Thanks for sharing about your initiative. I do have some significant doubts about this project.
Have you interviewed charities and asked them whether they prefer donations through your scheme vs donations made directly to them?
Is there a chance that this project has negative impact, by cannibalizing direct donations and turning them into indirect donations via your platform—potentially against the will of the charities themselves, i.e., against their judgement that they could have more impact with direct donations?
Or alternatively, looking at the opposite: Have you got evidence that this will attract new donations to highly effective charities that wouldn’t otherwise have happened—for example, by introducing these charities to people that have never heard about them before? (but even then, the same question applies—why your scheme instead of direct donations?)
thank you for your reply. To answer your questions: yes, all the charities on our website were ‘onboarded’, meaning they all specifically approved being listed there. Many actually enthusiastically embrace the idea! The reasons for this are twofold:
Many charities currently see their stable, periodic donations trending downwards. The reason for this is that there is an ongoing switch in how people donate. It used to be very normal to transfer a fixed amount periodically to your favorite charities. However, this is changing nowadays more towards one-time gifts based on campaigns (think ice bucket challenge) and tips from influencers and blogs/vlogs/podcasts. As a result, many charities can no count less and less on a stable, annual income. This is a challenge that Give For Good helps to solve.
We were told by several of the larger charities that their research has shown that the more ‘methods’ of giving there are, the more the overall income is. There is some degree of cannibalization between the different donation methods, but overall the income is more. So we understood from them that this is an extra method of income for them, which they expect will increase their overall income (especially long-term, given our model). Also, they expect that because of our model, we may be able to attract donors from sectors that are normally hard to reach for them (e.g. the financial sector).
Re your second question, most of our donors today enter via our general website and are not looking for one specific charity to support via our platform using our methods (which also happens). So yes, our platform generates ‘extra’ attention for the charities that we list that would otherwise not have occurred.
Finally, to answer your question about why our scheme and not direct donations, this is quite extensively discussed on our website, but in a nutshell there are two major benefits:
Over time the money that goes to the charities is much more. For example, if Give For Good had been established 100 years earlier, in 1920, by the year 2020 each donation from that year would have generated 28 times as much income for the charities as compared to a one-time donation! See this figure on our website. This has been calculated using real stock market data, it is not an estimate, and is already corrected for inflation, so constitutes ‘real value’. And most of all: after those 100 years it still continues to generate interest for the charity!
Give For Good is also beneficial because it can turn one-time donations into a stable, annually returning source of income for charities, that they can count on. For reasons described above, and for reasons like strategic planning, this is important to charities.
Thanks again for your questions, I hope that clarifies things!
Thanks for sharing about your initiative. I do have some significant doubts about this project.
Have you interviewed charities and asked them whether they prefer donations through your scheme vs donations made directly to them?
Is there a chance that this project has negative impact, by cannibalizing direct donations and turning them into indirect donations via your platform—potentially against the will of the charities themselves, i.e., against their judgement that they could have more impact with direct donations?
Or alternatively, looking at the opposite: Have you got evidence that this will attract new donations to highly effective charities that wouldn’t otherwise have happened—for example, by introducing these charities to people that have never heard about them before? (but even then, the same question applies—why your scheme instead of direct donations?)
Dear Lukas,
thank you for your reply. To answer your questions: yes, all the charities on our website were ‘onboarded’, meaning they all specifically approved being listed there. Many actually enthusiastically embrace the idea! The reasons for this are twofold:
Many charities currently see their stable, periodic donations trending downwards. The reason for this is that there is an ongoing switch in how people donate. It used to be very normal to transfer a fixed amount periodically to your favorite charities. However, this is changing nowadays more towards one-time gifts based on campaigns (think ice bucket challenge) and tips from influencers and blogs/vlogs/podcasts. As a result, many charities can no count less and less on a stable, annual income. This is a challenge that Give For Good helps to solve.
We were told by several of the larger charities that their research has shown that the more ‘methods’ of giving there are, the more the overall income is. There is some degree of cannibalization between the different donation methods, but overall the income is more. So we understood from them that this is an extra method of income for them, which they expect will increase their overall income (especially long-term, given our model). Also, they expect that because of our model, we may be able to attract donors from sectors that are normally hard to reach for them (e.g. the financial sector).
Re your second question, most of our donors today enter via our general website and are not looking for one specific charity to support via our platform using our methods (which also happens). So yes, our platform generates ‘extra’ attention for the charities that we list that would otherwise not have occurred.
Finally, to answer your question about why our scheme and not direct donations, this is quite extensively discussed on our website, but in a nutshell there are two major benefits:
Over time the money that goes to the charities is much more. For example, if Give For Good had been established 100 years earlier, in 1920, by the year 2020 each donation from that year would have generated 28 times as much income for the charities as compared to a one-time donation! See this figure on our website. This has been calculated using real stock market data, it is not an estimate, and is already corrected for inflation, so constitutes ‘real value’. And most of all: after those 100 years it still continues to generate interest for the charity!
Give For Good is also beneficial because it can turn one-time donations into a stable, annually returning source of income for charities, that they can count on. For reasons described above, and for reasons like strategic planning, this is important to charities.
Thanks again for your questions, I hope that clarifies things!