I’m curious, did you decide on the entire year’s worth of donations through an election? To me, donation elections can be a fun way to generate discussions around giving (I donated to the election fund here after all) but I would never let it decide on a significant part of my donations (let’s say 1% at most). If you want to outsource the day-to-day decision making on what charities to give to, then I believe funds are a much more effective tool for that than elections or lotteries.
:) sounds right to me. A couple factors here that might clear things up.
1) I probably want to donate to both GH and AW charities across my life, so I don’t think the results of this donation election counterfactually affected my lifetime donations much.
2) I’m a student and this donation was relatively small compared to future ones I expect to make.
We had very brief intros for each charity and then a non-binding vote at the start, a short discussion on the vote, followed by an introduction to effective giving with a discussion in the middle. We then gave more info on each charity. Voting was done as: discussion, first round vote to eliminate one charity, discussion, final round of voting to choose winner.
Charities were AMF, GiveDirectly, and the Humane League. The slides were a modified version of GWWC’s donation election presentation so the initial vote also included the Play Pumps fake out.
I donated to AMF because it beat the Humane League in our club donation election :(
I’m curious, did you decide on the entire year’s worth of donations through an election? To me, donation elections can be a fun way to generate discussions around giving (I donated to the election fund here after all) but I would never let it decide on a significant part of my donations (let’s say 1% at most). If you want to outsource the day-to-day decision making on what charities to give to, then I believe funds are a much more effective tool for that than elections or lotteries.
:) sounds right to me. A couple factors here that might clear things up.
1) I probably want to donate to both GH and AW charities across my life, so I don’t think the results of this donation election counterfactually affected my lifetime donations much.
2) I’m a student and this donation was relatively small compared to future ones I expect to make.
Keen to hear more about how you guys ran the election and who won! (If you’ve got time to share).
I’m also a co-president at EA Purdue.
We had very brief intros for each charity and then a non-binding vote at the start, a short discussion on the vote, followed by an introduction to effective giving with a discussion in the middle. We then gave more info on each charity. Voting was done as: discussion, first round vote to eliminate one charity, discussion, final round of voting to choose winner.
Charities were AMF, GiveDirectly, and the Humane League. The slides were a modified version of GWWC’s donation election presentation so the initial vote also included the Play Pumps fake out.
So cool!
What an awesome exercise!