Seeking feedback on charity redirecting opposing donations to GiveWell
DuelGood is a recently launched nonprofit that redirects donations to opposing political causes into GiveWell’s Top Charities Fund instead, so donors can neutralize their opponent’s funding while supporting high-impact work.
For example, imagine Alice donates $100 to Planned Parenthood, while Bob donates $100 to Focus on the Family. Normally these donations would fund opposing advocacy efforts that largely cancel each other out in the political arena. Through DuelGood, that $200 is redirected to GiveWell’s Top Charities instead. Both Alice and Bob get what they actually want most: stopping $100 from going to a cause they oppose. And instead of funding a political stalemate, their donations save lives.
We’re seeking the EA community’s feedback on how to maximize impact. Specifically, some of what we’d like to know is:
Does the value proposition make sense to potential donors?
Are there major flaws in the mechanism we’re missing?
How could we explain this more clearly?
What concerns would prevent you from using/recommending this?
Are there better political donation pairs we should consider?
What’s the best way to reach people who donate to these political causes?
We’re open to all feedback, questions, and criticism. Our website is https://duelgood.org.
One concern I have is how this might be pretty gameable to not reflect someone’s counterfactual donation decisions.
For instance, say that I am going to donate anyway to GiveWell’s Top Charities Fund, but I also have other political preferences (say promoting second amendment rights in the United States). Now, instead of just donating directly to GiveWell’s Top Charities Fund, I can use DuelGood to donate to GiveWell, while neutralizing the donations to a gun safety organization.
This possibility, that your DuelGood contribution may not actually be neutralizing spending by the opposing cause, seems like it could prompt some serious concern (even if, in fact, people were being honest and using it for counterfactual donations).
EDIT: This sort of setup where two people agree not to fund causes where they oppose each other seems like it would work very well if the two people trust each other. How can DuelGood create this degree of trust in a scalable way between strangers?
EDIT2: second amendment is the right to bear arms, not first!
We hadn’t considered this framing! DuelGood wouldn’t contribute anything if everyone who uses it would have donated to GiveWell anyway. And if Person A was already planning to donate to GiveWell and uses DuelGood to also block a political donation, Person A hasn’t made a real sacrifice while their matched partner has. This asymmetry could undermine trust and discourage participation.
I wonder if the net outcome might still be positive.
Consider Person A, who was going to donate $100 to GiveWell anyway and now donates through DuelGood to neutralize a gun safety donation.
Person A’s $100 still go to GiveWell, same as if they had donated directly.
In addition, a gun safety donation is blocked and redirected to GiveWell instead. This is a net positive assuming A: GiveWell is more effective than donating to gun safety, and B: perceived gaming doesn’t reduce participation enough to eliminate the benefit.
The system creates value as long as someone on each matched pair is making a counterfactual change. The question is whether perceived gaming reduces participation enough to outweigh these benefits.
We don’t have a perfect solution to the problem of trust, but here’s some initial things I can think of that might help:
Include testimonials from previous donors making sacrifices.
When donating, allow people to specify if they had already heard of GiveWell/select from a list like “What best describes your donation: (a) Redirecting a planned political donation, (b) New donation inspired by DuelGood, (c) Already planned GiveWell donation”. This would help us gather data on how many people are potentially gaming and then update.
Include this problem on our FAQ to improve transparency.
This may be a limitation we can’t fully solve. If enough people are gaming, the concept may not be viable at scale. We’d value your thoughts on mechanisms that could help.
(p.s. thank you for your input!)
Severely, unless you can find a mitigation.
Each user has near-perfect knowledge of what they were going to do anyway. They can guess at the swindle rate—the rate at which counterparties play games to various sorts that prevent an honest/equal mutual neutralization. You describe one swindle, but there are other variants as well.
Unfortunately, the incentive for swindlers to participate is stronger than the incentive for honest players. The honest player is trading a known donation to Go Go Guns for a possibility of averting a contribution to No No Guns. The swindler is giving up nothing and only has an upside. That doesn’t strike me as a stable equilibrium.
A partial fix would be to require users to hand over the money when listing on the site with instructions to forward it to Go Go Guns unless someone who had conditionally committed to No No Guns pairs with them. This would reflect the true preference of an honest player, but would make it harder for someone who was just interested in maximizing donations to GiveWell and was going to counterfactually donate there anyway. Now they must accept the risk of not matching and watching their money sent to Go Go Guns.
But:
This would require more legal/accounting work for DuelGood, could make certain types of donations impossible (e.g. hard money political donations), and could cost donors tax writeoffs.[1]
There are still workarounds:
If I were going to donate $500 each to Go Go Guns and to GiveWell, I could throw $500 into DuelGood, see which org it went to, and then donate the other $500 outside DuelGood. I’ve given up nothing (and neither has Go Go Guns). But I potentially moved $500 from No No Guns to GiveWell, and my counterparty got swindled.
Or, if I don’t care about gun issues, saw that my donation wasn’t going to pair, and that it was headed toward Go Go Guns, I could hand a confederate some money with instructions to throw at No No Guns. The end result is that I can still make sure all my money ends up with GiveWell. So i can still play a gambit to try to draw some additional monies to GiveWell without incurring any risk on my end. If I match, my counterparty got swindled into switching from No No Guns to GiveWell without getting anything in return. If I don’t, it’s the same as having given to GiveWell in the first instance.
If DuelGood were a 501(c)(3), donations to it would probably be tax deductible, but it could generally not re-donate to non-501(c)(3) organizations. And a lot of the potential advocacy organizations being neutralized would be 501(c)(4) organizations.
Thank you, Jason! Until we can find a mitigation, we’ll update our website to inform donors about the problems you found. We appreciate your thoughtful contributions :)
Thanks for the thoughtful reply — and yes, I do think this is a pretty serious concern for trust and scale.
The core issue, as I see it, is that for the “we’re neutralizing opposing political donations” story to really hold, donors should be doing something like:
“This is money I was otherwise going to use to support the specific zero-sum political cause indicated (or a very close substitute), and I’m now redirecting it instead.”
One concrete way to reinforce that would be a short pledge at checkout, e.g.:
“I understand that DuelGood only works if donors genuinely redirect money they would otherwise have used to support the indicated political cause (or a very similar one). I pledge that this donation meets that description.”
You could then reserve the strongest “duel/neutralization” framing and stats for donors who sign that pledge, and be transparent about that in the FAQ.
I’d really love to see DuelGood work — turning political deadlock into bednets is a very compelling vision.
I think maybe a brief video explaining the zero-sum nature of a lot of political giving, and a brief explanation of a better path forward might be helpful.
Excellent idea, we’ll set our creative talent on it. If the result isn’t too amateurish we’ll include it in our About page.