The gift giver loaded up the gift recipient’s account with however much money they liked
The gift recipient could choose to donate to any charity
The user journey “nudged” donors to high impact charities: the front page showed SoGive Gold-rated charities (which at the time perfectly aligned with GiveWell-recommended charities). To get to another charity required an extra click. The front page explained that those charities were there because careful research had shown these charities to be higher impact.
The successful bits:
Our user testing suggested the nudge was largely successful: users largely wanted to complete the process as quickly as possible and were happy to accept the research done by others
The less successful bits
Donor acquisition costs (i.e. the costs of online advertising to get users) was higher than the donations generated
We then experimented with the model. We tried a different product where the gift recipient receives 50% charity donation, 50% Amazon gift voucher. This was more successful, in that the amount of charity donations generated at least exceeded the advertising costs. However this was not sufficient—we had set a more demanding goal than this, and it did not reach that target.
We did not target the EA community, as we were aiming for impact, and didn’t want to target users whose counterfactuals involved donating to high impact charities anyway.
“We did not target the EA community [...]” Did you consider that EAs might want to provide this as a gift to their non-EA friends or family? Personally, it seems like one of the most likely ways/instances in which I would introduce some of my connections to EA charities.
SoGive piloted charity gift cards some years ago.
Our charity donations product worked as follows:
The gift giver loaded up the gift recipient’s account with however much money they liked
The gift recipient could choose to donate to any charity
The user journey “nudged” donors to high impact charities: the front page showed SoGive Gold-rated charities (which at the time perfectly aligned with GiveWell-recommended charities). To get to another charity required an extra click. The front page explained that those charities were there because careful research had shown these charities to be higher impact.
The successful bits:
Our user testing suggested the nudge was largely successful: users largely wanted to complete the process as quickly as possible and were happy to accept the research done by others
The less successful bits
Donor acquisition costs (i.e. the costs of online advertising to get users) was higher than the donations generated
We then experimented with the model. We tried a different product where the gift recipient receives 50% charity donation, 50% Amazon gift voucher. This was more successful, in that the amount of charity donations generated at least exceeded the advertising costs. However this was not sufficient—we had set a more demanding goal than this, and it did not reach that target.
We did not target the EA community, as we were aiming for impact, and didn’t want to target users whose counterfactuals involved donating to high impact charities anyway.
“We did not target the EA community [...]”
Did you consider that EAs might want to provide this as a gift to their non-EA friends or family? Personally, it seems like one of the most likely ways/instances in which I would introduce some of my connections to EA charities.