Thank you for doing and sharing this work! I’ve had a hard time developing a clear understanding of the impact of political donations, and I found this post helpful
Sam Anschell
Karma: 1,130
Strangers calling: the value of warm responses to cold outreach
A friend recently shared this reason for not giving (fear of an expensive medical crisis). I think if a good resource existed with the base rates of events that can cause financial hardship and solutions for reducing their likelihood (e.g., long term care insurance), this might help some people feel more comfortable with giving.
I passed this along to someone at GWWC and they said this is on their list of ideas to write about.
Thanks for this comment Jason, you raise a valid point. I do think this will be challenging — part of the motivation behind this bounty was that friends and I don’t think we could facilitate large-scale corporate donation matching through our own connections. However, there is some precedent for companies matching non-staff funds, and I can imagine a few theories of success:
Last year, Walmart launched a campaign to match up to $2.5M in customer donations to the Red Cross. Amazon, Google, Facebook and others have run similar matching programs for specific nonprofits that are open to the public. PayPal has run public Giving Tuesday donation matching campaigns similar to Facebook’s old Giving Tuesday format.
There is a law in India requiring certain companies to donate at least 2% of net profits to registered nonprofits; many US companies set aside a pot of resources (in tech it is often 1% of profits) for giving. So in some cases, CSR leadership merely decide how to allocate existing resources for corporate philanthropy (though in other cases, encouraging a company to give could grow the total amount they donate). With low confidence, I would guess that causes are often chosen by a single passionate senior leader at a company or by an internal champion persuading a small group of senior decisionmakers.
I’m unsure about the extent to which retail donors’ matching funds incentivize companies to give, but I would guess that it helps at least somewhat. Executives might be excited by a $10M company-branded initiative that only “costs” the company $5M. I also think there are ways to frame retail donor co-funding as coming from community members or customers, rather than from strangers.
I don’t have a view on whether it’s more tractable to persuade companies to pledge a pot of matching funds or to change their employee donation matching policy. I could imagine that an initiative allowing employees to lend their unused donation match for an org-wide giving event would be meaningful to many staff members, and could lead to greater orgwide morale gains than a “use-it-or-lose-it” donation match policy. I could also imagine that certain early-stage startups may be openminded about designing their donation match to include a public matching component.
Ultimately, I’m unsure about how realistic this idea is or how likely the bounty is to get claimed. But we wanted to offer this bounty in case it might cause someone reading this post to work some magic and grow the set of resources going to great nonprofits!
$100,000 bounty for finding >$1M in legal and collaborative corporate donation matching opportunities
Can confirm; Zipline is ridiculously cool. I saw their P1 Drones in action in Ghana and met some of their staff at EA conferences. Imo, Zipline is one of the most important organizations around for last-mile delivery infrastructure. They’re a key partner for GAVI, and they save lives unbelievably cost-effectively by transporting commodities like snakebite antivenom within minutes to people who need it.
Their staff and operations are among the most high-performing of any organization I’ve ever seen. Here are some pics from a visit I took to their bay area office in October 2024. I’d highly recommend this Mark Rober video, and checking out Zipline’s website. If any software engineers are interested in high-impact work, I would encourage you to apply to Zipline!
Advice to my EA newcomer self
Sam Anschell’s Quick takes
If you put a substantial amount of time into something, I think it’s worth considering whether there’s an easy way to summarize what you learned or repurpose your work for the EA Forum.
I find that repurposing existing work is quick to write up because I already know what I want to say. I recently wrote a summary of what I learned applying to policy schools, and I linked to the essays I used to apply. The process of writing this up took me about three hours, and I think the post would have saved me about five hours had I read it before applying. And I’m just one reader!
I get the sense that there are a lot of Forum readers who don’t vote or comment on posts, but still get value from what they read. Benefits from Forum posts are diffuse, and I think authors can find it difficult to internalize the full social value of their writing. I also expect that the residual value of certain posts (e.g., those with timeless, original, practical advice) may be underrated. I’ve been sending this post (and its previous iteration) to friends for years, and I’m pretty confident that next year it will still be my favorite piece of writing encouraging perseverance in pursuit of impactful work.
I find it handy to be able to send a bunch of people a link, rather than having the same conversation multiple times. For example:
I’ve sent the “writing about my job” posts I’ve written to a couple hundred jobseekers who’ve reached out about an informational call. I think this helped make the time we spent on the phone much more productive.
I sent an information-dense post I wrote about high-value ways to help loved ones with their finances to a few hundred people in my life. If one person takes action to augment a family member’s finances due to the post, the post will have been worth writing.
Finally, it feels really cool to have a collection of your writing out in the world! EA is a pretty tight-knit professional community, and putting your writing out there can be a great way to build a reputation.[1]
- ^
I feel unabashedly proud when someone I meet asks “wait, are you the guy from the sportsbetting post?”
Policy school can be a really good deal. The case for going and tips for applying
Woah, huge congratulations on getting 80 pledges! That’s a really incredible achievement—I hope you all feel proud :)
I would guess that established uni groups at big schools don’t get 80 pledges per year; you might consider reaching out to GWWC (community@givingwhatwecan.org) to brainstorm how to make the most of this momentum.
I don’t have experience in student group organizing (not starting an EA group at my college is my biggest regret in life), but I’d recommend looking into whether your campus career center is open to co-hosting events and working with students on applying to high-impact roles.
At the liberal arts school I went to, events hosted by the career center tended to be pretty well-attended. Plus, you can lean on the job boards from 80k, Probably Good, and Animal Advocacy Careers to direct students to real world opportunities.
Another idea is to look into whether you can teach a student forum about EA for college credit! It really lowers the bar for students to commit to weekly meetings/readings if they can substitute it for another class.
And if students in your club are ever interested in talking to someone about entry-level operations or grantmaking work, I’m always excited to call!
Thanks for the thoughtful comment, Sawyer. I agree that haggling can be zero sum in many (though not all) cases, and I understand the sentiment of your note.
In my personal experience, haggling hasn’t felt particularly adversarial or deceptive. It feels less like the Pawn Stars guy ripping off antiquers, and more like marketing, campaign finance, professional poker, standardized test prep, quant trading, or another type of legal and socially acceptable form of working for a bigger piece of a fixed pie.
I think Robi raises a good point. Despite transaction costs, I would guess that haggling creates societal surplus on net by enabling more trades. In much (maybe most) of the world, haggling for daily goods is common; I’ve been a fly on the wall at outdoor markets in a handful of LMICs, and my impression is that haggling helps customers and vendors send valuable signals about their willingness to buy/sell.
This isn’t exactly getting at what you wrote, but I feel uncomfortable negotiating when my counterparty seems like they need the money. E.g., if a taxi driver in another country quotes a “tourist” price where it’s pretty clear that locals would haggle and I’m (literally) getting taken for a ride, I pay sticker.
When it comes to contracts with a San Francisco landlord, a big university, or DocuSign, I feel motivated to haggle. Not because I see my counterparty as “the bad guy”, but because haggling is a standard practice following social norms that helps me direct more resources to important projects making the world a better place.
Consider haggling
I also got an error when I tried a credit card, but my debit card (Bank of America) went through on the first try.
Fwiw I was able to sign up by using the nine digit alphanumeric code on my German passport.
Thanks for trying, fingers crossed you’re able to join—signing up seems high leverage!
Hi Sammy, I’ve also found the meat eater problem compelling/distressing. One idea that gives me peace is an “offsetting” argument—that the most effective animal welfare charities use resources remarkably well. I’ve seen estimates online that the average American eats 7,000 animals over the course of their life (98.5% of which are fish and chicken). My intuition is that the average recipient of a GiveWell-recommended program eats slightly fewer animals, though I could be wrong.
The Humane League claims to be able to be able to spare a hen from the life of extreme confinement for just $2.63, and the Fish Welfare Initiative claims to be able to help a fish live in lower stocking density, higher water quality environments for just $1. Altogether, this suggests that donating ~$11,000 to cost-effective farmed animal welfare organizations mitigates a substantial amount of the harm that a meat-eater might cause (consuming 4500 fish and 2400 chickens). So a portfolio of global health and animal welfare donations seems likely to do good across both worldviews.
A few other scattered thoughts:Saving human lives doesn’t just contribute to the problem of animal consumption, I hope it it also accelerates the solutions to factory farming.
The extent to which averting a death of a child under 5 (which GiveWell programs primarily target) increases total global population is unclear to me. Families that lose a child may be more inclined to have another baby than families that don’t. My guess is that lifesaving GiveWell-style charities do increase population in the short term, but not by one full person per life saved.
I would recommend this blog on the idea of a “moral parliament”, which I think can be an interesting thought exercise for resolving tensions like this. Rethink Priorities also has a cool tool for this idea.
I know this may not be fully satisfying, and this isn’t a strong argument against using your resources to go all in on animal welfare (which I think is a great thing to do), but I hope it might be helpful.
- 's comment on GiveWell may have made 1 billion dollars of harmful grants, and Ambitious Impact incubated 8 harmful organisations via increasing factory-farming? by (22 Dec 2024 23:11 UTC; 6 points)
- 's comment on GiveWell may have made 1 billion dollars of harmful grants, and Ambitious Impact incubated 8 harmful organisations via increasing factory-farming? by (23 Dec 2024 0:09 UTC; 1 point)
Mathias, I hope you feel proud of what you did at CEAP. I have a lot of respect for the thought and effort you put into this project, and I thought your decisionmaking was well-reasoned throughout. A number of people in the field and at CE have told me they feel the same way.
Running an organization with such a broad remit and weak feedback loops is a challenge. Doing so by yourself with waning morale is an uphill battle. You were in a tough position and I thought you handled it well. And as Jason wrote, you may have had more success developing Dutch, Danish, and British champions than you know.
I’m looking forward to following what you do next :)
Interesting! Thanks for adding this.
Thanks for asking, and I want to caveat again that this is not intended as financial advice.
Unfortunately I think relatively little of this material would be relevant outside the US. The section on finding fee-for-service financial professionals is probably helpful across borders, but the rest of the post is based on US tax laws.
Hi Seema, thanks for this thoughtful post! I work as a grantmaker at Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Phil) and I’ve had similar thoughts in the past. Last year, CG began offering a modest severance package for staff who leave voluntarily to mitigate the golden handcuffs effect. Anecdotally, a number of colleagues have left for lower-paying jobs at other impactful nonprofits over the past year. It’s hard to say whether staff would pursue other opportunities more often if CG paid less, but it’s been reassuring to see that some staff feel comfortable leaving and the decision is celebrated by the org.
CG’s HR team also regularly conducts benchmarking exercises to sense-check that staff compensation is in line with other foundations and roles with similar levels of responsibility. Overall, CG (and I strongly suspect GW) spends considerably less on opex than peer foundations. Staff fly economy, bureaucracy is low, and people have the tools they need to work efficiently so the ratio of money moved per FTE is high.
A number of CG and GW staff members choose to donate some of their pay, and CG/GW may have this in mind when setting compensation. Personally, I’ve passed up pay or donated a little over half my income this year. Some staff use part of their pay for childcare, which helps them achieve their professional ambitions while maintaining work-life balance.
I share the concern that the ecosystem effects of drawing talent through high salaries may be under-appreciated. But when I zoom out, I directionally think that increasing compensation in the social impact space is valuable. For example, there has been a push to increase salaries in the animal advocacy field in recent years and my understanding is that this has increased professionalism and decreased workplace harassment—employers have a larger talent pool to draw from, and have an easier time replacing problematic employees.
Of course, there are always tradeoffs, and I sometimes feel uncomfortable that orgs working to end poverty offer lavish compensation (even by US standards). But all things considered, I think there are fair reasons why an org like GiveWell would choose the compensation structure it does.
On an unrelated note, I help organize Princeton’s Effective Altruism student group. We and the School for Moral Ambition club would love to host you at an event to discuss your work when you’re back from sabbatical—it’s wonderful to have a fellow randomista on campus!