I don’t believe the multipliers that fundraising organizations report (e.g. because they don’t appropriately adjust for money that would have been donated counterfactually, rely on aggressive assumptions, or ignore the opportunity cost of having people working at the multiplier organization)
There’s also the question of whether the multiplier charities are just replacing some of the fundraising that the beneficiary charities would do in their absence, and whether or not they’re better at it.
Could the beneficiary charities coordinate to fund the multiplier charity? Why don’t they? Is it because they think their own fundraising is better, or that their regular donors wouldn’t like that, or something else?
I think it’s preferable to have people give through intermediaries, so that the message is “give to organizations the experts think is best” vs. having every charity try to argue for its own impact and having donors try to make sense of it all.
That message gets undermined if the recommendations aren’t independent, which is a serious problem with having the recommended charities fund the multiplier org.
That’s fair, but if the fundraising org (e.g. TLYCS) was independent of a charity evaluator (e.g. GiveWell) and took all of its recommendations from them, then this seems like it would be okay. I know TLYCS support more than just GiveWell-recommended charities, though.
I think the multiplier estimates I’ve seen are usually of the average multiplier, not the marginal multiplier, but what we care about is the marginal impact. See also HStencil’s answer and the discussion that follows, though.
I don’t believe the multipliers that fundraising organizations report (e.g. because they don’t appropriately adjust for money that would have been donated counterfactually, rely on aggressive assumptions, or ignore the opportunity cost of having people working at the multiplier organization)
There’s also the question of whether the multiplier charities are just replacing some of the fundraising that the beneficiary charities would do in their absence, and whether or not they’re better at it.
Could the beneficiary charities coordinate to fund the multiplier charity? Why don’t they? Is it because they think their own fundraising is better, or that their regular donors wouldn’t like that, or something else?
I think it’s preferable to have people give through intermediaries, so that the message is “give to organizations the experts think is best” vs. having every charity try to argue for its own impact and having donors try to make sense of it all.
That message gets undermined if the recommendations aren’t independent, which is a serious problem with having the recommended charities fund the multiplier org.
That’s fair, but if the fundraising org (e.g. TLYCS) was independent of a charity evaluator (e.g. GiveWell) and took all of its recommendations from them, then this seems like it would be okay. I know TLYCS support more than just GiveWell-recommended charities, though.
Yeah, that makes sense.
I think the multiplier estimates I’ve seen are usually of the average multiplier, not the marginal multiplier, but what we care about is the marginal impact. See also HStencil’s answer and the discussion that follows, though.