At Giving What We Can I work to support the global effective giving community and help with the development of new effective giving initiatives.
I also am the Executive Director of Impact Books.
Luke Moore šø
Karma: 667
One concern Iāve got about this model for funding EA groups is about the incentive structure this creates. While member donations could provide useful feedback, this might lead community builders to optimise for member satisfaction rather than impact. A group running popular social events might receive more donations than one doing the harder work of developing peopleās capabilities to tackle pressing challenges.
The ultimate measure of an EA groupās success should be its ability to develop capable individuals who can contribute meaningfully to improving the world. This might require not running popular programs that increase immediate member satisfaction.
FWIW I completely agree that EA uni groups should be able to fund themselves a fair bit like most other uni groups and societies do. Definitely worth having āscholarshipā options for those who request it, but the default should be that these EA uni groups do whatever is ānormalā for socialites at their university. I also think that this would go some way to make EA seems less weird.
Thank you for raising this important point about double-counting, Ian! This is something we go to great pains to avoid when evaluating the counterfactual impact of fundraising efforts in the effective giving space. For example, weāre careful not to count donations that would have happened anyway or were primarily inspired by other organisations when accounting for our own organisationās counterfactual multiplier.
Where I see it a bit differently is around the question of individual impact credit. Rather than worrying about dividing up credit between meta-donors and direct donors, I think what matters most is maximising our collective impact as a community. When you donate to an EG organisation, you might indeed be counterfactually responsible for 2x or more money going to effective charitiesāand so too are the people who choose to donate after learning about effective charities through your meta-donation. Since weāre all working toward the same goal of maximising good done, this isnāt a zero-sum game where we need to divide up credit.
This accounting question really only becomes crucial when we need to make decisions about where to direct scarce fundingāwe want to fund the organisations that will be most effective at growing the total pool of donations to effective charities.
That said, I think your approach of allocating 15% to evaluators makes a lot of practical sense as a way to sustainably support the ecosystem. It aligns nicely with the thrust of Ollie Baseās argument in his post āConsider donating to whoever helped youā while avoiding getting too caught up in precise impact attribution. And as you note, GiveWellās excess funds regranting policy makes this particularly straightforward in their case and this policiy is something we are working to put in place at GWWC too.
Hey @Henri Thunberg šø really exciting that youāll be making a donation in this space. Happy to talk this through with you if youād like :) Iāve DMād you :)
Why you should alĀloĀcate more of your donaĀtion budĀget to effecĀtive givĀing organisations
In some ways this level of advising was what @Spencer R. Ericson šø was trying to do with SoGive. Although, theyāve now pivoted as I think there was not sufficient interest or willingness to pay from this size of donor. See this post on SoGiveās expanded advising and custom research service (I think now outdated).
Iāve already seen all the GWWC stuff (and think itās awesome!), but seeing your more recent work on GCR visualisations reminded me how much we lost with you moving on from GWWCā¦ and how much youāre now bringing to the rest of the EA space! Absolutely fantastic work :)
I completely agree that focusing on pledges for students over direct fundraising is a good idea! In our latest internal impact evaluation (2022) at GWWC we found that each new 10% Pledge results in roughly $100,000 USD donated to high impact funding opportunities over the lifetime of the pledge (and we conservatively estimate that ~1/ā5 of that is counterfactual). Because of this, in my view focusing on promoting pledges is the more impactful path as one single 10% Pledge would raise more in the longrun as the most successful student fundraising campaign imaginable. It also has the added benefit of making a clear case for effective and significant giving which I think helps to promote positive values in the world and demonstrates the kind of principles that we care about in the EA community.
OTOH I think that often people feel like students might not feel able to make such a big commitment. However, I think that this is a little overcautious. I took the 10% Pledge as a student and found giving incredibly manageable. The 10% Pledge encouraged students to aim for about 1% of their spending money, which for me amounted to roughly Ā£100 a yearāless than the cost of a couple of pints each month. It was easy and, honestly, it felt really rewarding. Getting into the habit of giving early on has been very helpful as well. It became a core part of my identity, something I felt really proud of. Once I started working full-time, giving 10% of my income was easy. I simply was able to set it aside each month and hardly noticed it was gone. Since I had never been accustomed to that extra 10%, Iāve never felt like I was sacrificing anything.
Hey! Glad you want to bring more effective giving into your uni group. I myself took the 10% Pledge as student and still think it was amongst the best decisions Iāve ever made :)
I now work at Giving What We Can and weāve developed a guide for how we can support /ā collaborate with EA groups to further our shared mission of spreading the ideas of effective giving, and effective altruism more broadly. Iāve DMād you a link
Yield & Spread from Rebecca Herbst is the closet thing to this I know of. Not sure if sheās tried anything else with the FIRE community.
Hey Squeezy! Iām really sorry, but weāre not going to be able to do this right now as we donāt have the data from these organisations or it would take too long to categorise it at this point. Here you can find out more information about Open Philanthropy and Manifundās allocations. Unfortunately we donāt have the data on other organisations.
UpĀdates on the effecĀtive givĀing ecosysĀtem (MCF 2024 memo)
You likely wonāt be applying to the Meta Charity Funders for this project, but I think that they have pretty good general tips on how to approach writing grant applications. This forum post has some of the key points.
For a sense of what this might look like see what the GWWC research team found when they looked into how our donorsā giving is distributed across cause areas in our recent 2020-2022 impact evaluation:
Cause area Proportion of pledge donations 2020ā2022 Proportion of non-pledge donations 2020ā2022 Improving human wellbeing 65% 43% Improving animal welfare 7% 13% Creating a better future 11% 15% Multiple/āUnknown 17% 29% *These results based on data from for both pledge and non-pledge donations, however, we analysed only donations to charities and funds for which we recorded more than $500,000 USD received over 2020ā2022. See our impact evaluation for a complete picture of what the data shows.
I actually think that GWWC and AIM are exploring the possibility of setting up a new Fund which would make grants in the meta charity space (including to effective giving initiatives). It would likely have a similar focus to the meta funding circle. This is all very early stage, and there are lots of details to be worked out, but watch this space!
Loved this post!
Thanks so much for writing this up!
Love to see how far this has come!
See these papers on EA and effective charitable giving by Paul Bloom and Lucius Caviola.
Interesting view, but I have a different perspective based on my experience in the effective giving and AIM startup space. I havenāt observed organisations being pushed toward premature scaling or unnecessary short-term funding growth. In fact, Iāve seen quite different dynamics at play often pushing in the opposite direction. Would be curious to hear specific examples from others where theyāve seen this pattern occur?