Thanks so much for writing this up!
Luke Moore
Karma: 377
Love to see how far this has come!
See these papers on EA and effective charitable giving by Paul Bloom and Lucius Caviola.
Happy to help if I can! Here’s some more info on me and my role as Effective Giving Global Coordinator and Incubator :)
Hey Ulrik!
GWWC has this advise about ‘why and how you should run a birthday fundraiser’.
I hope that helps :)
A midpoint approach (working hypothesis) could be to offer a lower standard pledge for GiveHealth (1%-5%) to appeal to a wider audience, but also mentioning the GWWC 10% Pledge in a few places and provide a link to it, similar to what AAC has done.
Normalising the 10% pledge often involves showing that others are already doing it. Therefore, it is important to ensure that when people pledge 1%, they are aware that there is a community (GWWC) that they can join, which pledges a higher amount (10%). I am very excited about this project and the potential to encourage a large number of healthcare professionals to give effectively. However, I would like to note that in GWWC’s most recent impact evaluation, we found that a small but significant percentage of our Trial Pledgers have gone on to take the 10% Pledge. This likely represents the majority of the value we provide through the Trial Pledge. I believe this could also be true for people taking a GiveHealth pledge if you also were to promote a 10% pledge, although I am uncertain about this.
I also agree with Vaidehi Agarwalla’s suggestion to reach out to OFTW and learn from their experience with the 1% pledge, including churn rates and other factors.
Hey GiveHeath!
I’m really excited about this new effective giving organisation—I think that you’ve done a really great job of capturing the heathcare vibe with the website and promotional video (simialr to how HIA captured the sporty/althlete vibes on theirs). Feels a bit like an NHS explainer video (which I think is awesome!).
My name is Luke, and I work at GWWC as the Effective Giving Global Coordinator and Incubator where I support the global effective giving community and help with the development of new effective giving initiatives. Here are a few ways that I might be able to support your project. The most relevant of which is that I would love to jump on a call with someone from the GiveHealth team to chat about ways that GWWC and the wider effective giving ecosystem can support the work that you’re doing!
I’m also curious if you’ve been in contact with High Impact Medicine as I think they are interested in getting more involved in the effective giving space?
Great question.
We think that both strategies have merits, however we also think that there is less to the distinction than meets the eye. Different locations have quite different audiences and so getting new projects started which can target them seems valuable. But, to expand into new legal justifications (and get tax deductible status) it’s important to start a new legal entity so starting a new initiative in many of these new countries will need to happen anyway.
I also think that the expanding existing orgs vs starting new initiatives division is more of a spectrum. As mentioned in Appendix B, we think that it’s possible that in some of these countries the new initiatives won’t have to be completely independent. In many cases they can make use of tech infrastructure and branding from existing orgs like GWWC or Effektiv Spenden to cut down the set up work that they’d otherwise need to do.
Ultimately it will be for the cofounders of these new initiatives to decide how much they want to make use of the existing brands and/or tech infrastructures that have already been developed—and we will go into more detail on the pros and cons of adopting these existing resources during the program so that cofounders can make whatever choice that gives their initiative the best chance of success.
Having said all of that, many existing orgs are hiring country managers, e.g. we didn’t include Austria as one of our target countries because Effektiv Spenden are likely to expand into that market. However, although GWWC, and other orgs, are expanding, we can only grow so fast and hire so many people in a year. As a result, getting new, more independent, projects started will accelerate the rate that we’re able to bring effective giving to new markets.
Hey Denis! Really glad to hear you’ve applied—please also let people in your networks know about the program :)
Hey Denis,
Sorry for not seeing this sooner! If you’re interested in reaching out to a few charities and making the case that they register (if it’s not to hard) that would be pretty useful. I’d recommend starting with GWWC’s top recommendations: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/donate/organizations
Please contact me on lucas.moore@givingwhatwecan.org if you get anywhere with this :)
This is really helpful thanks so much, if you could link to https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/seeking-founders-for-new-effective-giving-organisations rather than the Forum post that would be amazing as it’s possible that the page gets updated over time and so will have the most up-to-date info :)
First of all, this is a great comment and indeed many others have been thinking along the same lines — I was hired by GWWC in June and a substantial element of my role will be to help effective giving initiatives get started in new legal jurisdictions, which will enable tax-deductions in more places. There are already many national ‘regranting organisations’ which fulfil the purpose you are suggesting here and we’re hoping to see many more get started. For an overview of the effective giving ecosystem and what already exists you can take a look here. And to see tax deductibility of donations by country take a look here. Very tentatively, I’m quite excited about new projects getting started in Italy, India, Singapore, Poland, South Africa, Mexico, South Korea, Japan and Portugal, but need to think a lot more about this.
In my view, the primary purpose of these new initiatives is not to increase impact through extra donations that would have otherwise been paid as tax, but rather to facilitate localised outreach and promotion of effective giving. The majority of resources available online are in English, which means we are missing out on reaching a large segment of the global population who may become effective givers.
I largely agree with HakonHarnes that tax deduction is not “a large part of what makes a donation effective, as our main claim to effectiveness lies in the interventions themselves, which can be many orders of magnitude better than typical charities”. Rather regranting organisations are particularity useful because they reach new audiences which counterfactually would not have started donating to effective charities. It is true that enabling tax-deductible donations will have some counterfactual impact insofar as old donors who previously could not give tax-deducible donations would be able to increase the amount they give. However, the largest impact that tax-deduction has, in my view, is psychological, allowing new donors to give more $ makes them to feel like they are contributing more and getting the most value for their donations. This is especially true when taking people on a journey from making tax-deductible donations to charities in their home country to making donations to highly effective charities. It may make people feel uncomfortable that they are able to give less overall, and they may initially struggle to buy into the idea that the best charities are 100x more effective than the median charities. For this reason I agree that tax-deductibility is an important element of the strategy to make effective giving more widespread.
One thing I’d love to follow up on from you’re comment is whether you’re saying that Belgians can always donate to Dutch charities in a tax-deducible way? Because if so that would mean that such information could potentially provided on the website of Doneer Effectief and could be promoted to Belgians.
On the promoting effective giving to businesses side of things, One For The World have been having some success and I’m excited to see much more done on that front!
Loved this post!