The reason many volunteering schemes persist is that volunteers are more likely to donate in the future. For instance, when FORGE cut their volunteering scheme to be more effective, they inadvertently triggered a big drop in donations.
This seems somewhat misleading to me. If you click through to the FORGE blog post, it states that “volunteers were each required to raise a minimum of $5,000.”
I don’t think it’s reasonable to extrapolate from ‘an organization that required each volunteer to raise a substantial sum saw a large decrease in revenue after decreasing the number of volunteers’ to ‘many volunteering schemes are maintained because volunteers are more likely to donate.’
The way the article phrases the two sentences implies that the second provides support for the first when in fact it does not (at least not without citation to evidence that many volunteering schemes require volunteers to raise substantial sums).
I was actually assuming a welfarist approach too.
But even under a welfarist approach, it’s not obvious how to compare campaigning for criminal justice reform in the US to bednet distribution in developing countries.
Perhaps it’s the case that this is not an issue if one accepts longtermism. But that would just mean that the hidden premise is actually longtermism.