I’m wondering how it was we in effective altruism more able to capture so much of this?
Is it that every.org is EA affiliated and somehow gave us an early scoop?
Or is it we are the main group of smallish donors that really care about the amount the charities receive and thus pay attention to these things
-… on the second point, you might think that Facebook giving Tuesday match is a counter example, as most of that ends up going to jonEA charities. However, FB giving Tuesday is heavily publicised.
Or is it we are the main group of smallish donors that really care about the amount the charities receive
In short, I think that’s basically the reason. In particular, EAs got donations matched to at least 66 different nonprofits. Many EAs participating in this match donated to 10+ different nonprofits. I’m not aware of any other groups of people who are that excited to support that wide a range of different nonprofits. So the $100 per donor per nonprofit limit really helped EAs direct a disproportionate amount of the matching funds due to our disproportionate willingness to donate to several different charities.
Regarding your other ‘early scoop’ hypothesis: Every.org reached out to me about this #FallGivingChallenge in mid-October (because they liked my post promoting their #25DaysOfGiving initiative last year), but I don’t think this is what led to the EA community directing such a large portion of the matching funds to effective charities. This can most apparently be seen from the facts that:
(1) I waited until after the match began to publish this post and promote the match to others in EA ;
(2) Every.org published their announcement post more than a week before the match, so presumably others had early notice of it;
(3) Most significantly, the matching funds still have not run out yet after more than a week of being available, meaning speed wasn’t a significant factor.
Point 3 above also suggests that the number of people interested in the match is clearly limited. In fact, even within EA the number of people interested is limited. This Forum post has not dropped off the front page of the EA Forum as of November 8th and yet the number of new EAs participating in the match has continually decreased each day since November 2nd and is now quite low. At this point, the number of people getting their donations matched each day is low enough that the initial $475k of matching funds will not be used up for weeks—perhaps not even by the end of the match (November 30th)--unless something accelerates the pace at which people start getting their donations matched again.
Regarding the Facebook Giving Tuesday match, note that EAs direct a highly disproportional amount of the available matching funds (probably way more disproportional than in this Every.org match). The difference is just that the Facebook match is far more competitive (approximately a million people make a donation of Facebook on Giving Tuesday each year), such that it’s impossible for any one group—including EAs—to direct a large fraction of the matching funds.
The difference is just that the Facebook match is far more competitive (approximately a million people make a donation of Facebook on Giving Tuesday each year)
Why do you think the FB GT match is so much more popular. Is it just more prominent? That sort of goes with my proposed HA1.
Facebook just has a massive audience. In years past they’ve promoted the match via a mention of it in people’s Facebook newsfeed. Presumably many millions of people saw that. They’ve also prompted donating to nonprofits on Facebook via prompting users to create a birthday fundraiser for their favorite nonprofit and matching some small amount of donations (like $2-$5 IIRC). Every.org is a fairly new nonprofit with a small team and clearly doesn’t have that kind of reach.
Point 3 above also suggests that the number of people interested in the match is clearly limited.
If it’s this, and not lack of awareness, it’s bizarre. Millions of Americans donate small-ish amounts to eligible charities each year. They could increase the amounts the charities receive, or reduce their out-of-pocket donations ‘for free’.
If Amazon.com was having a ‘spend $100 on each store, get $100 more for free’, this would be used up in a sneeze. Can it be that people really only care about the amount they sacrifice and not the amount the charities get?
Alternative hypothesis HA1: Most relevant people are not aware of this match
HA2: People don’t trust it, it seems ‘too good to be true’
HA3: People think “it’s not really getting free money/free charity, because if I don’t take advantage, an equally good charity/donor will do
Of these, only HA1 seems plausible to me.
In fact, even within EA the number of people interested is limited. This Forum post has not dropped off the front page of the EA Forum as of November 8th and yet the number of new EAs participating in the match has continually decreased each day since November 2nd and is now quite low.
How is this possible? Isn’t it an easy gain for GWWC and other pledgers? Do we all have such high value of time that the small effort involved here doesn’t merit the $400-$4000 (oom) gain from giving to an overlapping set of charities we care about?
Increased awareness would certainly lead to increased participation I think, but I think your HA3 is true for most people (especially non-EAs). So many charities have used donation “matches” in their fundraising campaigns that most people might not even realize how this one is different or the significance of that difference if they were to take a quick look at some short marketing copy from Every.org about it, and so I wouldn’t expect them to be so interested in it like EAs often are.
On that note my uncertain guess is that some significant fraction of the interest in the Facebook match comes from nonprofits promoting the match to their supporters. Given Facebook’s limits of $20k/donor being much higher than Every.org’s limit here ($100 per donor per nonprofit), nonprofits may be much more motivated to bother marketing the Facebook opportunity to their supporters than the Every.org match.
… I was also thinking about this in the sense of “from the individual EA donor’s point of view, is the match really counterfactual/marginal if it’s capped? If it’s all going to end up captured by other EA charities then individually it may not be counterfactual, but collectively among EAs it still is..
At this point the remaining matching funds are being used up very slowly—slowly enough that it is very conceivable they will not all be used up by the end of the match (Nov 30th). So it seems it really is counterfactual.
But of course you make a good point that if the counterfactual is that the money is likely to go to some EA charity if a marginal individual doesn’t donate, then this does diminish the value of participation from a marginal individual’s perspective. But insofar as individual EAs see big differences in the value of directing the money to different EA nonprofits (e.g. charities working in different cause areas), then the fact of other EAs participation may not make participation that much less appealing.
I also worry that if our EA efforts fade, some other non-EA group will discover this and pick up the slack.
Worth your/our making another ‘update’ post on this as a CtA?
Could also be noted: If you don’t have much money to donate now, you can still
Get $25 free for signing up with a link like yours (and another $25 to the ‘linker’).
Donate $10 to each of a handful of charities and ‘aggregators’ of these (like Founders Pledge and GiveWell) and get the $10 match, $5 for adding bank details, plus a $10 addition from copying the social media link, and a few more bucks from ‘liking’ donations.
So, e.g., “you can get $215 in donations for just $50!)” … might be a good pitch for the less cash-liquid in our midst.
I thought about making another ‘update’ post, but it’s not clear to me that it’s good to try that hard to promote this one way people can increase the effectiveness of how some money is spent. Afterall, $85k (the amount of matching funds left currently) is a very small amount relative to the amount of money that people spend on charitable endeavors in general (and also relative to the amount of money in EA). Arguably EAs’ limited attention would be better spent working towards more ambitious goals (such as trying to ifluence how many millions or billions of dollars are spent).
The reason why I don’t think this logic applies to sharing about this match in the first place is because I think this match was valuable from a community engagement perspective. I think many EAs enjoyed participating in it and there’s value in that in terms of making them feel more engaged with EA and the EA community in general, which I expect will make them more effective over the course of their lives on average.
That said, while two posts promoting the same opportunity in the same channel seems like too much when the opportunity is as “small” as this match, I may post a brief “here’s how it went” post at the end of the match since that’s a different kind of post and I think people may be interested.
Just some quick counterpoints to consider, in weighing whether to post ‘update: funds still available’:
the match amount might be increased again
something like this may occur again in future, and it may be good to be aware of it
I’m curious how close to ‘fully taking advantage of this’ we can come
85k seems fairly substantial in comparison with some ‘money/action’ things that get attention on EA Forum (epistemic status: not so sure about this)
you could probably combine this with the “here’s how it went” post … without much loss, and also get more feedback on questions surrounding ‘why is it that EAs were able to get so much of these funds’
I’m wondering how it was we in effective altruism more able to capture so much of this?
Is it that every.org is EA affiliated and somehow gave us an early scoop?
Or is it we are the main group of smallish donors that really care about the amount the charities receive and thus pay attention to these things
-… on the second point, you might think that Facebook giving Tuesday match is a counter example, as most of that ends up going to jonEA charities. However, FB giving Tuesday is heavily publicised.
In short, I think that’s basically the reason. In particular, EAs got donations matched to at least 66 different nonprofits. Many EAs participating in this match donated to 10+ different nonprofits. I’m not aware of any other groups of people who are that excited to support that wide a range of different nonprofits. So the $100 per donor per nonprofit limit really helped EAs direct a disproportionate amount of the matching funds due to our disproportionate willingness to donate to several different charities.
Regarding your other ‘early scoop’ hypothesis: Every.org reached out to me about this #FallGivingChallenge in mid-October (because they liked my post promoting their #25DaysOfGiving initiative last year), but I don’t think this is what led to the EA community directing such a large portion of the matching funds to effective charities. This can most apparently be seen from the facts that: (1) I waited until after the match began to publish this post and promote the match to others in EA ; (2) Every.org published their announcement post more than a week before the match, so presumably others had early notice of it; (3) Most significantly, the matching funds still have not run out yet after more than a week of being available, meaning speed wasn’t a significant factor.
Point 3 above also suggests that the number of people interested in the match is clearly limited. In fact, even within EA the number of people interested is limited. This Forum post has not dropped off the front page of the EA Forum as of November 8th and yet the number of new EAs participating in the match has continually decreased each day since November 2nd and is now quite low. At this point, the number of people getting their donations matched each day is low enough that the initial $475k of matching funds will not be used up for weeks—perhaps not even by the end of the match (November 30th)--unless something accelerates the pace at which people start getting their donations matched again.
Regarding the Facebook Giving Tuesday match, note that EAs direct a highly disproportional amount of the available matching funds (probably way more disproportional than in this Every.org match). The difference is just that the Facebook match is far more competitive (approximately a million people make a donation of Facebook on Giving Tuesday each year), such that it’s impossible for any one group—including EAs—to direct a large fraction of the matching funds.
Why do you think the FB GT match is so much more popular. Is it just more prominent? That sort of goes with my proposed HA1.
Facebook just has a massive audience. In years past they’ve promoted the match via a mention of it in people’s Facebook newsfeed. Presumably many millions of people saw that. They’ve also prompted donating to nonprofits on Facebook via prompting users to create a birthday fundraiser for their favorite nonprofit and matching some small amount of donations (like $2-$5 IIRC). Every.org is a fairly new nonprofit with a small team and clearly doesn’t have that kind of reach.
FB promo: Wasn’t it something like “we will donate the first $1”?
If it’s this, and not lack of awareness, it’s bizarre. Millions of Americans donate small-ish amounts to eligible charities each year. They could increase the amounts the charities receive, or reduce their out-of-pocket donations ‘for free’.
If Amazon.com was having a ‘spend $100 on each store, get $100 more for free’, this would be used up in a sneeze. Can it be that people really only care about the amount they sacrifice and not the amount the charities get?
Alternative hypothesis HA1: Most relevant people are not aware of this match HA2: People don’t trust it, it seems ‘too good to be true’ HA3: People think “it’s not really getting free money/free charity, because if I don’t take advantage, an equally good charity/donor will do
Of these, only HA1 seems plausible to me.
How is this possible? Isn’t it an easy gain for GWWC and other pledgers? Do we all have such high value of time that the small effort involved here doesn’t merit the $400-$4000 (oom) gain from giving to an overlapping set of charities we care about?
Increased awareness would certainly lead to increased participation I think, but I think your HA3 is true for most people (especially non-EAs). So many charities have used donation “matches” in their fundraising campaigns that most people might not even realize how this one is different or the significance of that difference if they were to take a quick look at some short marketing copy from Every.org about it, and so I wouldn’t expect them to be so interested in it like EAs often are.
On that note my uncertain guess is that some significant fraction of the interest in the Facebook match comes from nonprofits promoting the match to their supporters. Given Facebook’s limits of $20k/donor being much higher than Every.org’s limit here ($100 per donor per nonprofit), nonprofits may be much more motivated to bother marketing the Facebook opportunity to their supporters than the Every.org match.
… I was also thinking about this in the sense of “from the individual EA donor’s point of view, is the match really counterfactual/marginal if it’s capped? If it’s all going to end up captured by other EA charities then individually it may not be counterfactual, but collectively among EAs it still is..
At this point the remaining matching funds are being used up very slowly—slowly enough that it is very conceivable they will not all be used up by the end of the match (Nov 30th). So it seems it really is counterfactual.
But of course you make a good point that if the counterfactual is that the money is likely to go to some EA charity if a marginal individual doesn’t donate, then this does diminish the value of participation from a marginal individual’s perspective. But insofar as individual EAs see big differences in the value of directing the money to different EA nonprofits (e.g. charities working in different cause areas), then the fact of other EAs participation may not make participation that much less appealing.
I also worry that if our EA efforts fade, some other non-EA group will discover this and pick up the slack.
Worth your/our making another ‘update’ post on this as a CtA?
Could also be noted: If you don’t have much money to donate now, you can still
Get $25 free for signing up with a link like yours (and another $25 to the ‘linker’).
Donate $10 to each of a handful of charities and ‘aggregators’ of these (like Founders Pledge and GiveWell) and get the $10 match, $5 for adding bank details, plus a $10 addition from copying the social media link, and a few more bucks from ‘liking’ donations.
So, e.g., “you can get $215 in donations for just $50!)” … might be a good pitch for the less cash-liquid in our midst.
25 + 25 + 5*(10 + 10 + 10 + 3)
I thought about making another ‘update’ post, but it’s not clear to me that it’s good to try that hard to promote this one way people can increase the effectiveness of how some money is spent. Afterall, $85k (the amount of matching funds left currently) is a very small amount relative to the amount of money that people spend on charitable endeavors in general (and also relative to the amount of money in EA). Arguably EAs’ limited attention would be better spent working towards more ambitious goals (such as trying to ifluence how many millions or billions of dollars are spent).
The reason why I don’t think this logic applies to sharing about this match in the first place is because I think this match was valuable from a community engagement perspective. I think many EAs enjoyed participating in it and there’s value in that in terms of making them feel more engaged with EA and the EA community in general, which I expect will make them more effective over the course of their lives on average.
That said, while two posts promoting the same opportunity in the same channel seems like too much when the opportunity is as “small” as this match, I may post a brief “here’s how it went” post at the end of the match since that’s a different kind of post and I think people may be interested.
Just some quick counterpoints to consider, in weighing whether to post ‘update: funds still available’:
the match amount might be increased again
something like this may occur again in future, and it may be good to be aware of it
I’m curious how close to ‘fully taking advantage of this’ we can come
85k seems fairly substantial in comparison with some ‘money/action’ things that get attention on EA Forum (epistemic status: not so sure about this)
you could probably combine this with the “here’s how it went” post … without much loss, and also get more feedback on questions surrounding ‘why is it that EAs were able to get so much of these funds’