CEO & Founder of effektiv-spenden.org
Sebastian Schwiecker
Karma: 1,214
Might not be our most important piece of furniture but we also have a treadmill which I love dearly.
Just to make sure I understand you correctly: Where or how exactly do you think we “arbitrarily limit” ourselves or our fund (besides planning to continue to comply with the applicable non-profit laws in the countries we are working in)?
I agree that there are some interventions like calling for the banning of a certain party might be net negative, even if they seem appealing at first sight. I also think that it can be possible and laudable to defend the rights of people you strongly disagree with like the ACLU does (or used to do → haven’t really followed them lately)
I’m not in the lead with regard to the research but one advantage of the fund is that we can take room for more funding into account. E.g. we think very highly of CORRECTIV but since they recently got a lot of (well deserved) attention their room to use additional funds might be limited very soon (might already be the case).
Might not convince you but afaik the effective giving space (GWWC, TLYCS, Effektiv Spenden and others ) has experienced basically zero or even negative growth in the last 2 years.
AMF is even down more than 50% year over year and in general there are probably few if any markets where effective giving has reached even 0.1% of all donations.
I consider this extremely disappointing and that’s why I’m open to experiments on how to reach (much) more people.
Besides there are many people in EA who believe that money directed at avoiding x-risks will go > 10x further than trying to fight extreme poverty. Might be true but I still don’t think we should get rid of all the GiveWell recommended charities on Effektiv Spenden (probably even for their instrumental value alone).
I didn’t do the research and I don’t want to speculate to much, but I think most if not all charity evaluators initially had some kind of bias towards organizations based in the same country as their research staff. One obvious reason is that it’s just easier because you don’t have to start completely from scratch (especially relevant if resources are very limited).
Future research of Power for Democracies will be less funding restrained and can therefore be more ambitious.
Seems like we didn’t articulate clearly enough why we exclusively focus on Germany at the moment.
I totally agree that it’s very unlikely “that Germany is currently the place where money goes furthest towards the goal of defending democracy”. Indeed we expect that Power for Democracies will mostly (or exclusively) recommend charities not working in Germany in the future. Unfortunately Power for Democracies is currently still in its initial hiring round and probably won’t produce any robust recommendation till 2025. The research that has been done in the last 2 years (and which let to the foundation of Power for Democracies) was mainly based on Germany though. Therefore we currently feel more comfortable recommending giving opportunities in Germany with regards to defending democracy but we try to make it clear that this is temporarily. Also we try to emphasize that the research our democracy donation fund is based on is not as good as the research other cause areas (that’s also the reason we added a “Beta” label to the fund in our donation form).
With regards to your other point we expect to continue to limit ourselves to recommend giving opportunities that are tax exempt in the countries we are working in. E.g. we are also not recommending investment opportunities etc. even if that would potentially be more effective to reach our goals (like investing in AI companies etc.).
Germany so far is probably less polarized than other countries (e.g. the US). Currently there is only one far right party with significant reach (AFD) currently polling around 19% nationally.
The main conservative party (CDU) and the conservative leaning economically liberal party (FDP) are currently clearly and credibly distancing themselves from the AFD. We even embedded an interview from one of the most prominent FDP members (Gerhart Baum) in one of our blog posts about how we think about defending democracy.
So while we still might risk our reputation with up to 20% of the electorate I assume that it’s far less than 20% of the people we might ever reach with the idea of effective giving anyway (especially in cause areas other than global health and development).
On the other side I hope this endeavor will help us introduce many new people to effective giving who would not otherwise have heard about it (because we will show up on the radar of additional journalists, some donors will more actively share our website etc.).
Totally agree. We are currently supporting Charity Entrepreneurship (and others like GWWC) in this endeavour (see e.g. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ME4ihqRojjuhprejm/effective-giving-incubation-apply-to-ce-and-gwwc-s-new). Belgium is definitely on the list.
As Jason wrote, legally it’s a non-binding recommendation by the person who receives the voucher + if we don’t receive such a recommendation within 12 month after the code was created the money (donation) goes to GiveWells All Grants Fund. So it’s not a DAF (which don’t exist in Germany anyway). If you really want to donate now but decide where the money should go (much) later we have a different product: https://effektiv-spenden.org/blog/effektiv-spenden-depot/ (also not a real DAF though).
Thanks for the reply.
I get why EAGs are not optimized for parents (still unfortunate in my case). What surprises me even more though is that at least my reading of your comment suggests that for most EAG attendees EA is still a side hustle (otherwise it would be part of their jobs or studies to attend an EA conference).
To add my 2 cents: For me as a father of two children the cost of spending a whole weekend working is a huge and potentially prohibitive cost and one of the reasons I didn’t attend EAG London this year (for me much more relevant than 200US$ more or less).
So I’m wondering why you have decided not to do EAGs during the week? My assumption is that especially more senior people would be more willing to come. Maybe even if that would include travel (to a cheaper location).
Unfortunately not.
With regards to effektiveraltruismus.de: The site has just been transferred to “Effektiver Altruismus Deutschland (EAD) e.V.” (can be seen in the Imprint/Impressum already and will be mentioned in a newsletter that we will probably send later today). Donations will still be managed by Effektiv Spenden (officially knows as “UES – Gemeinnützige GmbH für effektives Spenden”) since EAD can’t do that at the moment (from a legal perspective and also from a technical/operations perspective). We already mention who is handling the donations on top of the donation form though. Happy to consider further clarification on the website (or elsewhere). Other than that I don’t really see why the arrangement should be changed since it would lead to unnecessary overhead but happy to discuss.
Disclaimer: I’m the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Effektiv Spenden.
For what it’s worth some anecdotal evidence from myself (Founder of Effektiv Spenden → effective giving organization working in Germany and Switzerland and in the last three years the main contact for every journalist coming through effektiveraltruismus.de → the by far most frequented German EA website).
I have been in contact with I guess 20 − 30 journalists in the last 3 years. Spoke to everyone and never turned anyone down. Never asked to be off the record (but I usually do ask to see drafts to make sure there are no factual errors → ask ≠ require). So far only positive experiences (100%) including three tv features and even more radio features (including discussions with critics). I’m not saying that I’m happy with every single word of every single article etc. but I’m pretty sure that all features, articles… have been net positive and that my views have been by and large presented correctly.
My situation is (very?) special though: Focus was mostly on giving to neartermist causes which might be easier to explain and less loaded + Germany and Switzerland have a much smaller EA community and far less people know about EA so questions are probably more basic. I might also have been more lucky and/or more talented than I think I am. So what has worked for me might not work for you.
I’m obviously biased, but wholeheartedly agree with you that EA should invest even more in effective giving (because of the impact the donations will have and also to get more people interested in EA). In the last couple of weeks I have started to become more optimistic that this will happen though (e.g. Open Phil seems to consider supporting this space directly).
With regards to the “pick a fight” strategy you might want to check out some of the very early GiveWell blog posts (2007 − 2009). They definitely didn’t shy away from a fight (just ask Charity Navigator) and I actually think that this was a smart strategy at the time and might still be under some circumstances.
Thanks for the feedback. I’m kind of with you, but having a nice office in a really central location would increase the price at least 3x (+ significant setup costs). In addition some of the regulars are living pretty close so it wouldn’t be an improvement for everybody. Nevertheless, if someone would be willing to commit €500,000+ I’m very happy to talk and/or help.
I agree with you that we should stop saying “funding overhang”. I’m also not advocating for Sam or Dustin to sell their stocks and put their money into supposedly safer assets.
What should be done in my opinion is to work harder on diversifying and increasing the amount of money available to EA causes and make sure that GiveWell et al. have to decrease “the bar” faster and more consistently (makes stuff more predictable and therefore probably more effective). One way (out of many) to do so that seems pretty obvious to me would be to put even more money into the effective giving landscape to convince millions of people in the world to give more effectively (again, I’m biased). A decent chunk of that would come from income and not equities. Still correlates with the global markets but much less so.
To a certain extent effective giving organizations are already receiving considerably more money than a couple of years ago but as long as several have a counterfactual multiplier (donations raised / cost of raising donations) of > 10 I think we should be much more aggressive since it kind of pays for itself many times over (and also to hedge against a possible prolonged bear market).
I’m obviously biased but I do see this as another clear sign that instead of worrying about a perceived funding overhang EA should invest heavily in increasing and diversifying its fundraising capabilities.
While your GiveDirectly video already has 19 million views the fundraiser (https://www.givedirectly.org/beast/) so far has only received 426 donations and has barely reached 1/3 of it’s goal. To be honest that is less than I expected. Do you feel the same and more generally what do you think are the challenges when it comes to turning your massive audience into a lot of donations?