Learned helplessness with pledge donations is real. Pledge burnout is real. Your feelings are legit and please do talk to people about them. This is a common feeling amongst EA people who focus on global health and development.
Do just fund your own weekly meetups using a pledge waiver if you want to. That’s ok. Supporting your costs as a volunteer is a fine use of effective money (especially if it helps prevent you from burning out and thereby makes your contribution as a volunteer and even as a donor more sustainable).
There is absolutely nothing in any way morally wrong with giving your pledge money to the Against Malaria Foundation (or another Givewell top charity or anything GiveWell-y). Malaria is neglected. AMF has about a £300 million funding gap. Easily preventable childhood death as a whole has about a £20 billion a year funding gap. That gap is real. You giving cash there doesn’t put it in Dustin’s pocket. CG’s donation amounts are basically unaffected by how much other money is in the space. We’ve seen this with all the stuff about USAID (billions of $) causing basically zero strategic shift in CG’s granting (though a lot of strategic shifts in GiveWell’s granting as the All Grants Fund tries to cover opened-up areas).
If you really want to save lives meaningfully more effectively than a GiveWell donation can, and don’t want to in any way substitute for CG money, consider donating to the operations costs of global health and development effective fundraising organisations that Coefficient Giving doesn’t fund at the moment. An example might be One for the World https://​​1fortheworld.org/​​our-team—there are others. There is a legitimate effective giving portfolio gap between what donation multiplier achieved would cause CG to fund an organisation (which I think is currently about 6x? I believe it’s going up as they double down on only funding the ones with the highest multipliers), and what method of employing staff to fundraise would provide a more effective way of saving lives than GiveWell (which is 1.1x). If these kinds of organisations have more money, they legitimately use it to employ more people to run more stuff to raise even more money for GiveWell charities.
I find that many EAs don’t know about that last point. This gap exists for somewhat reputational reasons. It’s seen as a little bit reputationally gauche for a large philanthropist to donate to a fundraising organisation (rather than the thing the fundraising organisation is fundraising for). Moreso for things with lower multipliers. CG will only take the mild reputational hit of it for things with a high enough multiplier, because CG is watching its reputation carefully. If you as a person do not care one bit about possible reputational consequences of being seen to be paying a fundraiser, just about how many lives you can save with your cash, then it’s a great donation area choice.
It’s a bit like paying your own direct work costs, but divorced from yourself as the person running the things.
There is lots of different stuff here:
Learned helplessness with pledge donations is real. Pledge burnout is real. Your feelings are legit and please do talk to people about them. This is a common feeling amongst EA people who focus on global health and development.
Do just fund your own weekly meetups using a pledge waiver if you want to. That’s ok. Supporting your costs as a volunteer is a fine use of effective money (especially if it helps prevent you from burning out and thereby makes your contribution as a volunteer and even as a donor more sustainable).
There is absolutely nothing in any way morally wrong with giving your pledge money to the Against Malaria Foundation (or another Givewell top charity or anything GiveWell-y). Malaria is neglected. AMF has about a £300 million funding gap. Easily preventable childhood death as a whole has about a £20 billion a year funding gap. That gap is real. You giving cash there doesn’t put it in Dustin’s pocket. CG’s donation amounts are basically unaffected by how much other money is in the space. We’ve seen this with all the stuff about USAID (billions of $) causing basically zero strategic shift in CG’s granting (though a lot of strategic shifts in GiveWell’s granting as the All Grants Fund tries to cover opened-up areas).
If you really want to save lives meaningfully more effectively than a GiveWell donation can, and don’t want to in any way substitute for CG money, consider donating to the operations costs of global health and development effective fundraising organisations that Coefficient Giving doesn’t fund at the moment. An example might be One for the World https://​​1fortheworld.org/​​our-team—there are others. There is a legitimate effective giving portfolio gap between what donation multiplier achieved would cause CG to fund an organisation (which I think is currently about 6x? I believe it’s going up as they double down on only funding the ones with the highest multipliers), and what method of employing staff to fundraise would provide a more effective way of saving lives than GiveWell (which is 1.1x). If these kinds of organisations have more money, they legitimately use it to employ more people to run more stuff to raise even more money for GiveWell charities.
I find that many EAs don’t know about that last point. This gap exists for somewhat reputational reasons. It’s seen as a little bit reputationally gauche for a large philanthropist to donate to a fundraising organisation (rather than the thing the fundraising organisation is fundraising for). Moreso for things with lower multipliers. CG will only take the mild reputational hit of it for things with a high enough multiplier, because CG is watching its reputation carefully. If you as a person do not care one bit about possible reputational consequences of being seen to be paying a fundraiser, just about how many lives you can save with your cash, then it’s a great donation area choice.
It’s a bit like paying your own direct work costs, but divorced from yourself as the person running the things.
Some more details here: https://​​coefficientgiving.org/​​research/​​reflecting-on-our-recent-effective-giving-rfp/​​
thank you, I appreciate the clarifying response!