Hi Abe, thanks for this post, it was really interesting! I largely agree with you, and I want to add some complexity from my decade of fundraising experience.
So it might be significantly easier in principle to convince a philanthropist to move from giving at the 1 unit to the 10 unit level, even if not arguing on the basis of cost-effectiveness: there are just more opportunities to move a donor from 1 to 10 units of value than from 101 to 110.”
In principle, sure! But I think you miss the practical reality that this is incredibly difficult. Most philanthropists’ giving, especially non-EA philanthropists’ giving, is a very complex personal (or institutional) decision informed by a variety of hard-to-influence factors. So while there are many more opportunities to shift philanthropists giving at the 1 unit level, the actual success rate is low. I suspect this is why many advisors focus on shifting EA or near-EA giving.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to shift ineffective funders—most fundraisers I know engage in this work, and do it really well. But in philanthropy, we focus a lot on affinity: how likely is this person to engage with a cause at all? People without any indication of affinity are just very unlikely to support your cause. I think your post gets at this, as you call the New York foundation example a huge victory, which I wholeheartedly agree with. And I often hear an expectation that it should be easier to bring in new donors, when in reality this work is very painstaking, can take years, and you fail far more often than you succeed.
Yeah! I strongly agree with the difficulty in doing this (and that EA is a unique fundraising environment with donors with a weirdly high willingness to change their mind). But, I think one under-appreciated fact is that if charities really strongly differ in cost-effectiveness, non-cost-effectiveness-oriented donation advising for non-EA donors might accidentally be doing tons of good (e.g. by making minor shifts in how funds are used that end up having larger changes in size of effect than the difference in cost-effectiveness between EA interventions)
Hi Abe, thanks for this post, it was really interesting! I largely agree with you, and I want to add some complexity from my decade of fundraising experience.
In principle, sure! But I think you miss the practical reality that this is incredibly difficult. Most philanthropists’ giving, especially non-EA philanthropists’ giving, is a very complex personal (or institutional) decision informed by a variety of hard-to-influence factors. So while there are many more opportunities to shift philanthropists giving at the 1 unit level, the actual success rate is low. I suspect this is why many advisors focus on shifting EA or near-EA giving.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to shift ineffective funders—most fundraisers I know engage in this work, and do it really well. But in philanthropy, we focus a lot on affinity: how likely is this person to engage with a cause at all? People without any indication of affinity are just very unlikely to support your cause. I think your post gets at this, as you call the New York foundation example a huge victory, which I wholeheartedly agree with. And I often hear an expectation that it should be easier to bring in new donors, when in reality this work is very painstaking, can take years, and you fail far more often than you succeed.
Yeah! I strongly agree with the difficulty in doing this (and that EA is a unique fundraising environment with donors with a weirdly high willingness to change their mind). But, I think one under-appreciated fact is that if charities really strongly differ in cost-effectiveness, non-cost-effectiveness-oriented donation advising for non-EA donors might accidentally be doing tons of good (e.g. by making minor shifts in how funds are used that end up having larger changes in size of effect than the difference in cost-effectiveness between EA interventions)