Pablo Melchor, co-founder and president at Ayuda Efectiva. Co-founded EA Spain.
Pablo Melchor šø
Karma: 750
Yes! How interested (or uninterested) mainstream media are in effective giving varies a lot between countries. In Spain, their interest is close to zero, but the book has already led to some good opportunities that will hopefully materialize in the next couple of weeks.
My standard reply when people ask me how Ayuda Efectiva is going is āhappy but not satisfiedā. I am happy because the trend is good. This is money raised for effective charities:
I am not satisfied because our figures are still tiny and I would like to see at least an extra zero to the right.
I expected this to be a very hard endeavor and I told my board from day one that we were starting a long-distance race. I would therefore say that things are going more or less as I could have wished for. (Note: I think figures are a great a progress indicator but a bad, random threshold for success)
My advice for founders of effective giving orgs is always that this is not about the donation platform but about how you acquire new donors. In my experience, the key is how you spread the ideas that lead to giving.
As I hinted at before, I am not a fan of the earning ro give concept and I much prefer an āearn and giveā framing that recognizes that your income serves multiple purposes. Having said that, I do think that effective giving has a much larger role to play than it has today.
Striving for The Most Impactful Career is great when it works but extremely frustrating when it doesnāt. Adding giving to the equation expands your space of possibilities dramatically.
As for starting for-profit startups, it is definitely an interesting option. I think the main considerations are the ones applicable to anyone contemplating entrepreneurship: the odds are against you and building something from scratch can be extremely hard, so you should only do it if you REALLY want to do itāoften for hard to explain reasons.
Thanks for the hot take, Camille :-). My slightly colder take is that how impactful my book ends up being (anywhere from very much to very little) will be a valuable data point for EAs in other non-English-speaking countries.
As for what limits the reach of EA ideas in these countries, I think (a) there may be some truth spread across the different theories and (b) the disagreement needs to be operationalized by making the goal concrete. If your goal is to find the nerds* with the highest potential for global impact, they probably spend hours reading online content in English and will discover EA pretty much as if they were staring at their laptop in California. However, I believe there is a huge counterfactual impact to be had beyond that demographic.
I see effective giving in particular as an undervalued way of making impact accessible to a much broader audience, and hence my book. This seems like a good place to drop something I think about often: I almost never talk about āearn to giveā, since Iād much rather suggest that people āearn and giveā.
* No negative connotation implied: I embrace my own nerdiness.
Thanks for the question, Pablo.
Beginning with Ayuda Efectiva, when we launched we had to decide how to approach what I would call a tough market: not much of a giving culture, low trust, and a still very traditional culture in certain aspects. I think that when you enter a market like that, your strategy must be wedge shaped. In our case, the tip of the wedge was making people consider whether they should give a part of their resources to help others. The wedge widened with the introduction of an effectiveness mindset and spatial impartiality (as referred to humans): two huge asks already. We feltāI think rightlyāthat introducing the expansion of the moral circle to include non-human animals was just too much at that stage.
However, we are gradually introducing cause areas beyond global health and poverty. @Andres Jimenez Zorrilla šø nudged us to start offering an animal welfare option in 2021 and this is the progression so far.
The figures are small compared to GHP, but the trend is significant. All this is to say that having multiple cause areas was not an āifā but a āwhenā decision.
As for the book, I hope you wonāt mind my self-quoting from the announcement š:
The truth is Iāve written the book I realized I wanted to write.
Back in 2018, discovering that I could help thousands of people and save lives at little personal cost was a forceful intellectual and moral shock, as well as a happy turning point in my life. It seems obvious in retrospect, and itās not something that keeps people busy at the expanding frontiers of EA. However, out in the world, it is a powerful idea that millions of people should hear. If itās well explained, it can change the minds and behaviors of a certain fraction, resulting in an extraordinary impact. I see my book as a modest contribution to that project, focused on the currently neglected Spanish-speaking world.
Many books try to do too much. They gain pages and lose strength. I decided to focus on a single idea (āYou have the power to save livesā), explain why it is true and meaningful, and remove anything that did not help to make the case.
Great to hear youāre working on a book!
I think you have it right: promotion is at least half of the workload.
@Matt Colemanš¹ gave me the words to describe myself as an āoutgoing introvertā. I often crave some more ācave timeā but I know that putting myself out there is a must. As is the case for other public(ish) EA figures, podcast interviews have been key for me. In the case of the book, the publisher wouldnāt have reached out to me if I had not already built a modest public presence.
Moving to your specific questions:
Promoting the book has been my single priority since ĖMay, when we started to plan the launch, and will be at least until the end of October.
No NGO collaborations. My relationships (and, by now, friendships) with podcast hosts and YouTubers are key. I have not tested collaborations with other influencers, mostly because my hands are already full :-).
I already have experience with TV and radio appearances so I am not investing in media training, but I think it can be a great investment and I hear wonders from other people in EA who have done it.
I am doing launch events in Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia, but I see them as a nice thing to do with āfansā (for lack of a better word) rather than a key outreach initiative. You simply reach many more people through things like podcast interviews. People who have worked on EA book launches, like Abie Rohrig, stress this as well.
The āPabloā effect is definitely worth studying :-). Besides your being the OG EA Spanish-speaker, there was a time when EA Spain was known as āJaime (@Jaime Sevilla) and the Pablosā. We still dominate the first-name leaderboard and have cool regional variations like āPauā.
Thanks a lot or your comment: I am really fortunate to have found a way to put my comparative advantage to good use. My life satisfaction is way higher than before because of EA.
Good question. There can be many synergies between EA communities and effective-giving orgs but, as for where to start, the people involvedāand their comparative advantagesāmatter a lot.
Building Ayuda Efectiva has been hard but still comparatively easy for me because I already had the entrepreneurial experience, the connections to raise seed capital locally, certain communication skills, etc. Conversely, I would have been the wrong person for the aim of starting student groups in Spanish universities.
People thinking of starting effective-giving orgs in countries without strong EA communities should be aware that setting the org up and having a website to accept donations is worth very littleāeven though it may require a lot of work. Outreach is essential. It is hard and it takes time: do not expect quick results.
I do think it is an essential communication skill to meet people where they are at before you ask them to follow you to a different destination. In some countries, giving is part of the culture. In Spain, you have to start at āwhy give?ā, and work through a lot of trust issues before you get to effectiveness. The public perception of NGOs is quite bad and acknowledging there are reasons for that is often an important starting point.
You also have to consider that there are very different profiles within the same country. My conversation with a young, politically liberal, agnostic entrepreneur may be very different from that with their seventy-year-old, conservative, Roman Catholic father (by the way: the liberal-conservative spectrum can flow in different directions in each country).
If I compare my Spanish-language book to other EA-themed books in English, the most salient difference may be that I devote a lot of pages to questioning the bad arguments for dismissing charitable giving as a whole.
Thanks for the question, Tristan. No, the book doesnāt recommend any Spanish NGOs. Its goal is to change peopleās whole approach towards giving, rather than suggesting tweaks to their current giving. However, it does endorse a portfolio approach: you can structure your giving so that a big slice is highly effective, while keeping other (ideally smaller) slices for local projects or charities with which you have a special connection.
Two updates:
Thereās been an issue with the Kindle version in some markets: the ebookās ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) changed for complicated reasons. Yesterday I updated all the affected links in the post, but if you preordered before that you may have received an email saying your order was canceled. If thatās your case, please reorder with the updated links. Sorry for the inconvenience!
Buscalibre, a leading online bookstore in Latin America, has now listed the paperback. I have updated the post with the links for several countries.
Thanks for the comment, Josh. I do think it would be great to have an up-to-date book on the topic in English, but I donāt know if this would be the right oneānot content-wise, but rather in terms of my ability to adequately promote it in the English-speaking world. I will definitely evaluate it if the Spanish version is successful.
Thanks for your comment. I agree with the importance of the plight of factory farmed animals, but I donāt think that implies it should be mentioned in every book about doing good.
I am actually pondering whether my next content project should be about animal suffering. If it ends up being so, I probably wonāt mention global health and poverty in that one (implying nothing about its importance).
Thanks a lot Mel! I do hope this book will become a useful asset for everyone trying to spread EA ideas in the Spanish-speaking world. Ā”Vamos! š
Fantastic work! Strongly upvoted.
Hi Miguel, Nicole,
I will be hosting this edition of the open forum. It looks like there is a mistake on the upper part of this page since the actual date announced on the GWWC website is tomorrow: Thursday, November 17.
If you see this before today at 8 p.m. CET please do let me know by replying to this comment. If I donāt hear from you, I will log in today as well.Sorry about this!
Two notes on existing resources:
Jamie Gittins created this wiki listing EA-alined orgs.
The EA Operations Slack (mentioned here) is doing wonders in terms of resource sharing and mutual help for people working in ops roles.
I can only describe āIt has been a good yearā as a massive understatement. You are doing amazing work with minimal resources and Effektiv Spenden is an inspiration for all of us working to promote effective giving. I think supporting your growth should be a no-brainer.
Regarding the contribution of effective giving to the growth of effective altruism, our donor base at Ayuda Efectiva skews even more towards āno previous knowledgeā. I think effective giving can be one of the main gateways into effective altruism in high-income, non-English-speaking countries.
Some great points have been made in previous comments, but I think there is some important context missing in GiveDirectlyās post and this discussion.
Disclosure and caveats: At Ayuda Efectiva we rely heavily on GiveWellās research and will soon incorporate GiveDirectly as a giving option for Spanish donors. We therefore have an ongoing relationship with GiveWell and a just-getting-started one with GiveDirectly. We talk to GiveWell regularly to get a better sense of their thinking but all I write here is my personal understanding (which could be wrong).
Even though GiveWell has been around for more than a decade, it is a fast-growing and fast-changing organization. It seems that one of the current key drivers of change is the success of their Maximum Impact Fund. More and more, donors seem to be choosing to let GiveWell pursue whichever opportunities they think are the most impactful at any given time.
The way I see it, what this means in practice is that GiveWellās role as a charity recommender is becoming less prominent while their role as a grantmaking organization is expanding. The 40% growth of their incubation grants in 2020 also seems to point in that direction.
Once you see GiveWell in that light, the arguments against the roll over of part of their 2021 let-GiveWell-decide money raised seem to me quite weaker. If there is a strong argument, it should be applicable to any foundation (e.g. Gates, Open Phil, you name it) not giving away all of their available money in cash transfers now.
I do find convincing the argument that GiveWell is still widely seen and represented as just a charity recommender and they do have an important influence on giving decisions (I would say mostly in the EA community and adjacent groups). Their communications can therefore have a big impact and potentially unintended consequences. I have two comments to make on this:
First, GiveWellās message to donors is not ādo not give, hold your moneyā:
We will continue to raise funds, and our top recommendation to donors continues to be our Maximum Impact Fund, which grants funds on a quarterly basis to the most cost-effective giving opportunities weāve identified at the time grants are made.
In fact, they expect to cover funding needs in 2022 equivalent to a very large percentage of the money they hope to raise:
Second, I find GiveDirectlyās argument on the potential impact of GiveWellās announcement rather confusing:
But their decision here tries to optimize 0.1% of U.S. charitable giving in isolation from the other 99.9%; when, in reality, growing that 99.9% and allocating it better will mean a lot more for our world than asking those donors to hold out for possible silver bullets down the road.
One possible interpretation is the one in Jaimeās comment. The way I understood it made me think the argument is not very consistent: On the one hand, they say that GiveWell is trying to optimize 0.1% of U.S. charitable giving. I donāt know what the exact percentage is but it does seem clear that GiveWellās money moved and influence is very small in the scheme of things. On the other hand, the post seems to suggest that GiveWell is somehow telling the 99.9% donors it has no influence on to hold their donations.
In any case, I think it is perfectly compatible for GiveWell to announce they will be holding some funds for some time in order to achieve maximum impact (since that is precisely what they set out to do) while other donors decide to give now because they prefer to address the immediate needs that GiveDirectly is focused on. It does not seem like GiveWellās announcement should have a huge impact on that latter group, even if it is not the messaging that GiveDirectly will want to (and should) emphasize when addressing the 99.9% donors out there.
Answering the questions in the OP:
How influential are the most prominent EA intellectual figures in the Spanish-speaking world?
The short answer would be ānot muchā :-). Peter Singer is of course known in academic philosophy circles and he has received some recognition. Toby Ord is not well known and Will MacAskill is mentioned most often by a couple of hatchet-job-specialized journalists that present EA as some crazy cult that aims to destroy the world (or something along those lines: I ignore their āworkā since I realized I gained nothing from reading it).
Whatās distinct about the giving culture in Spain?
Probably that there is not much of a giving culture. The first ā¬250 you give has an 80% tax deduction, costing you just ā¬50. The average yearly donation doesnāt even reach that ā¬250 amount. However, the average Spaniard is not the person we are targeting. I have often found our donors to be not people who were already giving and decided to do it more effectively, but rather people who were very skeptical of the existing alternatives and who started giving significantly upon discovering effective giving.
What surprised you about writing your book?
Lots of things! The many gaps in my reasoning; how the core idea emerged while writing; how much clutter you can remove; how writing improves your thinking; how generous, helpful and supporting my beta readers were...