Momentum 2022 updates (we’re hiring)
Momentum (formerly Sparrow) is a venture-backed, EA startup that aims to increase effective giving. We build donation pages that emphasize creative, recurring donations tied to moments in your life (e.g. offset your carbon footprint when you buy gas, or give to AI alignment every time you scroll Facebook) and we use behavioral science to nudge new donors to support EA charities.
Our goal is to direct $1B per month to EA causes by 2030, growing EA funding by over an order of magnitude and becoming EA’s largest funding source. We believe that relying exclusively on a few mega-funders is not a robust long-term strategy for EA. Yet effective giving is quite small—there are 7.4K active EAs, and 85K people have ever donated to GiveWell. In contrast, each year, 240M Americans donate and 11M people visit Charity Navigator alone. We intend to reach a large number of people who have not yet heard of EA but are open to making highly-effective donations.
82% of VC-backed startups fail, and Momentum may be no exception. However, the potential upside of creating a sustainable funding source for EA is so great that the expected value appears high. And there’s evidence that we’re on the right track.
Momentum has moved over $10M with our software from 40,000 donors. In our mobile app, 87% of donations went to our recommended charities (including several longtermist ones). We have $4M in funding from both EA funders (e.g. Jaan Tallinn, Spencer Greenberg, Luke Ding) and venture investors (e.g. Mark Cuban, Eric Ries, On Deck), making us one of a handful of VC-backed EA startups. Our campaigns have received widespread attention from celebrities (Peter Singer, John Legend, MLK III) and the press (e.g. NYT, BBC, and Quartz).
Our team recently grew from 3 to 9, and we have 6 more openings in product, growth, engineering, etc. For the right person, this could be very high impact and a great place to work. We’d love to hear from you—email ari@givemomentum.com or apply here.
A huge thank you to Jade Leung, Ozzie Gooen, Aaron Gertler, Rebecca Kagan, George Rosenfeld, and Bill Zito for feedback. All opinions and mistakes are our own.
Table of contents
The product
To increase the number of EA donors, we need to reach people outside of EA and encourage effective giving. We reach new donors by providing donation pages to a wide range of charities (regardless of effectiveness) that they market to their audience. After donors check out we offer a portal that encourages additional effective donations.
Step 1: Reach donors with our donation pages
To reach donors outside of EA, we give charities free donation pages built in their brand (like this one or this one) that they put on their website—like Shopify but for nonprofits. Our page helps the charity acquire more recurring donors (who give 7x more) by tying personal actions and global events to automatic donations. You might give 5% to clean water when you buy a coffee, donate to BLM with each police shooting, or donate to stop Trump every time he tweets.
We saw success with Defeat by Tweet (97% of 40K donors were recurring), so it looks promising that we can beat the industry average of 10% recurring. Since increasing the number of recurring donors increases donation volume so much, charities leverage their marketing resources to direct traffic to their page.
Step 2: Nudge effective giving with our donor portal
To increase effective giving, we give donors a portal that encourages supporting effective charities. After the donor checks out on a donation page, we guide them (on the confirmation page or via email) to log in to the portal to track their giving, edit their donations, and see their estimated impact (e.g. lives saved, papers published, etc).
Critically, we nudge donors in the portal to support effective charities. Most people do not have fixed donation budgets, so they are open to making additional effective donations on top of their original donation. To encourage this, we build portfolios of highly-effective charities (e.g. ‘Good Technology’ or ‘Poverty’) using evaluations from groups like Open Philanthropy, GiveWell, and Animal Charity Evaluators. We employ best practices from donation psychology, such as defaults, personalization, and social proof (and it seems to work, including for longtermist charities). For example:
A Red Cross donor likely values disaster prevention, so the portal might suggest preventing the next pandemic by giving to biosecurity with every 1K COVID cases.
A values quiz gives an animal lover a portfolio of charities, like a local shelter and Humane League (mixing familiar with effective, similar to Giving Multiplier).
Impact
Momentum aims to increase funding for effective causes by an order of magnitude; we’ll evaluate the impact of this work using the INT framework.
Importance
EA hopes to tackle the largest problems facing humanity. While there currently is a funding overhang, we are just scratching the surface of discovering high-impact opportunities. As long as EA continues to scale, funding needs will accelerate.
However, it’s unclear if funding can continue to grow at its current rate. Most funding comes from a few mega-donors, which may prove hard to reliably scale. Recruiting mega-donors is erratic, and Ben Todd suggests funding growth may slow in 5 years.
Furthermore, overly relying on a few funders bears mission risk. Open Philanthropy often encourages grantees to diversify their funding sources, as funder diversity is important for organizational and movement health. Diversifying funders would make EA more robust:
It protects against the risk a funder’s financial situation changes (a worry given how much of the movement’s money is tied up in illiquid crypto and tech stock).
It prevents any single funder’s preferences from creating unintended pressure or dramatically influencing movement priorities. This may be critical for the movement to avoid ideological stagnation.
There are too few EAs for individual members to substantially scale EA funding, at 7.4K members growing 14% a year. We may need to look beyond this group. Americans alone give $450B per year; while most donors will never become committed EAs, many are open to making effective donations. Momentum reaches these donors and helps them give to highly-effective charities using behavioral science.
Our scale can be modeled by asking: how large is the target market (market size), What portion will Momentum capture (market share), and what portion will go to EA-aligned charities (activation rate)? This can be calculated as:
Effective donations = [Market size] X [Market share] x [Activation rate]Market size: Americans give $450B per year. However, only ~$120B is from small-dollar donors. Our best estimategives a $75B target market in the US.
Market share: Market leaders often capture over 40% of the market, but many successful startups capture under 10%. Shopify (a good analog) has captured 32%.
Activation rate: In our discontinued mobile app recommended charities got 87% activation. We estimate our new pages will get~50% (but greater market share).
As an upper bound, capturing 40% of a $120B market with 87% activation would mean $41B/yr to effective charities. More realistically, capturing 30% of $75B with 50% activation would mean $11B/year. $4B/year would still 10x current EA funding.
How likely are we to achieve that? That’s a big question and the full analysis is outside the scope of this post, but a back-of-the-napkin Fermi estimate is a 5% chance the platform directs over $500M/year to EA and a 1% chance it directs over $5B/year.
With so many open questions, it may be helpful to note other possible paths to impact:
We hope to create an on-ramp towards deeper involvement in EA, providing a journey eventually guiding some donors to 80,000 hours, etc. Research shows that behavior change drives attitude and identity change.
Directing a meaningful portion of giving may help shift the nonprofit ecosystem away from its focus on overhead, encouraging organizations to prioritize evaluating and increasing their impact.
The proceeds from Momentum’s market cap can be donated once liquid.
Neglectedness
Motivating effective giving at scale appears neglected within EA. Many are focused on the current funding overhang, and few are working towards creating sustainable funding growth. Furthermore, the movement is better at identifying funding opportunities than motivating people to donate there. These are two fundamentally different efforts. Facts and information are essential to determine where people should donate, but behavioral science research has repeatedly found that they play a much smaller role in actually driving behavior change. Despite this, expected value calculations and logical premises remain one of EA’s primary motivational tools.
Of the organizations that are working on scaling funding, many (e.g. Longview Philanthropy, Giving What We Can) prioritize generating substantial buy-in and lifelong commitment. Others (e.g. EA Funds, GiveWell) are tailored for already committed donors. Momentum’s work complements the current movement: we are rapidly scaling giving by motivating new donors. Our founders have backgrounds in behavioral science and met researching effective donation psychology with Dan Ariely.
Tractability
Momentum has meaningful, early evidence of tractability. From an inside view, the key questions are about reaching new donors and nudging them to effective charities:
40K donors: The discontinued mobile app didn’t reach many donors before the pivot, but our new donation pages have. In just three months, our pilot page acquired 40K donors (5x the EA movement) and Momentum has moved $10M to date (and growing). We consider this strong evidence for market share.
87% nudged: In the mobile app, 87% of dollars went to our recommended charities, and some campaigns directed 10-35% of funds to longtermism. Our new donor portal is under development, so the activation from donation pages is unknown. We expect some drop, but consider this evidence that donors are open to recommendations. We predict ultimately seeing around 50% activation (with wide confidence intervals), which could mean $11B/year for EA.
From an outside view, we’ve received significant non-profit and for-profit interest:
Venture-backed: We’ve raised $4M in funding. We’re backed by top venture capital firms and angel investors like Mark Cuban, Eric Ries (The Lean Startup), Elizabeth Yin (500 Startups), Michael Vaughan (ex Venmo COO), Tim Kendall (ex Pinterest President), Betaworks, OnDeck, Shrug Capital, Contrary, and Adjacent.
Support from EA: We’ve also received funding from mission-aligned investors like Jaan Tallinn, Luke Ding, Spencer Greenberg, Total Portfolio Project, and Peter Groenen. Peter Singer is on our advisory board.
Press coverage: We’ve been featured in publications like NYT, BBC, NPR, ABC, Quartz, and The Chronicle of Philanthropy.
Celebrity coverage: Our campaigns have been promoted by a wide range of celebrities like Mark Ruffalo, Olivia Wilde, Andrew Yang, Corey Booker, Peyton List, Noah Centineo, MLK III, and the founders of BLM.
Working at Momentum
You can have outsized impact
Momentum has the opportunity to create a large, sustainable funding source for the EA movement. For the right person, joining at this early stage could be extremely high-impact—a single employee could make the difference between success and failure. There are few places where your work can have such outsized, counterfactual impact.
It’s a great place to work
In addition to having high impact potential, Momentum is also a great place to work:
We tackle hard problems: Many EAs (especially software engineers) worry about working somewhere they may not develop their skill-set or be intellectually challenged. As a growing tech startup, Momentum has a long list of interesting problems waiting to be solved. We have complex architectural challenges on the backend, unanswered product dilemmas to research, and countless growth channels to explore. We need talented people who want to solve hard problems.
We have a strong team: Momentum is rapidly growing our team: we’ve hired 6 of our 9 team members in the last 6 months, and we’re hiring another 6 in 2022. We hire both for deep mission alignment and exceptional talent. 7 of our team members were independently involved with EA before joining. We have decades of combined experience in software engineering, research, nonprofit fundraising, and sales at places like Y Combinator, Google, and EA Hub. We’re serious about hiring great people and care about supporting you once you join. We prioritize mentorship, feedback, training, reflection, and personal development, helping you both grow at Momentum and prepare for your career to come.
We pay well: We know that finding great compensation can be a challenge for EAs entering direct work. Momentum offers market rates for a seed-stage startup in San Francisco. That’s less than you’d make at Facebook or Google, but more than you’d make most places. Furthermore, your equity has a much higher potential upside than it does at a large company. We also offer perks like free meals and gym memberships, and will even sponsor visas for the right candidate.
We open doors: Working at a small, unknown organization can be a resume risk, but Momentum’s credentials make it a valuable addition. Even if Momentum fails, no one will fault you for joining a rapidly growing startup backed by Mark Cuban with 40K users. If we succeed, few things look better than being an early employee at a successful startup. Momentum will also build your network; whether that’s embedding you in the Bay Area EA community, introducing you to successful founders and investors, or helping you meet charities. Momentum sits at the intersection of technology and direct work, so it opens doors in both areas.
We’re building something new: The opportunity to build something from the ground up is rare. You can meaningfully affect our chance of success and help shape the company culture. Given our stage, we prioritize hiring competent, aligned employees, and empowering you to make a difference. You’ll be given both more responsibility and more autonomy than at larger companies.
Reasons not to work at Momentum
If you have extremely short AI timelines: If you have extremely short timelines on AGI development and can contribute to AI safety, you probably shouldn’t work here. Momentum’s impact is greater in worlds with longer AI timelines. That said, if you’re unsure how to contribute to AI safety, a startup enables rapid skill development in areas valuable for the EA movement.
If you predict funding will outpace funding needs: If you think EA funding will continue to grow at its current rate or don’t think we’ll discover bigger funding needs in the future, Momentum is less valuable. It’s important to consider the chance that EA continues to attract mega-funders or that there is mass adoption of effective giving without Momentum.
If you don’t think we’ll succeed: Perhaps you think charities won’t use our donation software, or we won’t manage to nudge effective donations. The impact may not outweigh the risk in your expected value estimate, or you may just want to work on something that’s more certain.
If you’re not excited about startup culture: Early-stage startups aren’t for everyone! You need to be comfortable with ambiguity, able to take initiative, and open to moving quickly. If you prefer a slower-paced environment with a clearly defined path laid out for you, Momentum may not be the right place to work.
FAQs
Why work at Momentum if EA isn’t funding constrained? This is a great question given the recent influx of cash in the movement. The current EA bottleneck is finding projects to fund, but this seems unlikely to remain the case in the future. A more sustainable funding source than mega-donors is needed for EA (more here).
Is Momentum neartermist? Nope! People often worry that Momentum will only direct money to global health and well-being. In fact, Momentum’s leadership leans longtermist, and we’re cause agnostic as a company (among EA causes). We recommend charities in AI safety, animal welfare, biosecurity, global health & well-being, and more. Some campaigns have directed 10-35% of donations to longtermism, and we believe we could raise this number (e.g. by creating managed funds that allocate money where the impact is greatest, similar to EA Funds).
Is working at Momentum higher impact than earning to give? Our rough Fermi estimates put the counterfactual expected value of a strong engineer joining the team at $5M/yr to effective charities (varies widely by role). That’s from direct impact alone, before factoring in donating your equity. If you currently donate a few hundred thousand per year or less, we think working at Momentum is higher impact in expectation. It’s a harder question if you donate over $1M a year.
How do you make money? We give our software to nonprofits for free and make money from an optional, donor-set tip. Research shows pay-what-you-want pricing can be more profitable than fixed pricing, and we reached profitability before our last round. And the more people donate, the more our investors make, so for-profit pressure encourages greater impact.
Why are you for-profit? We considered starting as a non-profit but concluded we’re better positioned for impact as a for-profit. First, it lets us raise money more quickly. Second, it helps us to attract talent (with equity and market-rate salaries). Third, it helps us harness efficient market forces for impact (by aligning our mission with for-profit incentives). And of course, we took Founder’s Pledge.
Why did you discontinue your mobile app? We discovered (the hard way) that there isn’t enough demand from donors for a B2C mobile app, so donor acquisition was challenging. People typically donate in response to an ask and don’t often have a burning desire to give otherwise. That’s why we pivoted to working with those who do have a burning need—charities looking to fundraise.
We’re hiring
What we look for
In general, you’re probably a good fit for our team if you are:
Mission-aligned: This likely isn’t a barrier here. Active EA involvement helps but isn’t required (2 of 9 team members hadn’t heard of EA before joining).
Talented: We often hire people who have relevant industry experience, but we also hire people who are smart and learn quickly.
A cultural fit: We tend to move fast and break things! We want people who are comfortable with uncertainty, willing to test things, and able to update quickly.
Excited about SF: We’re based in San Francisco and work in person. We value in-person collaboration, spontaneous conversations, and a close-knit team. We can help with visas, but you’ll need to relocate if you don’t live here.
Open roles [Updated as of July ’22]
You can see all of our roles here, but we’d love to hear from you even if you’re not a perfect fit for anything listed. We’re currently actively recruiting for:
Designer: We’re hiring our first in-house designer. We’re looking for a UX/UI designer to create product and web designs working closely with our growth and product teams.
Get in touch
This post probably doesn’t come close to answering all of your questions, and we certainly don’t expect you to be fully persuaded! Don’t hesitate to get in touch regardless—we welcome questions and push back, and we’d love to discuss it with you.
If you’re interested in learning more, you can write a comment, send an email to ari@givemomentum.com, or apply to an open role. We can’t wait to meet you!
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Just wanted to say that I found this update really impressive and the case for (and against) impact clearly presented. Well done!
Seriously! This has gotta be one of the best update/recruiting posts I’ve ever seen on EA Forums. Wishing you guys the best!
Thanks so much Eddie!
Thanks a lot Ian!
vs
These are fairly different, and it feels kind of misleading to start with the first one in the head and change to the second one in the main body.
I’d still want to bet against “5% chance the platform directs over $500M/year to EA [by 2030]”, but not as eagerly after a second re-read.
Wait, is this 87% of the $10M, or does this include the donation pages? What’s the % for total donations as a whole? Do you have a rough sense of how many of those donations are counterfactual?
In any case, cheers and best of luck, this feels like an ambitious undertaking that could have a large impact.
Thanks for the thoughtful questions, I appreciate the close reading it likely took for you to understand that level of nuance. To address all of them:
1) $500M/year:
Interesting, I’m wondering why you felt that was the main claim of the body? While at one point I do give a 5% fermi estimate of $500M/yr, it’s immediately followed by a 1% estimate of $5B/yr, and I never refer to $500M at any other point. I also give estimates for $11B/yr twice in the body (slightly less than $1B/mo) and estimates for $4-5B/yr twice as well. These latter numbers roughly correspond with the original goals mentioned: to move $1B/mo and to grow funding by over an order of magnitude (>$4B/yr).
More importantly, I want to distinguish our goals from the range of possible outcomes (or even the most likely outcome). It seems valuable to set extremely ambitious goals while still being honest about the chance of success. Being honest about those probabilities shouldn’t be seen as undermining that ambitious goal.
2) 87% & $10M:
Great question—it is not 87% of the $10M, it’s 87% of the money moved on the mobile app. The $10M is total money moved, including donation pages. As discussed in the post, we haven’t rolled out the donor portal to most of the new donation pages yet, so it is very hard to get a good estimate. Since we haven’t started nudging the new donors towards recommended charities yet, the only money moved so far to recommended charities is from mobile donors. If I recall correctly, the mobile app moved around $100K before we switched to focusing on donation pages. You might expect that to mean $87K to recommended charities (87% x $100K), but in fact it’s closer to $230K to date. Recurring donors are retained at a very high rate, and many mobile donors are still donating to our recommended charities (they can manage donations through the donor portal). Naturally, $230K still only represents a fraction of the $10M (~2%) since the new donation pages reach far more donors, and we haven’t yet begun recommending charities to these donors. We are very eager to roll out the donor portal to the donors using the donation pages and see what that percentage becomes. As discussed in the post, we expect it to be lower than 87%, but don’t know how much lower.
3) Counterfactual:
I’ve been unable to think of a great way to estimate this. We do have evidence that donations tend not to be made from a fixed budget (e.g. people are very open to giving more or less depending on how much we ask). As a result, we might expect a large portion of donations to be counterfactual. More importantly, even if someone supporting our recommended charities would have donated money regardless, it presumably would have gone to a different charity. These donors are new to effective giving and otherwise most would support far less effective charities. That said, we don’t have a good way to come up with a numerical estimate for any of this, so if you have any ideas I would love to hear them, as this question is extremely important to us.
Hopefully this helps to clarify things!
Hey, the main uncertainty I see with Momentum is “does it have product-market-fit except for the Trump-specific campaign”, since I can imagine the Trump campaign being somewhat of an anomaly, interesting but also maybe very hard to reproduce, I don’t know
As far as I understand, the current things we know about product market fit are:
The trump campaign raised $9,300,000 (source below)
The mobile app raised $230K, but was closed down (which means it didn’t have good product market fit, I assume)
“donation pages” (that are not trump related?) - this sounds very interesting! Could you say more? For example:
How much money did you move?
Is it more than the charities would have probably raised otherwise? (however you’d like to estimate this, I don’t mind)
Did you spend money on adwords or something like that, or was it raised organically?
Anything else you can say about the product market fit here?
And I understand this sums up to
I am very interested to hear how the 40k donors spread over these projects, as well as the amount they donated, if you’re ok with sharing it
Source for defeat by tweet donations:
I hope you’ll have amazing product market fit and I think you’ll change the world if you will
@arikagan
Yeah, great question—I agree that this is more important than many of the questions I lay out in the FAQ (but unfortunately it’s not one we’re frequently asked). I agree the mobile app did not have PMF (which is why we shut it down). The vast majority of the 40k donors are from DBT (it’s the largest campaign we’ve launched by far), so the interesting question is if we can replicate that to demonstrate PMF.
We spent most of this last year rebuilding our technology and running campaigns with small nonprofits to see which features are needed for PMF. We can now easily acquire small nonprofit customers but have now learned all we can from them. While these are easy minimum viable sales tests, these customers don’t have substantial donation volume. Saying that we got a 40% increase in donation volume isn’t meaningful if we moved an org from $200/mo to $280/mo. Now that we’ve hired several engineers and upgraded our tech, we’re moving on to testing with larger nonprofits with significant donation volume (our target market is orgs moving over $1M/year). Of course, even with the right product you still need to find the right growth channel, but that should also be revealed through the tests we’re running on the new market segment. We believe these tests will answer the three most important questions right now: do we truly have PMF, which growth channels should we be prioritizing, and precisely how large is the increase in donation volume for a nonprofit using our software.
<3
TL;DR: My suggestion would be checking Product Market Fit without developing any significant technology, especially since you said things like “We spent most of this last year rebuilding our technology”
For example:
Use your existing tech from the Trump campaign
Use your existing tech from the $280/mo orgs
I imagine both have messy code (as with all startups) and require actual developer time to customize for the customers, but I think that’s all ok (as long as you don’t make wrong financial transactions).
I’d try selling to a $1M/year nonprofit, I’d tell them “you’ll be our design partners and we’ll do custom development for you”, and I’d try making nothing generic (are you trying to make tech that will be relevant for multiple customers? Maybe that’s our double crux).
I don’t know anything about your internals so these suggestions might be totally silly for reasons I don’t understand, sorry for that. I thought It’s better to offer than not to. And that it would be better to put all my disclaimers here instead of in each sentence above :P
I’d be happy for lots of pushback of course <3
Or maybe I misunderstood and this is already exactly what you’re doing:
Yeah, I basically agree with everything you said! More specifically:
We tested with the small nonprofits using the same hacked software we used for DBT (literally a static page with an iframe to our webapp)
We were in fact making financial transaction errors (e.g. double charging donors) since our database was not designed for scale, so we had to rebuild our backend. We had no in-house engineers, so we paused development until we hired engineers who have rearchitected the backend.
We’re trying to launch with mid-sized nonprofits using the improved technology we built for the small-nonprofits.
Our sales calls have revealed pretty similar feature requests from every mid-sized nonprofit (e.g we need a CRM integration). Many of these features are in our roadmap, but I agree with you that it would be even better to build it for a specific charity that is willing to sign rather than based on “generic” tech.
We’re already focused on getting 3-5 “case studies” from mid-sized nonprofits, but I’ve been reflecting recently on going to greater lengths to build custom features for those organizations, and after reflecting on your comments I’m updating further in that direction.
We did a lot of this custom work for DBT—we stopped developing generic features and almost worked like a dev shop to meet their needs (although we’ve slowed developing custom features for that charity as we are no longer learning as much from them).
Yeah, this is probably a cultural difference.
Makes sense! I originally just spoke about the aspirational goals, but then early reviewers asked for more explicit estimates of middle-of-the-road outcomes as well, so I added a range of possibilities. Perhaps that made it more confusing than if I’d just kept one set of estimates.
Superb post! 👏👏👏
Have you considered applying to YC?
Thanks! We applied and had the final in-person interview with them in 2019 and didn’t get in, and then it no longer made sense after the first round.
Are you able to share the breakdown of where donations to recommended charities go, by recommended charity? (E.g. you mentioned that “some campaigns directed 10-35% of funds to longtermism,” but it’s not immediately clear to me which of the recommended charities at https://givemomentum.com/charities that counts.)
Great question. I actually don’t think that data will prove very useful yet, although I’d be happy to share it with you directly. We primarily found donations in the mobile app to heavily follow defaults, and intentionally didn’t yet spend much time experimenting with defaults. We were struggling with donor acquisition, and the evidence was already strong that we could influence donation choices, so we turned our attention to the donation pages. We haven’t yet rolled out the new donor portal where defaults will once again become critical, but once we do, experimenting with defaults will become very important (and then that data would be more revealing).
As to the stat I mentioned: we ran a series of campaigns focused on donating money saved during COVID (e.g. donating the price of your canceled commute or donating a refunded concert ticket). We rapidly built a portfolio of relevant charities when COVID hit, and as always, the donation volume closely tracked our defaults. Some defaults were doing direct relief/included to increase familiarity (e.g. Feeding America). Others were recommended by 80k (e.g. Gates Foundation), Founder’s pledge (e.g. John’s Hopkins CHS), or had received Open Philanthropy grants (e.g. CDC Foundation). We defaulted JHCHS to 10%, which it received. CDC Foundation also received 25%. However, I doubt their share was allocated to preventing future pandemics (in retrospect, it is clear that the OP grants were carefully earmarked for specific programs). But that seems like a question of default selection, so my conclusion was that defaults almost entirely determine the donation volume to each charity. I wasn’t unsure whether to count the 25%, so I listed it as 10-35%.
We’ve actually seen far more than 35% go to longtermism in some cases. One campaign defaulted to the Good Technology fund had 93% of donors giving to CHAI, CISAC, FHI, JHCHS, MIRI, and NTI (donate every time a news article comes out on nuclear disarmament). What’s more, one donation rule that had nothing to do with longtermism achieved 85% simply because Good Tech was the default (donate every time This American Life airs). But these had a lower sample size, so I wouldn’t conclude much beyond the exceptional influence of defaults.
Defaults seem to predict a massive portion of the variance, which suggests it shouldn’t be too challenging to get donors to support longtermism. If we can get enough donors into the portal, the hard work will be carefully choosing which charities to default. If we reach the point where the donation volume is high enough, I am hopeful we can rely on help from other EA organizations that are better suited to make these decisions than we are. We may even establish an independent nonprofit (that doesn’t answer to the for-profit) which owns decisions around charity recommendations.
This sounds like an exciting and very high-potential project! I’d be curious if you’ve thought about the potential for impact through directing new people to EA (in terms of work as well as donations).
It seems plausible that people might discover EA organisations, and ultimately the community as a whole, through the effective charities listed and the background info of the app. Expanding the community in this way might further increase the overall impact and also make it valuable if funding remains a relatively low constraint in the community.
Yeah, we’re actually very excited about this possibility! I had to resist adding another 2 pages on this as a separate route towards impact because the post was already too long, although I gestured at it briefly when I mention a possible “on-ramp towards deeper involvement in EA.”
As you suggest, if funding continues to grow at its current pace (and the other concerns we discuss about relying on a few funders prove incorrect), then growing the community may become a higher priority than merely increasing donation volume. While many donors won’t be interested in deeper involvement with EA, if we actually scale to have 10M donors on the platform, introducing a small portion of these donors to the EA community would be extremely valuable.
We intend to provide escalating layers of information that are available if a user expresses interest. In the mobile app we had default portfolios, but we also provided charity profiles with additional descriptions, impact estimates, and links out to the charity evaluator that recommended the organization. We hope to eventually go one step further, and offer other routes to engage with the community, such as career coaching, mentors, EA fellowships, and more. This would allow you to easily make a donation without needing to process too much information, but if you are interested in engaging more deeply after, that should also be encouraged.
Other FinTech platforms take similar approaches to financial education, first starting with automation/robo-advisors, then escalating to tips and suggestions once you’ve demonstrated engagement, and sometimes escalating to interacting with a financial advisor (in this case, perhaps a career advisor or an EA fellowship). We think something in this vein is likely a very promising alternative route to impact.
Do you have an exit strategy? If you don’t, how did you convince VCs?
We’ve explored a number of different exit strategies, although we don’t really need to flesh out all of the details until later rounds. Some ideas we’ve thrown around:
- There’s a lot of for-profit interest in fintech from groups like Intuit, Blackbaud, etc. We’d obviously need to be careful from a mission alignment point of view, but the ultimate goal (as with any social enterprise) is to bake our theory of change into the way we make money so that it is genuinely valuable from a for-profit point of view to push our mission forward. This is harder with effective altruism than simply with broader social impact, as it adds additional constraints, but the process is similar (and we believe it’s achievable). This is something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about from a product point of view, and it’s actually one of the main reasons we think it’s so important to hire an EA product manager (more than for many other roles).
- There are more creative setups we’ve seen work, like separating profits from decision making, so investors earn a higher percentage of profits while having a lower percentage of voting rights. There’s also a concept called Steward Ownership that we’re pretty excited about: https://medium.com/@purpose_network/whats-steward-ownership-14efc6caf9e7. You could also imagine exiting to a foundation, although this would bear other risks (e.g. reconsolidating decision making under the very mega-donors you were trying to diversify from).
I actually don’t think we have this fully answered yet, and I expect to spend significantly more time down the line exploring exit options that maintain profitability while advancing our mission.
Medium article throws a 404, FWIW.
Ah sorry, it keeps adding my punctuation to the hyperlink! Fixed
Apologies if this was already asked.
Do you have any idea how much of your users (weighted by donation) self-ID as EAs? If the number is low, obviously this is super impressive, but if you’ve only gotten traction among EAs then less so.
Thanks for posting, this is a really interesting idea, congrats.
Great question—a negligible portion of our donors would identify as EA. I’d estimate a few hundred of our users would identify as EA at most, almost all of the other donors came in from acquisition channels completely unrelated to EA. So I’d estimate over 99% are non EA donors. Indeed, there are only about 10k EAs in the entire movement, so even if we’d somehow captured all existing EAs it would still only be about 1⁄4 of our donors at most.
That’s a good point re: 1⁄4, haha.
Super cool to hear. Great job.