I’m not necessarily disputing the idea that donating to these sorts of fundraising organizations is a good use of money; but we also need to be careful about double-counting. It’s tempting to try to take credit for one’s own meta donations while object-level donors are also taking full credit for the programs they fund.
My practice, perhaps adjacent but not identical to the one proposed here, is to give 15% of a donation to the charity evaluator or facilitator that introduced me to the main charity or program. In recent years that’s been GiveWell, and the fact that they have an excess funds regranting policy makes this an even easier decision.
Yeah, the double accounting question can be a problem. It is inherent to counterfactual impact. Imagine a production chain X → Y → Product. Then counterfactually, X can call 100% dips of the product; as can Y. So together, they have 200%, which does not make sense.
However, there are alternative impact metrics. For example, Shapley values have some nice properties. In particular, they guarantee that they sum up to one. Intuitively, they calculate the mean counterfactual impact for each player over all possible configurations of players. This can be useful to assess important predictors in statistical modles. But it is also the reason why I don’t find them partucularly useful for decision making. After all, you are not interested in your impact in hypothetical worlds, but just in your impact in the current constellation of the world, i.e. your counterfactual impact.
So in summary, I’d say use counterfactuals for decision making and Shapley values for determining bragging rights ;)
Thank you for raising this important point about double-counting, Ian! This is something we go to great pains to avoid when evaluating the counterfactual impact of fundraising efforts in the effective giving space. For example, we’re careful not to count donations that would have happened anyway or were primarily inspired by other organisations when accounting for our own organisation’s counterfactual multiplier.
Where I see it a bit differently is around the question of individual impact credit. Rather than worrying about dividing up credit between meta-donors and direct donors, I think what matters most is maximising our collective impact as a community. When you donate to an EG organisation, you might indeed be counterfactually responsible for 2x or more money going to effective charities—and so too are the people who choose to donate after learning about effective charities through your meta-donation. Since we’re all working toward the same goal of maximising good done, this isn’t a zero-sum game where we need to divide up credit.
This accounting question really only becomes crucial when we need to make decisions about where to direct scarce funding—we want to fund the organisations that will be most effective at growing the total pool of donations to effective charities.
That said, I think your approach of allocating 15% to evaluators makes a lot of practical sense as a way to sustainably support the ecosystem. It aligns nicely with the thrust of Ollie Base’s argument in his post “Consider donating to whoever helped you” while avoiding getting too caught up in precise impact attribution. And as you note, GiveWell’s excess funds regranting policy makes this particularly straightforward in their case and this policiy is something we are working to put in place at GWWC too.
I’m not necessarily disputing the idea that donating to these sorts of fundraising organizations is a good use of money; but we also need to be careful about double-counting. It’s tempting to try to take credit for one’s own meta donations while object-level donors are also taking full credit for the programs they fund.
My practice, perhaps adjacent but not identical to the one proposed here, is to give 15% of a donation to the charity evaluator or facilitator that introduced me to the main charity or program. In recent years that’s been GiveWell, and the fact that they have an excess funds regranting policy makes this an even easier decision.
Yeah, the double accounting question can be a problem. It is inherent to counterfactual impact. Imagine a production chain X → Y → Product. Then counterfactually, X can call 100% dips of the product; as can Y. So together, they have 200%, which does not make sense.
However, there are alternative impact metrics. For example, Shapley values have some nice properties. In particular, they guarantee that they sum up to one. Intuitively, they calculate the mean counterfactual impact for each player over all possible configurations of players. This can be useful to assess important predictors in statistical modles. But it is also the reason why I don’t find them partucularly useful for decision making. After all, you are not interested in your impact in hypothetical worlds, but just in your impact in the current constellation of the world, i.e. your counterfactual impact.
So in summary, I’d say use counterfactuals for decision making and Shapley values for determining bragging rights ;)
Thank you for raising this important point about double-counting, Ian! This is something we go to great pains to avoid when evaluating the counterfactual impact of fundraising efforts in the effective giving space. For example, we’re careful not to count donations that would have happened anyway or were primarily inspired by other organisations when accounting for our own organisation’s counterfactual multiplier.
Where I see it a bit differently is around the question of individual impact credit. Rather than worrying about dividing up credit between meta-donors and direct donors, I think what matters most is maximising our collective impact as a community. When you donate to an EG organisation, you might indeed be counterfactually responsible for 2x or more money going to effective charities—and so too are the people who choose to donate after learning about effective charities through your meta-donation. Since we’re all working toward the same goal of maximising good done, this isn’t a zero-sum game where we need to divide up credit.
This accounting question really only becomes crucial when we need to make decisions about where to direct scarce funding—we want to fund the organisations that will be most effective at growing the total pool of donations to effective charities.
That said, I think your approach of allocating 15% to evaluators makes a lot of practical sense as a way to sustainably support the ecosystem. It aligns nicely with the thrust of Ollie Base’s argument in his post “Consider donating to whoever helped you” while avoiding getting too caught up in precise impact attribution. And as you note, GiveWell’s excess funds regranting policy makes this particularly straightforward in their case and this policiy is something we are working to put in place at GWWC too.