that vlogger—drawing them into the ongoing work of his foundation in that area through an email newsletter.
Careful design would maximise the impact, and would require some thought but I suggest this as it is boring+++ - it will do at least as much good as the “boring” option as well as having a significant additional impact potential (though I don’t like the name—the opportunity to donate a large amount to an EA cause would be pretty exciting to me). For other options you need a very compelling case as to how it does does actually beat the boring option, and for $20,000 to $200,000 it seems unlikely that you would have the time or the resources to actually show that case beyond a somewhat fuzzy argument.
This is a great idea, I heard that the dollar-per-dollar match offered in the Charity Science walk caused a big increase in the amount which people donated.
Thanks Alasdair; for what it’s worth I consider this very close to many variants on the ‘giving games’ idea, in terms of using the money to draw people in while still making sure it goes to a good cause. One plausible issue with donation matching instead here is that it seems fake if the money is going to be donated anyway (giving games of pretty much any variant give a genuine, if perhaps constrained, choice); do you have a sense of how people react to that?
Also, at some point in drafting this the word ‘boring’ was in inverted commas, as it is in your post. Not sure what happened to that...
Well, donation matching schemes are very well known and accepted in the wider charity world.
I agree with you there is some tension there—but it is a pretty relaxed one, I think people see it more as making a communal shared commitment than as being fake.
With the Bill Gates example I mentioned, they reached their $100,000 donation in 2 days and currently are around $260,000 - obviously $100,00 is a trivial amount of money for Bill Gates, no-one looking at that video can have been like “well if we don’t reach the target maybe Bill Gates is going to not donate money to charity and spend it on hookers and blow”—But they donated, in part i guess because they wanted to be part of their community and to show this was something they were thinking about and in alignment with this issue and donation event.
But yes, the framing and structure - how to make it seem genuine (the ultimate way of course would be a precommitment that any unmatched funds be used for some silly or negative purpose—but that seems even more icky), of how to engage that group event feeling and finally of how to make it a sticky thing beyond a one off event people get involved with and forget about—all would require some careful thought and planning.
My suggestion is that you use the money for influence matching. Influence matching (A term I am borrowing from give well) is where you use the large amount of money you have as an opportunity to combine the boring option with some a donation matching scheme specifically targeted at a group of people who are not currently within the Effective Altruism community—attempting to draw them in and use the matching as a “hook” to educate and bring new people into the community—over time having a multiplying donation effect.
I would imagine a good group to do this with is an online or offline community with some commitment to charity—but not one where EA is well known (For example a University Club, a Church or local humanist group, a non-EA blog readership or message board) . A recent good example is that Bill Gates partnered with a prominent youtuber (John Green) to produce an educational video on African nutrition and then offered a $100,000 donation matching scheme for the community of that vlogger—drawing them into the ongoing work of his foundation in that area through an email newsletter.
Careful design would maximise the impact, and would require some thought but I suggest this as it is boring+++ - it will do at least as much good as the “boring” option as well as having a significant additional impact potential (though I don’t like the name—the opportunity to donate a large amount to an EA cause would be pretty exciting to me). For other options you need a very compelling case as to how it does does actually beat the boring option, and for $20,000 to $200,000 it seems unlikely that you would have the time or the resources to actually show that case beyond a somewhat fuzzy argument.
This is a great idea, I heard that the dollar-per-dollar match offered in the Charity Science walk caused a big increase in the amount which people donated.
Thanks Alasdair; for what it’s worth I consider this very close to many variants on the ‘giving games’ idea, in terms of using the money to draw people in while still making sure it goes to a good cause. One plausible issue with donation matching instead here is that it seems fake if the money is going to be donated anyway (giving games of pretty much any variant give a genuine, if perhaps constrained, choice); do you have a sense of how people react to that?
Also, at some point in drafting this the word ‘boring’ was in inverted commas, as it is in your post. Not sure what happened to that...
Well, donation matching schemes are very well known and accepted in the wider charity world. I agree with you there is some tension there—but it is a pretty relaxed one, I think people see it more as making a communal shared commitment than as being fake.
With the Bill Gates example I mentioned, they reached their $100,000 donation in 2 days and currently are around $260,000 - obviously $100,00 is a trivial amount of money for Bill Gates, no-one looking at that video can have been like “well if we don’t reach the target maybe Bill Gates is going to not donate money to charity and spend it on hookers and blow”—But they donated, in part i guess because they wanted to be part of their community and to show this was something they were thinking about and in alignment with this issue and donation event.
But yes, the framing and structure - how to make it seem genuine (the ultimate way of course would be a precommitment that any unmatched funds be used for some silly or negative purpose—but that seems even more icky), of how to engage that group event feeling and finally of how to make it a sticky thing beyond a one off event people get involved with and forget about—all would require some careful thought and planning.
I quoted your post verbatim from FB, and it wasn’t in quotes there. I can add them back if you want.