I think what I am proposing here is perfectly compatible with your requirement as a donor: We can make it the norm to pay market salaries but then you as a donor can still say you only donate to charities where the founder or staff donate a significant fraction of that salary back to the charity with salary sacrifices. Thatâs a bit like the common for-profit equivalent for investors to want founders to have âskin in the gameâ by having equity.
Letâs take Marcusâ example (please correct me if I am making wrong assumptions here!): Marcusâ fund will turn donations into impact by regranting. As a donor to the fund, you only get a âcutâ of that impact because the fund did some work (research, payment processing, âŚ). As a donor to the fund I am happy to give them a cut because it saves me time. How big is the cut? I think the foregone salary by Marcus (and potentially other staff) are a good estimate for this. Thatâs why we should model his foregone salary has an implicit donor to the fund and divide the fund impact by all the donations, including his foregone salary. I hope this is making sense!
you as a donor can still say you only donate to charities where the founder or staff donate a significant fraction of that salary back to the charity with salary sacrifices.
For this to work, those donations would need to be made public which presumably creates considerable pressure on staff who feel compelled to give simply to avoid deterring donors. I canât see such a system ever gaining traction in the European Union, given how seriously we take privacy, though it might function well in cultures with different norms around financial transparency.
Thatâs why we should model his foregone salary has an implicit donor to the fund and divide the fund impact by all the donations, including his foregone salary. I hope this is making sense!
It makes perfect sense mathematically. Whether it would be a wise marketing strategy is another question. Telling donors that overhead is only 5% because the fund manager forgoes a salary is a far more compelling pitch than saying overhead is 7.31% but the fund manager donates 2.31% of it back. (The numbers are purely illustrative, of course.)
Not sure if weâd have to make all donation public. But in the example of Marcus, he did that, he publicly stated that he is not taking salary. Your original claim was you prefer to donate to charities where you know that people take a low salary. The only way to know this is for this to be public.
For this to work weâd only need to know total market-equivalent salaries and total âdonatedâ fraction of this. Doesnât have to be per-staff. This is not very different from the overhead reporting right now and should be possible with privacy laws.
Re marketing: I agree that this differnt view of looking at impact is a bit harder to get across initially but it could eventually be much cleaner: It allows to give a âmathematicalâ quantifiable view on what âsplitâ of the impact I am getting as a donor. At least in this community, thatâs something people want I think.
I guess you could align your proposals with European privacy laws, but it would never be truly private, especially in a small charity.
Your original claim was you prefer to donate to charities where you know that people take a low salary. The only way to know this is for this to be public.
It was not a claim but a statement of fact. Iâm not saying itâs the right thing to do. Itâs just that when I hear a story like Markusâs, or when I have dinner with the management of Sea Shepherd Global and learn that they all sleep on volunteersâ couches while on an official mission because they wouldnât want to use any donor money on a hotel room it inspires me, and I want to give. When I hear that a COO of the Centre for Effective Altruism earns $227,461, I may understand it intellectually, but it just doesnât inspire me at all.
There will always be some information about salaries available. When charities have to hire people in many countries, they are required to state how much they will pay and people are always free to share how much they earn if they wish to do so. Information about donations seems to be more worthy of protection to some people. The view that donating publicly is in some way âunpureâ because the people doing it are acting in their own interest, i.e. to look good is surprisingly common. I have heard this many times when people were talking about celebrities and what they donated.
It might also be an issue for Christians. Matthew 6:1â4 says:
Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites doâŚ
I donât hold these views, quite the contrary. I think one should talk about oneâs own commitment in order to motivate others, and perhaps this simply isnât an issue in EA charitys. I just wanted to mention it as something worth considering.
Yes, I agree about the inspiring vs non-inspiring feelings and how this has impact.
I still feel there must be a way to flip this somehow and find a way to assign and recognise impact and contributions that feels motivating and uplifiting to everybody, but maybe thatâs for another post haha
Thanks for taking the time to write these comments, really appreciate it!
I still feel there must be a way to flip this somehow and find a way to assign and recognise impact and contributions that feels motivating and uplifiting to everybody
I feel it would be interesting, but not necessarily uplifting, to estimate how much the EA community spends on any given intervention. Letâs return to your Atlantic Shepherd example. Sea Shepherd is one of those classic charities that handles everything in-house from fundraising and awareness-raising to carrying out the actual anti-poaching interventions. The charities typically recommended by EAs, on the other hand, externalise a great deal of their costs.
Imagine we set up âAtlantic Shepherdâ as an EA charity. Before it ever received funding, an organisation like Rethink Priorities would likely have helped make the case for ocean interventions. Grantmakers would have supported them in getting started. Animal Charity Evaluators would assess them. Several other charities would recommend them. The 80,000 Hours podcast would feature them. And then there are all the charities working on building the EA community itself, as well as those raising funds on Atlantic Shepherdâs behalf. All of these organisations have spent real resources advancing the cause, yet none of those costs ever appear when analysing Atlantic Shepherdâs cost-effectiveness. It would be entirely possible for the community to be spending twice as much per fish saved as Sea Shepherd does, while the cost-effectiveness analysis still shows Atlantic Shepherd coming out ahead by a wide margin.
Agree on this 100%. I originally wanted to bake in that line of reasoning in this article but I felt it was already controversial enough as it is hahaha. This is another example of everybody claiming marginal impact adding up to 10x of the imapct we actually had.
Happy to write a post about this together at some point!
Thanks for your thoughts!
I think what I am proposing here is perfectly compatible with your requirement as a donor: We can make it the norm to pay market salaries but then you as a donor can still say you only donate to charities where the founder or staff donate a significant fraction of that salary back to the charity with salary sacrifices. Thatâs a bit like the common for-profit equivalent for investors to want founders to have âskin in the gameâ by having equity.
Letâs take Marcusâ example (please correct me if I am making wrong assumptions here!): Marcusâ fund will turn donations into impact by regranting. As a donor to the fund, you only get a âcutâ of that impact because the fund did some work (research, payment processing, âŚ). As a donor to the fund I am happy to give them a cut because it saves me time. How big is the cut? I think the foregone salary by Marcus (and potentially other staff) are a good estimate for this. Thatâs why we should model his foregone salary has an implicit donor to the fund and divide the fund impact by all the donations, including his foregone salary. I hope this is making sense!
For this to work, those donations would need to be made public which presumably creates considerable pressure on staff who feel compelled to give simply to avoid deterring donors. I canât see such a system ever gaining traction in the European Union, given how seriously we take privacy, though it might function well in cultures with different norms around financial transparency.
It makes perfect sense mathematically. Whether it would be a wise marketing strategy is another question. Telling donors that overhead is only 5% because the fund manager forgoes a salary is a far more compelling pitch than saying overhead is 7.31% but the fund manager donates 2.31% of it back. (The numbers are purely illustrative, of course.)
Not sure if weâd have to make all donation public. But in the example of Marcus, he did that, he publicly stated that he is not taking salary. Your original claim was you prefer to donate to charities where you know that people take a low salary. The only way to know this is for this to be public.
For this to work weâd only need to know total market-equivalent salaries and total âdonatedâ fraction of this. Doesnât have to be per-staff. This is not very different from the overhead reporting right now and should be possible with privacy laws.
Re marketing: I agree that this differnt view of looking at impact is a bit harder to get across initially but it could eventually be much cleaner: It allows to give a âmathematicalâ quantifiable view on what âsplitâ of the impact I am getting as a donor. At least in this community, thatâs something people want I think.
I guess you could align your proposals with European privacy laws, but it would never be truly private, especially in a small charity.
It was not a claim but a statement of fact. Iâm not saying itâs the right thing to do. Itâs just that when I hear a story like Markusâs, or when I have dinner with the management of Sea Shepherd Global and learn that they all sleep on volunteersâ couches while on an official mission because they wouldnât want to use any donor money on a hotel room it inspires me, and I want to give. When I hear that a COO of the Centre for Effective Altruism earns $227,461, I may understand it intellectually, but it just doesnât inspire me at all.
There will always be some information about salaries available. When charities have to hire people in many countries, they are required to state how much they will pay and people are always free to share how much they earn if they wish to do so. Information about donations seems to be more worthy of protection to some people. The view that donating publicly is in some way âunpureâ because the people doing it are acting in their own interest, i.e. to look good is surprisingly common. I have heard this many times when people were talking about celebrities and what they donated.
It might also be an issue for Christians. Matthew 6:1â4 says:
I donât hold these views, quite the contrary. I think one should talk about oneâs own commitment in order to motivate others, and perhaps this simply isnât an issue in EA charitys. I just wanted to mention it as something worth considering.
Yes, I agree about the inspiring vs non-inspiring feelings and how this has impact.
I still feel there must be a way to flip this somehow and find a way to assign and recognise impact and contributions that feels motivating and uplifiting to everybody, but maybe thatâs for another post haha
Thanks for taking the time to write these comments, really appreciate it!
I feel it would be interesting, but not necessarily uplifting, to estimate how much the EA community spends on any given intervention. Letâs return to your Atlantic Shepherd example. Sea Shepherd is one of those classic charities that handles everything in-house from fundraising and awareness-raising to carrying out the actual anti-poaching interventions. The charities typically recommended by EAs, on the other hand, externalise a great deal of their costs.
Imagine we set up âAtlantic Shepherdâ as an EA charity. Before it ever received funding, an organisation like Rethink Priorities would likely have helped make the case for ocean interventions. Grantmakers would have supported them in getting started. Animal Charity Evaluators would assess them. Several other charities would recommend them. The 80,000 Hours podcast would feature them. And then there are all the charities working on building the EA community itself, as well as those raising funds on Atlantic Shepherdâs behalf. All of these organisations have spent real resources advancing the cause, yet none of those costs ever appear when analysing Atlantic Shepherdâs cost-effectiveness. It would be entirely possible for the community to be spending twice as much per fish saved as Sea Shepherd does, while the cost-effectiveness analysis still shows Atlantic Shepherd coming out ahead by a wide margin.
Agree on this 100%. I originally wanted to bake in that line of reasoning in this article but I felt it was already controversial enough as it is hahaha. This is another example of everybody claiming marginal impact adding up to 10x of the imapct we actually had.
Happy to write a post about this together at some point!