Effective giving is the branch of effective altruism focused on charitable donations.
The main purpose of effective giving is to support a charity or project that can achieve an especially large amount of good with that support. However, effective giving on a sufficient scale can also influence the charitable sector, giving charities an incentive to improve their own effectiveness.
Questions related to effective giving
There is a variety of questions related to effective giving.
For instance, how can one ensure that a donation has the largest possible direct impact? Should donors give to multiple organizations? This is common, but there are reasons to think that it may be more effective not to diversify donations in this way. Donors can also think about when to give their money — in which cases is saving money and giving it later better? And all of this gets more complicated when multiple donors are involved; a person’s donations may impact the effectiveness of another person’s donations, raising the tricky question of how they should coordinate to collectively maximize their impact.
The indirect impact of donations can also be important to consider. For instance, giving publicly could encourage others to donate.
Further reading
Birkwood, Susannah (2016) Effective altruism: Will donors change their ways?, Third Sector, February 25.
A look at effective altruism and the effectiveness of charities
Related entries
donation choice | diminishing returns | philanthropic coordination | philanthropic diversification | room for more funding | impact assessment | earning to give
I just saw that there’s an effective funding entry. It seems to me that:
“effective funding” and “effective giving” are basically synonyms
So we should merge the two tags
Keeping the useful parts of the text from each
Maybe this’d mean mainly using the text from the “effective funding” entry and then just adding or tweaking a few bits in like of the “effective giving” text
The term “effective giving” is used more often in EA
I’d actually never heard the term “effective funding” before seeing this entry
So we should use the name “effective giving” for the merged tag
(But maybe I’m wrong about one or more of those things..)
I support merging them and calling the tag “effective giving”.
I also support this.
I’ll proceed to do the merging now.
Okay, done. I moved the content under ‘issues related to effective funding’ and fixed all the links. I will leave the effective funding entry up for a couple of days, in case anyone wants to move any additional content or compare the two entries, and will then delete it.
Deleted.