Here’s the problem:
Some charities are not just multiple times better than others, some are thousands of times better than others. But as far as I can tell, we haven’t got a good way of signaling to others what this means.
Think about when Ed Sheeran sells an album. It’s “certified platinum” then “double platinum” peaking at “certified diamond”. When people hear this it makes them sit back and say “wow, Ed sheeran is on a different level.”
When a football player is about to announce his college, he says “I’m going D1”. You become a “grandmaster” at chess. Ah, that restaurant must be good it has won two Michelin stars. That economist writing about the tragedy of the commons is great, she won a Nobel prize.
We need nomenclature that goes beyond “High impact” charity. “Cost-effective” “High impact” “Effective” are all good descriptions, but we need to come up with a rating system or some method of giving high status to the best charities (possibly based on how much $ it costs to save one life).
It’s got to be something that we can bring into the popular conscience, and it can’t be something we just narrowly assign to all of our own EA meta charities. We need journalists popularizing the term and recognizing the 3-5 super charities that save lives like no ones business. We should work with marketing teams and carefully plan what the name would be. But it’s got to confer status to the charity and people like Jay Z can gain more status by donating to it, just like he gains status by eating at Michelin star restaurants.
(excuse me if I’m not the first to outline this idea)
I think it is a cool idea for people to take a giving pledge on the same day. For example, you and your friend both decide to pledge 10% to charity on the same day. It would be even more fun if you did it with strangers. Call it “giving twins” or “giving siblings”.
Imagine that you met a couple strangers and they pledged with you. Imagine that after pledging you all just decided to be friends, or at least a type of support group for one another. Like “Hey, you and I took the further pledge together on New Year’s Day last year. When I’m in your city let’s go have a pint or maybe we can email each other about our career plans to discuss ways we can help people more!”
Which leads me to my final bit here: would anyone be interested in being my giving sibling? Haha I am interested in taking the further pledge in 2022, and it would be fun to have the same ‘giving birthday’ as other people so I could befriend them, meet people in the community, and get a couple lifelong friends.
Giving what we can could even take this idea and run with it. They could assign you a giving sibling if you entered into the sibling program, this could help increase the feeling that we are a community.