I love the spirit of this post and I agree with almost everything Charles said. My only difference of opinion is that I don’t think people are taxed on gift income, so long as a giver provides under $16,000 in a year to any single individual and under $12.06MM in their lifetime. Letting participants keep the tax savings could be a polite way to compensate them for their involvement without dampening their altruistic glow.
I’d be excited by a project that explored surrogate donation from employees of these companies to multiply the impact of our giving. I expect the cap on Meta’s Giving Tuesday match will barely scratch the surface of EAs’ personal donations this year. My preliminary thoughts to scale this idea would be:
Learn the fine print of the programs. Some employers explicitly disallow donating money that is given to an employee for this purpose.
Try to form a nuanced understanding of the long term incidence of doing this. I imagine many companies would discontinue or scale back their charity benefits if it was exploited in this way. I suspect that it would still be net good because of which charities would get bonus funding, but companies price in the fact that most employees don’t utilize donation matching & I suspect they would adjust their offering if it were used more.
Focus on employees of companies with the most generous matches first. Possibly establish a fund where EAs could pool their money and funnel them through each surrogate donor to max out the donor’s gift cap.
I want to reiterate what Charles said about disassociating this from EA, and I recommend speaking to a(t least one) lawyer before making any moves. This feels like the type of ends-justifying-means action that is righteous in intent, but underhanded in public appearance.
Feel free to reply here or PM me if you’d like to flesh this out. I think it’s a great idea, thanks for sharing!
Thank you for your feedback, Sam! After thinking futher about this idea and emailing a GWWC contact I think this idea is not worth pursuing any further. I now agree with your statement “This feels like the type of ends-justifying-means action that is righteous in intent, but underhanded in public appearance.” The person I emailed sent me this article on “Considering considerateness: Why communities of do-gooders should be exceptionally considerate” https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/blog/considering-considerateness-why-communities-of-do-gooders-should-be
I think it was a good attempt and worth posting but it’s now time for me to keep brainstorming and see if I can come up with any better ideas. Thank you everyone for your time!
I love the spirit of this post and I agree with almost everything Charles said. My only difference of opinion is that I don’t think people are taxed on gift income, so long as a giver provides under $16,000 in a year to any single individual and under $12.06MM in their lifetime. Letting participants keep the tax savings could be a polite way to compensate them for their involvement without dampening their altruistic glow.
I’d be excited by a project that explored surrogate donation from employees of these companies to multiply the impact of our giving. I expect the cap on Meta’s Giving Tuesday match will barely scratch the surface of EAs’ personal donations this year. My preliminary thoughts to scale this idea would be:
Learn the fine print of the programs. Some employers explicitly disallow donating money that is given to an employee for this purpose.
Try to form a nuanced understanding of the long term incidence of doing this. I imagine many companies would discontinue or scale back their charity benefits if it was exploited in this way.
I suspect that it would still be net good because of which charities would get bonus funding, but companies price in the fact that most employees don’t utilize donation matching & I suspect they would adjust their offering if it were used more.
Focus on employees of companies with the most generous matches first. Possibly establish a fund where EAs could pool their money and funnel them through each surrogate donor to max out the donor’s gift cap.
I want to reiterate what Charles said about disassociating this from EA, and I recommend speaking to a(t least one) lawyer before making any moves. This feels like the type of ends-justifying-means action that is righteous in intent, but underhanded in public appearance.
Feel free to reply here or PM me if you’d like to flesh this out. I think it’s a great idea, thanks for sharing!
Thank you for your feedback, Sam! After thinking futher about this idea and emailing a GWWC contact I think this idea is not worth pursuing any further. I now agree with your statement “This feels like the type of ends-justifying-means action that is righteous in intent, but underhanded in public appearance.” The person I emailed sent me this article on “Considering considerateness: Why communities of do-gooders should be exceptionally considerate” https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/blog/considering-considerateness-why-communities-of-do-gooders-should-be
I think it was a good attempt and worth posting but it’s now time for me to keep brainstorming and see if I can come up with any better ideas. Thank you everyone for your time!