Hi, I am Director of Technology at Effektiv Spenden. Thanks for your comments, we appreciate having a discussion on this!
I wanted to point out that describing our approach as “bait and switch” is not correct IMO, nor that we somehow do not tell people “what we believe and why”. Here is what we currently write on our website:
As external analyses and evaluations of the same quality and depth are not yet available in the area of democracy as in our other areas, the effectiveness of the measures we recommend and promote is subject to greater uncertainty than our other recommendations. Nevertheless, the urgency demands that we act now—and not later. We have therefore decided to mark the qualitative difference between the Defending Democracy Donation Fund and our other funds with a “beta” status. ... In the medium term, we plan to expand our donation fund in close coordination with Power for Democracies to include particularly promising initiatives to protect and strengthen democracy worldwide. This year, however, the focus remains on defending and strengthening democracy in Germany.
Similarly in a newsletter we wrote: “We do not expect truly robust donation recommendations before 2025”.
So we make clear that (i) this recommendation isn’t as robust as others and that (ii) the scope is limited to Germany, but that this is a temporary limitation.
My objection is not primarily to what Effektiv-Spenden itself published but to the motivation that Sebastian Schienle articulated in the comment I was replying to. As I said there are potentially good reasons to publish such research, I just think “trying to appeal to people who don’t currently care about global effectiveness and hoping to redirect them later” is not one of them.
(I think ideally Effektiv-Spenden would do more to distinguish this from other cause areas, “beta” seems like an understatement, but I wouldn’t ordinarily criticize such web design decisions if there weren’t people here in the comments explicitly saying they were motivated by manipulative marketing considerations.)
“Manipulative” does not seem an apt description to me. Sebastian Schienle wrote:
So hopefully, the current focus provides a good entry point for donors who are new to effective giving whom we can then guide to the place where money goes furthest towards the goal of defending democracy, once such recommendations are available, as well as to other cause areas.
We are up front on our website about in the future probably giving money to organisations outside of Germany from this fund. With regard to other cause areas, I don’t see anything dishonest about hoping that donors will look at other cause areas after entering through a specific one.
Hi, I am Director of Technology at Effektiv Spenden. Thanks for your comments, we appreciate having a discussion on this!
I wanted to point out that describing our approach as “bait and switch” is not correct IMO, nor that we somehow do not tell people “what we believe and why”. Here is what we currently write on our website:
Similarly in a newsletter we wrote: “We do not expect truly robust donation recommendations before 2025”.
So we make clear that (i) this recommendation isn’t as robust as others and that (ii) the scope is limited to Germany, but that this is a temporary limitation.
My objection is not primarily to what Effektiv-Spenden itself published but to the motivation that Sebastian Schienle articulated in the comment I was replying to. As I said there are potentially good reasons to publish such research, I just think “trying to appeal to people who don’t currently care about global effectiveness and hoping to redirect them later” is not one of them.
(I think ideally Effektiv-Spenden would do more to distinguish this from other cause areas, “beta” seems like an understatement, but I wouldn’t ordinarily criticize such web design decisions if there weren’t people here in the comments explicitly saying they were motivated by manipulative marketing considerations.)
“Manipulative” does not seem an apt description to me. Sebastian Schienle wrote:
We are up front on our website about in the future probably giving money to organisations outside of Germany from this fund. With regard to other cause areas, I don’t see anything dishonest about hoping that donors will look at other cause areas after entering through a specific one.