Just as a heads up, when I read ‘conditional donation’ I thought you were going to talk about restricted donations which can only go to one aspect of a charity’s work.
What you’re talking about is basically just what crowdfunding sites do, right? If the project doesn’t receive enough donations to be viable, everyone’s money is refunded.
Thanks for the input. I would like to hear better names for this idea.
Yes, the idea is similar to crowdfunding. I think there is an important difference though. I see conditional donations working under some form of a website that directs donations to effective charities. Donors would thus be able to set many conditions for the optimal allocation of a specified lump sum. The main gain that I see is that this allows for more optimization than in a normal crowdfunding implementation, where you might have to split your budget.
“Donor coordination” is used, and Google turns up some results that seem relevant. There’s been writing in EA on this topic; here’s some on GiveWell’s website. Relatedly, Open Philanthropy Project tries not to fund more than half of its grantees’ budgets.
Thank you for this. The post by GiveWell is quite relevant.
The post deals with the problem of whether an org such as Good Ventures should wait out to make their donations so that they can fill in gaps where needed and not donate to a charity past a point of decreasing returns. I think a platform for conditional donations may improve on Good Venture’s solution of posting their decisions before giving season.
Say there is an agreed-upon limit for how much funding a given charity can absorb. The platform could then coordinate donors so that this threshold is never reached. Each person might, for example, have conditions of the kind “donate to A if there are sufficient (conditional) donations to get A to receive in total between $X and $Y, else donate to B...”.
Just as a heads up, when I read ‘conditional donation’ I thought you were going to talk about restricted donations which can only go to one aspect of a charity’s work.
What you’re talking about is basically just what crowdfunding sites do, right? If the project doesn’t receive enough donations to be viable, everyone’s money is refunded.
Thanks for the input. I would like to hear better names for this idea.
Yes, the idea is similar to crowdfunding. I think there is an important difference though. I see conditional donations working under some form of a website that directs donations to effective charities. Donors would thus be able to set many conditions for the optimal allocation of a specified lump sum. The main gain that I see is that this allows for more optimization than in a normal crowdfunding implementation, where you might have to split your budget.
“Donor coordination” is used, and Google turns up some results that seem relevant. There’s been writing in EA on this topic; here’s some on GiveWell’s website. Relatedly, Open Philanthropy Project tries not to fund more than half of its grantees’ budgets.
Thank you for this. The post by GiveWell is quite relevant. The post deals with the problem of whether an org such as Good Ventures should wait out to make their donations so that they can fill in gaps where needed and not donate to a charity past a point of decreasing returns. I think a platform for conditional donations may improve on Good Venture’s solution of posting their decisions before giving season. Say there is an agreed-upon limit for how much funding a given charity can absorb. The platform could then coordinate donors so that this threshold is never reached. Each person might, for example, have conditions of the kind “donate to A if there are sufficient (conditional) donations to get A to receive in total between $X and $Y, else donate to B...”.