Thanks for the thoughtful comment. As with all articles that I've posted from Cognito Mentoring, part of my purpose in posting is to solicit feedback, both on the content and on the presentation.

This article is disappointing: it gives a very strong impression that you wrote the bottom line first.

The article was written with an assumption that the reader would have been exposed to the basic arguments in favor of volunteering ahead of time, which accounts for the imbalance.

Since that is essentially what you're doing, you should be more open about that, and then the article would be more effective as well. The way it looks now, I imagine reading it as a high school student and immediately thinking: "this guy isn't really interested in finding out the value of volunteering. He has his own agenda to sell."

Thanks, this is good information, I'll think about rewriting it along the lines that you suggest.

You never try to see why volunteering may be more valuable than donating. There's no attempt to understand, much less steelman, the opposing side. Here, off the top of my head:

To be clear, I don't necessarily think that donating is more valuable than volunteering in a given instance, or maybe even generically. I expect volunteering to be more valuable than donating for many of our readers. Note that in the "what to do?" section I don't suggest that the reader donate. I'll try to make the article more clear.

Your points are strong, and I'll add them.

An unconvincing zero-sum assumption (who said we're anywhere near close the "certain point"?).

Charitable giving in the US has allegedly been fixed at 2% for the past 40 years despite an increase in fundraising. It could be that the rate would decrease if marginal fundraisers stopped fundraising, but there's a genuine possibility that people's willingness to give has been saturated in general.

Also, hello, by urging people to consider e.g. GiveWell's recommendations, this is exactly what you're doing!

There's no contradiction here; if philanthropic opportunity A is better than philanthropic opportunity B, then convincing people to take opportunity A rather than B is net positive, even though there's a negative effect.

If it's not net helpful to the nonprofit, they will not accept the volunteers.

It's helpful to the nonprofit on net, but the value that the volunteers add is less than the value of their labor – it can be arbitrarily close to zero as long as it's positive.