A resource I keep coming back to is the 2010 Money for good study from Hope Consulting. They found that only about 3% of people donate based on organizations’ relative performance (see slide 41).
At the time that study came out, I figured the best thing for EA was to lean into that 3%. Is that still true? As the movement has grown, I’m not really sure.
See also ‘How Donors Choose Charities’ (Breeze, 2013), where even unusually engaged donors are explicit about basing their donations on personal preference and often donating quite haphazardly, with little deliberation.
See also ‘Impediments to Effective Altruism’ (Berman et al, 2018 [full paper]), where people endorsed making charitable decisions based on subjective preferences and often did not elect to donate to the most effective charities, even when this information was available.
I’ve only skimmed this article, but also Coupet and Schehl (2021) claims “Much of the nonprofit performance theory suggests that donors are unlikely to base donation decisions on nonprofit production”.
A resource I keep coming back to is the 2010 Money for good study from Hope Consulting. They found that only about 3% of people donate based on organizations’ relative performance (see slide 41).
At the time that study came out, I figured the best thing for EA was to lean into that 3%. Is that still true? As the movement has grown, I’m not really sure.
See also ‘How Donors Choose Charities’ (Breeze, 2013), where even unusually engaged donors are explicit about basing their donations on personal preference and often donating quite haphazardly, with little deliberation.
See also ‘Impediments to Effective Altruism’ (Berman et al, 2018 [full paper]), where people endorsed making charitable decisions based on subjective preferences and often did not elect to donate to the most effective charities, even when this information was available.
See also this review by Caviola et al (2021).
I’ve only skimmed this article, but also Coupet and Schehl (2021) claims “Much of the nonprofit performance theory suggests that donors are unlikely to base donation decisions on nonprofit production”.