This doesn’t look cost-free to me. It’s just that the costs are indirect and uncertain.
Discussion of the extent to which matched funds would counterfactually go to the same place came up in a recent thread. I think it’s even more relevant here because you are explicitly asking people to do this when they would donate the same way anyway. That means that there isn’t even a veneer of “well maybe it wouldn’t” to hide behind.
The reason I say this is that reading this post made part of my brain think “this looks sleazy”. And if I get that reaction then probably a nontrivial fraction of other people will too. People don’t like being lied to, so there’s potential for significant negative publicity about this. Can you do something to reduce this risk? Even just encouraging people to do it only if they’re happy to let their donations be somewhat swayed by where others give would go a long way here, as it would turn the effect into what would be commonly perceived as genuine matching.
Owen, I’m sorry you were downvoted. I agree that there are pretty big potential honesty concerns here.
It would be nice if the EA community could have norms of being especially virtuous about things like messaging around matching donations, rather than allowing themselves to do things like claim “matching” status without counterfactual adjustment just because “everyone else does it.”
EDIT: especially when we pay so much attention to counterfactual claims elsewhere! It just seems like really bad signalling.
EDIT EDIT: If you’re interested in finding out what people think about donation matching, please share the following survey with your friends! (Please DON’T just fill it out yourself, since I don’t want too much EA sampling bias. If you fill it out yourself, please also share the post to a non-EA audience, e.g. on Facebook.)
The survey is a great idea. However I shared it with someone and they didn’t complete it because they found it too unclear what the questions were asking. I think is exhibiting a problem here in that it’s a bit complicated even to talk about these things—so it may not be the kind of thing many people even have expectations for per se.
Yeah, it was tough to find questions that were both simple and asked what I wanted. I definitely don’t think the survey should be the last word on the subject—we could certainly make a better one and distribute it via e.g. Mechanical Turk for a bigger and more representative sample—but I wanted to get something out quickly and without it clobbering too much of my time.
Agree with Owen’s PR concerns, and with Ben about being especially virtuous. GiveWell have written about this as well, they call it a donor illusion.
That said, I think matching challenges are almost always fake, and maybe they’re a useful tool we should be using. But we can at least try to make it less fake and less obvious.
No studies found strong, generalizable negative effects of donation matching. However, several found worrying hints: Meier 2006 found that may have decreased net long-run donations, Eckel and Grossman 2008 found that it decreased response rate among some donors (probably due to the study’s unfamiliar-looking fundraising appeal), and there’s weak evidence that higher matching levels can actually crowd out some donations.
I actually guess I was downvoted for tone. Reading over my comment it seems a bit arrogant in not just raising the issue and asking if something should be done (which I think is correct), but also presupposing that the issue was big enough that something should be done (I may or may not be right.
I agree that norms like that would be worthwhile. I think they would help the movement to seem open and welcoming.
PS: I guess it might be relevant that the vast majority of Charity Science’s donation matching to date has been counterfactual—i.e. it wouldn’t have been given otherwise.
Hi Owen, we’ve considered that at length and are confident that excluding this matching isn’t the right thing to do. Matching funds will lead to greater donations, which is what’s important. We actually address this in the form—where we ask “Would you donate the same amount even if you didn’t offer a match?”, we say:
“It’s worth counting your donations as matching funds even if you would, because the important thing is that this will lead to greater donations by others. In general, matches often include money that would have been given anyway, and donors aren’t concerned with counterfactuals—so this is completely standard. We’d be happy to discuss this more—just email team@charityscience.com.”
I’d be happy to discuss it more by email with you or anyone interested, but right now the important thing is arranging enough matching for fundraisers. (That said, on your point, the people getting matched won’t be reading this post, apart from EAs who expect that matches may be wholly or partly non-counterfactual anyway.) We ask whether people would donate the same amount in order to prioritize those who wouldn’t, but if lack of matching funds would stop a fundraiser from going ahead we’ve decided that’s not worth it.
Non-counterfactual EA fundraisers have also happened for many years without objection.
You say you’ve considered this at length—do you have a discussion of your reasoning anywhere?
This seems to be an important conversation for us to have as a community, so I’m not sure that taking it to email is helpful. It could be a separate forum thread if you prefer—I brought it up here because this was where the point was salient.
You keep on saying that greater donations are the important thing, and I’m simply not sure I agree. I’m worried about reputational effects; I think a norms of being very up-front and honest could help build a stronger movement, and actions which could be perceived as deceptive could backfire. (GiveWell ran into trouble with this a few years back.)
Sorry, my first response was probably worded a bit strongly. But my initial reaction to your post was one of worry. It seems to me like this may be a unilateralist’s curse scenario with respect to reputational damage.
You say you’ve considered this at length—do you have a discussion of your reasoning anywhere?
Not written down in any document I can easily share unfortunately, but I’ll try to reconstruct much of it in our existing email thread.
This seems to be an important conversation for us to have as a community, so I’m not sure that taking it to email is helpful. It could be a separate forum thread if you prefer—I brought it up here because this was where the point was salient.
I’ll happily create a separate thread if people would like. If the practical end is informing our fundraising I’d want to get clearer in our email thread first (which anyone’s welcome to join by PMing or emailing me), because I can talk more freely and (initially) more loosely there, while focusing on arranging enough additional matching here. I don’t think there’s a plausible mechanism for reputational damage (e.g. media stories saying “EAs use their donations for matching”), and this is very different in kind from what GiveWell did, but I’ll try to explain this first in our thread where we can hopefully have a useful to-and-fro.
I’d vote for not taking the discussion offline without some strong justification. It adds somewhat to the sense of being not-quite-transparent that Owen alluded to. When the request here is justified by ‘solid evidence’, it’s a bit alarming to read the evidence can’t be discussed openly.
I’ll aim to post publicly later if possible, though it may take a little time to get everything written up in a suitable form for that. We’ll certainly continue to do that with our evidence for matching’s effect too, as we’ve consistently done; this is a slightly separate matter. It’s also a matter of internal strategy, which organisations aren’t generally called to make public for transparency, though we try to do this to an unusual extent (e.g. publishing our unedited internal impact reviews and the minutes of board meetings, including those that decide strategy). Right now I’m not going to discuss it in this particular thread, partly because there are considerations I can’t describe without taking the time to phrase them publicly, and partly due to lack of time.
It’s also a matter of internal strategy, which organisations aren’t generally called to make public for transparency
That’s fair, but in the context of a public request for people to join your strategy, it seems reasonable to ask for the reasoning/support to be just as public.
It’s totally fair enough if it takes time to produce this, and I am sorry if this line of questioning has seemed overly critical. It just seems like people are asking to accept as given a strategy that’s underproven, and where some (flawed) studies have even suggested a possible negative effect.
There’s solid evidence that matching funds from this pool have led to more money going to help the global poor.
Is this more than is publicly available in Charity Science’s blog posts? I would call those more “suggestive” than “solid,” since there was no randomization and lots of potential confounders.
Hi Ben, we’ll try to write something up—we may try asking additional people whether matching influenced their donations first, though of course this is an imperfect test. We’ll run it past you first for your suggestions! I remember we discussed doing randomization in your thread, though I’m not personally sure we’d get a large enough sample size given how much variability there is in fundraisers due to other factors.
In general, it’s helpful if UK-based people can avoid the word “scheme” when describing an idea to a global audience, because it has mildly sleazy connotations to speakers of American English.
After reading the post, however, I’m not sure “scheme” is wrong here...
It seems very hard to represent a matching campaign with “matching funds” sourced this way which is not unacceptably deceptive. Unlike standard matching where ‘unmatched funds’ may end up being given anyway, it is certain these funds will be given, so no matter whether a donor gives to the match, the money will get to the charity eventually—at best, the donor influences whether it is given now or in a future match. I can’t see any way of selling this which isn’t outrageous to common sense morality: imagine the scandal if a charity (or a fundraiser on its behalf) ran a matching campaign with the matched funds drawn from its own donations. This scheme seems tantamount to that.
Bracket any of the moral concerns; I am more fearful of the legal ramifications. This looks like plausibly professional misconduct, and possibly fraud.
Ms. McManus, the Canadian fundraiser, is an international board member of the Association of Fundraising Professionals. She says guidelines about how to describe matching gifts in appeals don’t exist.
“The lines are gray,” she says. “But if the language is open to interpretation or leaning toward being open to a conclusion that’s not truthful, you have gone over the line.”
“Donors,” she says, “should be skeptical.”
Marcus Owens, a lawyer who led the tax-exempt division of the Internal Revenue Service, says he’s not aware of a legal challenge against a charity involving matching gifts. But he says nonprofits should be careful.
To rise to the level of fraud, Mr. Owens explains, a solicitation’s language would have to be untrue—something along the lines of, ’If you don’t give a donation, we won’t receive a million-dollar grant,’ if that’s not the case.
(I also checked the Canada Revenue Agency’s ‘Fundraising by Registered Charities’ guidance. Note the injunctions that Fundraising is unacceptable if deceptive (F30), and further F49-51.
So at the very least (and as a matter of urgency) someone should take professional advice if they plan to following through with this scheme: it looks plausible by my lights that it will be judged extremely dimly by regulatory and legal authorities (I’d guess people on this forum tend to be more accepting of breaking deontic rules for greater good purposes, and even many of them think this goes too far—also note the CRA expressly state that they do not view the costs of deceptive practice as being outweighed by the benefits), and consequently expose CS to risk of legal action being taken against them. Even more troubling, this risk may extend to people who offer funds (or intend to offer funds, such as by filling in the form) through this scheme.
I think until then it is safest that this project be put on hold.
This doesn’t look cost-free to me. It’s just that the costs are indirect and uncertain.
Discussion of the extent to which matched funds would counterfactually go to the same place came up in a recent thread. I think it’s even more relevant here because you are explicitly asking people to do this when they would donate the same way anyway. That means that there isn’t even a veneer of “well maybe it wouldn’t” to hide behind.
The reason I say this is that reading this post made part of my brain think “this looks sleazy”. And if I get that reaction then probably a nontrivial fraction of other people will too. People don’t like being lied to, so there’s potential for significant negative publicity about this. Can you do something to reduce this risk? Even just encouraging people to do it only if they’re happy to let their donations be somewhat swayed by where others give would go a long way here, as it would turn the effect into what would be commonly perceived as genuine matching.
Owen, I’m sorry you were downvoted. I agree that there are pretty big potential honesty concerns here.
It would be nice if the EA community could have norms of being especially virtuous about things like messaging around matching donations, rather than allowing themselves to do things like claim “matching” status without counterfactual adjustment just because “everyone else does it.”
EDIT: especially when we pay so much attention to counterfactual claims elsewhere! It just seems like really bad signalling.
EDIT EDIT: If you’re interested in finding out what people think about donation matching, please share the following survey with your friends! (Please DON’T just fill it out yourself, since I don’t want too much EA sampling bias. If you fill it out yourself, please also share the post to a non-EA audience, e.g. on Facebook.)
Link to the survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/143R0tJmvRUh2ZtSCHRPsctKBls3HyW_gZ5g3dc4yJIc/viewform?usp=send_form
The survey is a great idea. However I shared it with someone and they didn’t complete it because they found it too unclear what the questions were asking. I think is exhibiting a problem here in that it’s a bit complicated even to talk about these things—so it may not be the kind of thing many people even have expectations for per se.
Yeah, it was tough to find questions that were both simple and asked what I wanted. I definitely don’t think the survey should be the last word on the subject—we could certainly make a better one and distribute it via e.g. Mechanical Turk for a bigger and more representative sample—but I wanted to get something out quickly and without it clobbering too much of my time.
Entirely fair!
Agree with Owen’s PR concerns, and with Ben about being especially virtuous. GiveWell have written about this as well, they call it a donor illusion.
That said, I think matching challenges are almost always fake, and maybe they’re a useful tool we should be using. But we can at least try to make it less fake and less obvious.
Ben Kuhn has summarised the evidence on matching challenges:
I actually guess I was downvoted for tone. Reading over my comment it seems a bit arrogant in not just raising the issue and asking if something should be done (which I think is correct), but also presupposing that the issue was big enough that something should be done (I may or may not be right.
I agree that norms like that would be worthwhile. I think they would help the movement to seem open and welcoming.
PS: I guess it might be relevant that the vast majority of Charity Science’s donation matching to date has been counterfactual—i.e. it wouldn’t have been given otherwise.
This is certainly relevant and worth advertising to the extent that there are any reputational worries!
It also reduces the impetus to seek illusory matching?
Hi Owen, we’ve considered that at length and are confident that excluding this matching isn’t the right thing to do. Matching funds will lead to greater donations, which is what’s important. We actually address this in the form—where we ask “Would you donate the same amount even if you didn’t offer a match?”, we say:
“It’s worth counting your donations as matching funds even if you would, because the important thing is that this will lead to greater donations by others. In general, matches often include money that would have been given anyway, and donors aren’t concerned with counterfactuals—so this is completely standard. We’d be happy to discuss this more—just email team@charityscience.com.”
I’d be happy to discuss it more by email with you or anyone interested, but right now the important thing is arranging enough matching for fundraisers. (That said, on your point, the people getting matched won’t be reading this post, apart from EAs who expect that matches may be wholly or partly non-counterfactual anyway.) We ask whether people would donate the same amount in order to prioritize those who wouldn’t, but if lack of matching funds would stop a fundraiser from going ahead we’ve decided that’s not worth it.
Non-counterfactual EA fundraisers have also happened for many years without objection.
(I wasn’t one of those who downvoted by the way!)
Hi Tom,
You say you’ve considered this at length—do you have a discussion of your reasoning anywhere?
This seems to be an important conversation for us to have as a community, so I’m not sure that taking it to email is helpful. It could be a separate forum thread if you prefer—I brought it up here because this was where the point was salient.
You keep on saying that greater donations are the important thing, and I’m simply not sure I agree. I’m worried about reputational effects; I think a norms of being very up-front and honest could help build a stronger movement, and actions which could be perceived as deceptive could backfire. (GiveWell ran into trouble with this a few years back.)
Sorry, my first response was probably worded a bit strongly. But my initial reaction to your post was one of worry. It seems to me like this may be a unilateralist’s curse scenario with respect to reputational damage.
Not written down in any document I can easily share unfortunately, but I’ll try to reconstruct much of it in our existing email thread.
I’ll happily create a separate thread if people would like. If the practical end is informing our fundraising I’d want to get clearer in our email thread first (which anyone’s welcome to join by PMing or emailing me), because I can talk more freely and (initially) more loosely there, while focusing on arranging enough additional matching here. I don’t think there’s a plausible mechanism for reputational damage (e.g. media stories saying “EAs use their donations for matching”), and this is very different in kind from what GiveWell did, but I’ll try to explain this first in our thread where we can hopefully have a useful to-and-fro.
I’d vote for not taking the discussion offline without some strong justification. It adds somewhat to the sense of being not-quite-transparent that Owen alluded to. When the request here is justified by ‘solid evidence’, it’s a bit alarming to read the evidence can’t be discussed openly.
I’ll aim to post publicly later if possible, though it may take a little time to get everything written up in a suitable form for that. We’ll certainly continue to do that with our evidence for matching’s effect too, as we’ve consistently done; this is a slightly separate matter. It’s also a matter of internal strategy, which organisations aren’t generally called to make public for transparency, though we try to do this to an unusual extent (e.g. publishing our unedited internal impact reviews and the minutes of board meetings, including those that decide strategy). Right now I’m not going to discuss it in this particular thread, partly because there are considerations I can’t describe without taking the time to phrase them publicly, and partly due to lack of time.
That’s fair, but in the context of a public request for people to join your strategy, it seems reasonable to ask for the reasoning/support to be just as public.
It’s totally fair enough if it takes time to produce this, and I am sorry if this line of questioning has seemed overly critical. It just seems like people are asking to accept as given a strategy that’s underproven, and where some (flawed) studies have even suggested a possible negative effect.
Ok, gotcha. Thanks for understanding :)
Is this more than is publicly available in Charity Science’s blog posts? I would call those more “suggestive” than “solid,” since there was no randomization and lots of potential confounders.
Hi Ben, we’ll try to write something up—we may try asking additional people whether matching influenced their donations first, though of course this is an imperfect test. We’ll run it past you first for your suggestions! I remember we discussed doing randomization in your thread, though I’m not personally sure we’d get a large enough sample size given how much variability there is in fundraisers due to other factors.
What does the distribution of funds raised in each fundraiser look like so far? If you give me a list of numbers I can do a power calculation.
When I saw the title I was going to post:
After reading the post, however, I’m not sure “scheme” is wrong here...
It seems very hard to represent a matching campaign with “matching funds” sourced this way which is not unacceptably deceptive. Unlike standard matching where ‘unmatched funds’ may end up being given anyway, it is certain these funds will be given, so no matter whether a donor gives to the match, the money will get to the charity eventually—at best, the donor influences whether it is given now or in a future match. I can’t see any way of selling this which isn’t outrageous to common sense morality: imagine the scandal if a charity (or a fundraiser on its behalf) ran a matching campaign with the matched funds drawn from its own donations. This scheme seems tantamount to that.
Bracket any of the moral concerns; I am more fearful of the legal ramifications. This looks like plausibly professional misconduct, and possibly fraud.
Source
(I also checked the Canada Revenue Agency’s ‘Fundraising by Registered Charities’ guidance. Note the injunctions that Fundraising is unacceptable if deceptive (F30), and further F49-51.
So at the very least (and as a matter of urgency) someone should take professional advice if they plan to following through with this scheme: it looks plausible by my lights that it will be judged extremely dimly by regulatory and legal authorities (I’d guess people on this forum tend to be more accepting of breaking deontic rules for greater good purposes, and even many of them think this goes too far—also note the CRA expressly state that they do not view the costs of deceptive practice as being outweighed by the benefits), and consequently expose CS to risk of legal action being taken against them. Even more troubling, this risk may extend to people who offer funds (or intend to offer funds, such as by filling in the form) through this scheme.
I think until then it is safest that this project be put on hold.