The only thing we put in to help with preferences, is to allow donors to “reject the swap”—e.g. if they don’t like the charity they are instructed to donate to. But that is clearly insufficient. They could be given more information before they choose to reject.
I’m trying to think of a way of asking for easily accessible information from donors to avoid these problems. This info would be shared with the match. Would “If you don’t get matched where would your donation go?”
with the options
Same charity, and I’ll get tax benefits
Same charity, and I won’t get tax benefits
Charity X and I’ll get tax benefits
Would that be sufficient to avoid the worst of the problems?
Hi! Thank you! That sounds good (“Charity X” would be a free text field?), but I don’t know whether there are other problems it doesn’t address. To guard against that, an FAQ entry explaining the problem would be best. Generally that’ll be needed because this is probably unintuitive for many people (like me), so even if they have the information about the swap counterfactual, they may not be able to use it optimally without an explanation.
That is a really good point Denis!
The only thing we put in to help with preferences, is to allow donors to “reject the swap”—e.g. if they don’t like the charity they are instructed to donate to. But that is clearly insufficient. They could be given more information before they choose to reject.
I’m trying to think of a way of asking for easily accessible information from donors to avoid these problems. This info would be shared with the match. Would “If you don’t get matched where would your donation go?”
with the options
Same charity, and I’ll get tax benefits
Same charity, and I won’t get tax benefits
Charity X and I’ll get tax benefits
Would that be sufficient to avoid the worst of the problems?
Hi! Thank you! That sounds good (“Charity X” would be a free text field?), but I don’t know whether there are other problems it doesn’t address. To guard against that, an FAQ entry explaining the problem would be best. Generally that’ll be needed because this is probably unintuitive for many people (like me), so even if they have the information about the swap counterfactual, they may not be able to use it optimally without an explanation.