The mechanism of action is not entirely clear to me: When, hypothetically, you’re able to run a cost-effectiveness evaluation on the Salvation Army and publish the results, then the only people who will see it will be EAs who wouldn’t donate to it anyway. All the while the Salvation Army would have no more incentive to improve its efficiency than it has now. However, such an evaluation would require substantial cooperation from the charity being evaluated, and that’s already where the endeavor would be stopped short because the Salvation Army will probably see no reason to cooperate on that. Does that clarify your question?
One way to raise the efficiency waterline, as it were, is probably to reach out to people running inefficient charities, explain considerations of cause-neutrality to them, and hope that some will update and improve their charities. This may succeed in some cases, but it requires overcoming powerful biases, because these people have already invested many years of their lives inefficiently and will be the lone dissenting voice in their organization if they update. Plus, they may have to accept raising less money if they wish to invest it more efficiently (of course more than offsetting the absolute decrease). If they had been doing fundraising for fundraising’s sake, they’ll have to abandon their bottom line of money raised in favor of their new favorite impact proxy, also a momentous change.
Another approach is what prioritization organizations (like GiveWell and ACE) and most organizations working on movement building try to accomplish. What they do instead is to awaken donors to the importance of impact, thus shifting donations from less efficient to more efficient charities, and thus creating an incentive (ideally a forcible one) for less efficient charities to become more efficient in order to retain or gain donors. They try to establish a more efficient market for altruistic investments, so that it is then the market that forces charities to improve.
Basically, money raised – as opposed to impact – is bottom line that no charity can afford to ignore lest it perish. So they’re trying to turn money raised into a less disastrous proxy for impact. ^^
The mechanism of action is not entirely clear to me: When, hypothetically, you’re able to run a cost-effectiveness evaluation on the Salvation Army and publish the results, then the only people who will see it will be EAs who wouldn’t donate to it anyway. All the while the Salvation Army would have no more incentive to improve its efficiency than it has now. However, such an evaluation would require substantial cooperation from the charity being evaluated, and that’s already where the endeavor would be stopped short because the Salvation Army will probably see no reason to cooperate on that. Does that clarify your question?
One way to raise the efficiency waterline, as it were, is probably to reach out to people running inefficient charities, explain considerations of cause-neutrality to them, and hope that some will update and improve their charities. This may succeed in some cases, but it requires overcoming powerful biases, because these people have already invested many years of their lives inefficiently and will be the lone dissenting voice in their organization if they update. Plus, they may have to accept raising less money if they wish to invest it more efficiently (of course more than offsetting the absolute decrease). If they had been doing fundraising for fundraising’s sake, they’ll have to abandon their bottom line of money raised in favor of their new favorite impact proxy, also a momentous change.
Another approach is what prioritization organizations (like GiveWell and ACE) and most organizations working on movement building try to accomplish. What they do instead is to awaken donors to the importance of impact, thus shifting donations from less efficient to more efficient charities, and thus creating an incentive (ideally a forcible one) for less efficient charities to become more efficient in order to retain or gain donors. They try to establish a more efficient market for altruistic investments, so that it is then the market that forces charities to improve.
Basically, money raised – as opposed to impact – is bottom line that no charity can afford to ignore lest it perish. So they’re trying to turn money raised into a less disastrous proxy for impact. ^^