Conferences provide a high-impact opportunity to promote effective giving. This is the broad take-away from an experiment in promoting effective giving at two conferences in recent months: the Unitarian Universalist (UU) General Assembly and the Secular Student Alliance (SSA) National Convention. This was an experiment run by Intentional Insights (InIn), an EA meta-charity devoted to promoting effective giving and rational thinking to a broad audience, with financial sponsorship from The Life You Can Save.

The outcomes, as detailed below, suggest that conferences can offer cost-effective opportunities to communicate effective giving messages to important stakeholders. An especially promising way to do so is to use Speed Giving Games (SGG) as a low-threshold strategy since recent findings show GGs are an excellent means of promoting effective giving. This encourages participants to self-organize full-length Giving Games (GG) when they return back to their homes.

This article aims both to describe our experiences at UU and SSA and to serve as a guide to others who want to adopt these approaches to promote effective giving via conferences. The article is thus divided into several parts:

• Evaluating the demographic group you want to target;

• Evaluating the potential impact and cost of the conference;

• Steps to prepare for the conference;

• Outcomes of the conference;

• Assessment of the experiment and conclusions;

Picking the Right Conference: Consider Demographics

Before deciding on a conference, make sure you target the right demographic. We at InIn, in agreement with The Life You Can Save, picked the two conferences mentioned above for a couple of reasons.

First, the UU and SSA both unite people who we thought were well-suited for promoting effective giving. Members of these organizations already put a considerable value both on improving the world, and on using reason and evidence to inform their actions in doing so.

Our work at SSA is part of our broader effort, in collaboration with The Life You Can Save and the Local Effective Altruist Network, to promote effective giving to secular, humanist, and skeptic groups. We do so by holding GGs targeted to their needs: appearing on podcasts, writing articles in secular venues about effective giving, and collaborating with a number of national and international common-interest organizations. Besides the SSA, this includes the Foundation Beyond Belief, United Coalition of Reason, American Humanist Association, International Humanist Ethical Union, and others.

The UU religious denomination is a more experimental focus group. It builds upon the success of the above-mentioned project, and expands to promote effective giving to people who are still somewhat reason-oriented, even if reason is less central for them. Yet UU members are strongly committed to action to improve the world, and generally show more active efforts on the social justice and civic engagement front than members of the secular, humanist, and skeptic movement. Thus, we at InIn and The Life You Can Save decided to target them as well.

Second, picking the right demographic also means having at least some people who are familiar with the language, needs, desires, and passions of the niche group you are targeting, and have some connections within it. Knowing the interests and language of the demographics is really valuable for understanding how to frame the concept of effective giving to those demographics. Having people with pre-existing connections and networks within that demographic allows you to approach them as an insider, giving you instant credibility and much more leverage when introducing the audience to an unfamiliar concept.

For the SSA, we had it easy, due to our extensive connections in the secular/skeptic/humanist movement. The SSA Executive Director is on the Intentional Insights Advisory Board,  our members regularly appear on podcasts and write for venues within that movement, and many of our members attend local humanist/secular/skeptic groups.

We had fewer connections in UU, but the ones that we did have were sufficient. Our two co-founders and some of our members attend UU churches. Intentional insights creates curriculum content for the UU movement, appears on relevant podcasts and writes for major venues. This proved to be more than enough familiarity from the perspective of knowing the language and interests.

Picking the Right Conference: Consider Impact and Costs

After choosing the right demographic, consider and balance the potential impact and effectiveness of each conference.

Number and influence of attendees:

Both the UU and the secular/skeptic/humanist movements hold a number of conferences. Fortunately, a single annual conference unites the whole UU movement, with over 3,500 UU leaders from around the world coming. Moreover, the people who come to the UU General Assembly constitute the most active members of the movement – Ministers, Religious Education Directors, church staff, lay leaders and prominent writers – in other words, those stakeholders most capable of spreading effective giving ideas into the UU community.

The SSA event had far fewer people, with just over 200 attendees. However, many movers and shakers from the secular/skeptic/humanist movement attend the conference. This makes it attractive from the perspective of spreading effective giving ideas in the movement.

Impact of your role at conference:

First, most conferences have tabling opportunities for exhibitors, and as an exhibitor, you can hold SGGs at your table. We did that both at the SSA and UU, and I doubt we would have gone to either without that opportunity, since we found it to be very effective at promoting effective giving.

Caption: Intentional Insights table at the Secular Student Alliance conference (courtesy of InIn)

Second, if you have an opportunity to be a speaker and can promote effective giving at your talk, this raises the impact you can make at a conference. That said, unless you can focus your talk on effective giving or at least give out relevant materials and sign-up sheets, simply mentioning effective giving may not be that impactful. It all depends on how you go about it, and whether the concept is relevant to your talk and memorable to the audience. I was a speaker at the SSA, and worked effective giving into my talk without focusing on it, as well as distributed relevant materials about effective giving.

Third, consider whether you have specific networking opportunities at a conference that are  helpful for promoting effective giving. For instance, this might involve having small-group or one-on-one meetings with influencers where you can safely promote effective giving without seeming pushy. At both the SSA and UU, we had both pre-scheduled and spontaneous meetings with notable people, which allowed us to promote effective giving concepts.

Costs: One of the fundamental aspects of effective giving is cost-effectiveness, and it is important to apply this metric to marketing effective giving, as well.

For the experiment with promoting effective giving at conferences, we at InIn decided to collaborate with The Life You Can Save on the most low-cost opportunities. Thus, one of the reasons we chose the UU and SSA conventions is that they both happened in Columbus, where InIn is based. InIn provided the people who ran the table and did the networking, and The Life You Can Save covered fees for conference registration, tabling, and other miscellaneous fees.

The UUA conference registration is around $450 per participant, and $800 for a table. Fortunately, as InIn is a member of a UU organization through which we promote Giving Games and other InIn materials, we were able to use a table at a discount, for $200. Miscellaneous fees included parking and food, for around $20 per participant per day. We had 2 people at the conference each day, so for the 5-day conference, that was $200. We also had about $175 in marketing costs to design and print flyers. We registered only one person, as we got one free participant with a table, so the total cost came down to $1025.

The SSA conference registration fee is around $135 per participant, and $150 for a table. As a speaker, I got a free registration, and another free registration accompanied the table. Parking and food cost $140 for the 3-day conference, and marketing costs came out to $150, for a total of $340.

Prepare Well

To prepare for the conferences, we at InIn brainstormed about the appropriate ways to present effective giving at both conferences. We then prepared talking points relevant to each audience, and coordinated with all people who would table at both conferences to ensure they knew how to present effective giving to the two audiences well.

As an example, you can see the GGs packet adapted to the language and interests of the SSA here and UU here. The main modifications are in the “Activity Overview” section, and these changes represent the broad difference in the kind of language we used.

Besides the language, we put a lot of effort into designing attractive marketing materials for our table. We created a large sign, visible from a long distance, with “Free Money” in red. People are attracted both to the color red and to the phrase “Free Money,” and it is highly important to draw attention in the context of a busy conference.

Caption: SGG activity overview for both UU and SSA conferences (courtesy of InIn)

We hired a professional designer to compose an attractive layout for the SGG activity at our table. SGGs involve having people make a decision between two charities. Their vote results in a dollar each going to either charity, sponsored by an outside party, usually The Life You Can Save. It was important to create a nice layout that people could engage with quickly and easily, again due to distractions in the conference setting. We chose GiveDirectly as the effective charity, and the Mid-Ohio Food Bank as a local and not so effective charity.

For those who participated in SGGs, then aimed at getting them to sign up for the InIn newsletter and The Life You Can Save newsletter, and engaging with them in conversations about effective giving. We also printed out shorter versions of the UU and SSA Giving Games packets. These had brief descriptions of the full Giving Games, with links to the longer versions they could host back in their SSA student clubs or UU congregations.

Another thing we did is schedule meetings in advance with some influencers to discuss effective giving opportunities. We also made sure to schedule meetings spontaneously during the conference with notables who seemed interested in effective giving. For those who expressed an interest but did not have time to meet, we made sure to exchange contact information and follow up afterwards.

Finally, we applied to be speakers at both conferences. We succeeded with the SSA, but not with UU. Still, we decided to attend the UU conference, because the costs were low enough since we did not have to travel and The Life You Can Save judged the potential impact worthwhile.

Conference Outcomes

At the UU conference, we had around 75 people play the SGG, so around 2% of attendees. Of those, about 65% (just under 50 people) signed up for the newsletter. We had 50 packets with GG descriptions printed, and we ran out by the end of the conference. Additionally, about 70% of the people who played there voted for GiveDirectly.

We also had meetings with some notable parties interested in effective giving. Especially promising was a meeting with the Executive Director of the Unitarian Universalist Humanist Association (UUHA), who expressed a strong interest in bringing GGs to her constituents. There are hundreds of UU Humanist groups within congregations around the world. We are currently working on testing a GG at a local UU Humanist group, and we will then write up the results for the UUHA blog. We had some other promising meetings as well, but no one was as interested as the UUHA.

At the SSA conference, we had 15 people play the SGG, so around 7.5% of attendees. Of those, 80% signed up for the newsletter, so about 12 people. The same proportion, 80%, voted for GiveDirectly.

We gave away around 35 GG packets with descriptions, as some people did not want to play the SGG, but were interested in having their clubs host it. Distributing packets was especially helped by the fact that I was a speaker at the SSA, and promoted and handed out packets at my presentation.

The meetings with notable parties proved more promising at the SSA. We met with staff from two national secular organizations, the American Ethical Union and the Center for Inquiry, who expressed an interest in promoting GGs to their members. A number of influencers expressed enthusiasm over the concept of effective giving, and wanted to promote it broadly in the secular/skeptic/humanist movement.

Assessment and Conclusion

We would have been satisfied at both conferences to have at least half of the people who played the SGG vote for GiveDirectly and have half the people sign up. We ended up with 70% voting for GiveDirectly at UU and 80% at SSA, and 65% signing up for the newsletter at UU and 80% at the SSA. So, these conferences strongly exceeded our baseline expectations. We did not have specific expectations for giving away packets or meetings with notables. Yet looking back, we certainly did not expect the level of interest we got for conference participants holding Giving Games back home - we would have printed more packets for the UU had we thought they might run out.

The evidence from GGs shows they are a great method to promote effective giving. Getting influencers from target demographics engaged with GGs not only gets the activists to give more effectively, but also encourages the activists to hold GGs back at their groups.

After all, holding GGs is a win-win for secular/skeptic/humanist groups and UU congregations alike. They get to engage in an activity that embodies their values of using reason and evidence. At the same time, they get to improve the world and build a sense of community without spending a penny.

For those of us promoting effective giving, it presents these ideas to a new audience, and enables the audience to continue engaging if they wish. The newsletter sign-ups are especially indicative of people’s interests. So are the numbers of people who took packets to host GGs back at their groups. We at InIn already heard from several people who are arranging Giving Games after being exposed to the adapted GG packets, including a UU church that is arranging to have a GG for all 500 members of the church. Based on these outcomes, we at InIn and The Life You Can Save decided it would be even worthwhile to invest into traveling to distant conferences given the right conditions - having a table,  speaking role, potential influencers, etc.

So, consider promoting effective giving at conferences to audiences not directly related to existing effective altruism communities. Hopefully, the steps I outlined above will help you decide on the best opportunities to do so. I would be glad to chat with you about specifics and share more details; email me at gleb@intentionalinsights.org.

Acknowledgments: For feedback on earlier stages of this draft, my gratitude to Jon Behar, Laura Gamse, Ryan Carey, Malcolm Ocean, Matthijs Maas, Yaacov Tarko, Dony Christie, Jake Krycia, Remmelt Ellen, Alexander Semenychev, Ian Pritchford, Ed Chen, Lune Nekesa, Jo Duyvestyn, and others who wished to remain anonymous.

We have so many great people involved in the EA movement, people who think hard and well about what cause to prioritize and who dedicate a significant portion of their money and time to advancing global flourishing in the most cost-effective manner. However, articles about EA participants typically feature the most dedicated folks, which contributes to those who don't reach such levels reluctant to call themselves EA members.

So to advance the cause of celebrating all in the EA movement and recognizing the value of all movement members appropriately, we at Intentional Insights are launching the "Everyday Heroes of Effective Giving" video series. This series of brief videos, around 10 minutes each, will showcase folks from across the movement, including from around the world, as we do the filming through videoconference (Google hangouts). We ask participants four questions:

1) How would you define effective giving and what makes you passionate about it?
2) What is your story of getting involved in effective giving?
3) What are you doing now in the area of effective giving?
4) What do you plan to do in the future and what do you envision as the mark you want to leave on the world?

Why do we frame the title and questions in terms of "effective giving?" Well, these videos are meant to be available as a resource to be shared with anyone and create a sense of narrative, identification, and emotional appeal, which are part of broader effective outreach strategies. Thus, using the terminology of effective giving decreases the likelihood of non-value aligned people trying to join the EA movement, while encouraging such people to give to more effective charities. Note that participants usually mention the EA movement in their comments, which provides a potential trail to the EA movement for those who would be interested in thinking hard about doing the most good.

We already released three videos. The first features Boris Yakubchik, who was involved in the EA movement before it was a movement as such. The second one is with Scott Weathers, an EA health policy expert who is currently interning at the WHO and is going on for a PhD in public health this Fall. The third features Alfredo Parra, the main organizer of EA Munich. Since the videos are short, I will post future videos on the EA Forum when we have finished doing a set of three.

FYI, the fact that the first three happened to be with men is a fluke. I extended an invitation for videotaping to three men and three women, and the women simply were not available until later. We already did two with the women, and are currently processing them.

For future developments with this series, we are planning to improve the backdrop situation for the interviewer by getting a black screen. We have also secured the domain http://www.givingeffectively.org/, and we plan to put these videos and other content there after we decide how to structure the website - we want to make it a key part of the EA Marketing Resource Bank as a venue for content about effective giving. If anyone wants to support these endeavors (the website or video series) with their programming/visual design/video skills, or with donations, please shoot me an email at gleb@intentionalinsights.org

I welcome your feedback about this project, in private emails to me or in comments here. My hope is that these videos will show the broad range of diversity across the EA movement, and help people understand that, even if they are not the most dedicated EA participants, they are making a welcome and valuable contribution to the cause of doing the most good effectively.

Please share about any outreach that you have done to convey rationality-style ideas broadly, whether recent or not, which you have not yet shared on previous Outreach threads. The goal of having this thread is to organize information about outreach and provide community support and recognition for raising the sanity waterline, a form of cognitive altruism that contributes to creating a flourishing world. Likewise, doing so can help inspire others to emulate some aspects of these good deeds through social proof and network effects.

This article will be of interest primarily for Effective Altruists. It's also cross-posted to the EA Forum.

Summary/TL;DR: Charities that have the biggest social impact often get significantly less financial support than rivals that tell better stories but have a smaller social impact. Drawing on academic research across different fields, this article highlights four common mistakes that fundraisers for effective charities should avoid and suggests potential solutions to these mistakes. 1) Focus on individual victims as well as statistics; 2) Present problems that are solvable by individual donors; 3) Avoid relying excessively on matching donations and focus on learning about your donors; 4) Empower your donors and help them feel good.

Co-written by Gleb Tsipursky and Peter Slattery

Acknowledgments: Thanks to Stefan Schubert, Scott Weathers, Peter Hurford, David Moss, Alfredo Parra, Owen Shen, Gina Stuessy, Sheannal Anthony Obeyesekere and other readers who prefer to remain anonymous for providing feedback on this post. The authors take full responsibility for all opinions expressed here and any mistakes or oversights. Versions of this piece will be published on The Life You Can Save blog and the Intentional Insights blog.

Intro

Charities that use their funds effectively to make a social impact frequently struggle to fundraise effectively. Indeed, while these charities receive plaudits from those committed to measuring and comparing the impact of donations across sectors, many effective charities have not successfully fundraised large sums outside of donors focused highly on impact.

In many cases, this situation results from the beliefs of key stakeholders at effective charities. Some think that persuasive fundraising tactics are “not for them”  and instead assume that presenting hard data and statistics will be optimal as they believe that their nonprofit’s effectiveness can speak for itself.

The belief that a nonprofit’s effectiveness can speak for itself can be very harmful to fundraising efforts as it overlooks the fact that donors do not always optimise their giving for social impact. Instead, studies suggest that donors’ choices are influenced by many other considerations, such as a desire for a warm glow, social prestige, or being captured by engrossing stories. Indeed, charities that have the biggest social impact often get significantly less financial support than rivals that tell better stories but have a smaller social impact. For example, while one fundraiser collected over $700,000 to remove a young girl from a well and save a single life, most charities struggle to raise anything proportionate for causes that could save many more lives or lift thousands out of poverty.

Given these issues, the aim of this article is to use available science on fundraising and social impact to address some of the common misconceptions that charities may have about fundraising and, hopefully, make it easier for effective charities to also become more effective at fundraising. To do this it draws on academic research across different fields to highlight four common mistakes that those who raise funds for effective charities should avoid and suggest potential solutions to these mistakes.

Don’t forget individual victims

Many fundraisers focus on using statistics and facts to convey the severity of the social issues they tackle. However, while fact and statistics are often an effective way to convince potential donors, it is important to recognise that different people are persuaded by different things. While some individuals are best persuaded to do good deeds through statistics and facts, others are most influenced by the closeness and vividness of the suffering. Indeed, it has been found that people often prefer to help a single identifiable victim, rather than many faceless victims; the so-called identifiable victim effect.

One way in which charities can cover all bases is to complement their statistics by telling stories about one or more of the most compelling victims. Stories have been shown to be excellent ways of tapping emotions, and stories told using video and audio are likely to be particularly good at creating vivid depictions of victims that compel others to want to help them.

Don’t overemphasise the problem

Focusing on the size of the problem has been shown to be ineffective for at least two reasons. First, most people prefer to give to causes where they can save the greatest portion of people. This means that rather than save 100 out of 1,000 victims of malaria, the majority of people would rather use the same or even more resources to save all five out of five people stranded on a boat or one girl stranded in a well with the same amount of resources, even if saving 100 people is clearly the more rational choice. People being reluctant to help where they feel their impact is not going to be significant is often called the drop in the bucket effect.

Second, humans have a tendency to neglect the scope of the problem when dealing with social issues. This is called scope insensitivity: people do not scale up their efforts in proportion to a problem’s true size. For example, a donor willing to give $100 to help one person might only be willing to give $200 to help 100 people, instead of the proportional amount of $10,000.

Of course charities often need to deal with big problems. In such cases one solution is to break these big problems into smaller pieces (e.g., individuals, families or villages) and present situations on a scale that the donor can relate to and realistically address through their donation.

Don’t assume that matching donations is always a good way to spend funds

Charitable fundraisers frequently put a lot of emphasis on arranging for big donors to offer to match any contributions from smaller donors. Intuitively, donation matching seems to be a good incentive for givers as they will generate twice (sometimes three times) the social impact for donating the same amount. However, research provides insufficient evidence to support or discourage donation matching: after reviewing the evidence, Ben Kuhn argues that its positive effects on donations are relatively small (and highly uncertain), and that sometimes the effects can be negative.

Given the lack of strong supporting research, charities should make sure to check that donation matching works for them and should also consider other ways to use their funding from large donors. One option is to use some of this money to cover experiments and other forms of prospect research to better understand their donors’ reasons for giving. Another is to pay various non-program costs so that a charity may claim that more of the smaller donors’ donations will go to program costs, or to use big donations as seed money for a fundraising campaign.

Don't forget to empower donors and help them feel good

Charities frequently focus on showing tragic situations to motivate donors to help.  However, charities can sometimes go too far in focusing on the negatives as too much negative communication can overwhelm and upset potential donors, which can deter them from giving. Additionally, while people often help due to feeling sadness for others, they also give for the warm glow and feeling of accomplishment that they expect to get from helping.

Overall, charities need to remember that most donors want to feel good for doing good and ensure that they achieve this. One reason why the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge was such an incredibly effective approach to fundraising was that it gave donors the opportunity to have a good time, while also doing good. Even when it isn’t possible to think of a clever new way to make donors feel good while donating, it is possible to make donors look good by publicly thanking and praising them for their donations. Likewise it is possible to make them feel important and satisfied by explaining how their donations have been key to resolving tragic situations and helping address suffering.

Conclusion

Remember four key strategies suggested by the research:

1) Focus on individual victims as well as statistics

2) Present problems that are solvable by individual donors

3) Avoid relying excessively on matching donations and focus on learning about your donors

4) Empower your donors and help them feel good.

By following these strategies and avoiding the mistakes outlined above, you will not only provide high-impact services, but will also be effective at raising funds.

Summary: This post describes the steps I took to newsjack a breaking story to promote Rationality and Effective Altruism ideas in an op-ed piece, so that anyone can take similar steps to newsjack a relevant story.

Introduction

Newsjacking is the art and science of injecting your ideas into a breaking news story. It should be done as early as possible in the life cycle of a news story for maximum impact for drawing people's attention to your ideas.

Some of you may have heard about the Wounded Warrior Project scandal that came to light five days ago or so. This nonprofit that helps wounded veterans had fired its top staff for excessively lavish spending and building Potemkin village-style programs that were showpieces for marketing but did little to help wounded veterans.

I scan the news regularly, and was lucky enough to see the story as it was just breaking, on the evening of March 10th. I decided to try to newsjack this story for the sake of Rationality and Effective Altruist ideas. With the help of some timely editing by EA and Rationality enthusiasts other than myself - props to Agnes Vishnevkin, Max Harms, Chase Roycraft, Rhema Hokama, Jacob Bryan, and Yaacov Tarko - TIME just published my piece. This is a big deal, as now one of the first news stories people see when they type "wounded warrior" into Google, as you can see from the screenshot below, is a story promoting Rationality and EA-themed ideas. Regarding Rationality proper, I talk about horns effect and scope neglect, citing Eliezer's piece on it in the post itself, probably the first link to Less Wrong from TIME. Regarding EA, I talked about about effective giving, and also EA organizations such as GiveWell, The Life You Can Save, Animal Charity Evaluators, and effective direct-action charities such as Against Malaria Foundation and GiveDirectly. Many people are searching for "wounded warrior" now that the scandal is emerging, and are getting exposure to Rationality and EA ideas.

Newsjacking a story like this and getting published in TIME may seem difficult, but it's doable. I hope that the story of how I did it and the steps I lay out, as well as the template of the actual article I wrote, will encourage you to try to do so yourself.

Specific Steps

1) The first step is to be prepared mentally to newsjack a story and be vigilant about scanning the headlines for any story that is relevant to Rationality or EA causes. The story I newsjacked was about a scandal in the nonprofit sector, a breaking news story that occurs at regular intervals. But a news story about mad cow disease spreading spreading from factory farms might be a good opportunity to write about Animal Charity Evaluators, or a news story about the Zika virus might be a good opportunity to write about how we still haven't killed off malaria (hint hint for any potential authors). While those are specifically EA-related, you can inject Rationality into almost any news story by pointing out biases, etc.

2) Once you find a story, decide what kind of angle you want to write about, write a great first draft, and get it edited. You are welcome to use my TIME piece as an inspiration and template. I can't stress getting it edited strong enough, the first draft is always going to be only the first draft. You can get friends to help out, but also tap EA resources such as the EA Editing and Review FB group, and the .impact Writing Help Slack channel. You can also get feedback on the LW Open Thread. Get multiple sets of eyes on it, and quickly. Ask more people than you anticipate you need, as some may drop out. For this piece, for example, I wrote it on the morning and early afternoon of Friday March 11th, and was lucky enough to have 6 people review it by the evening, but 10 people committed to actually reviewing it - so don't rely on all people to come through. 

3) Decide what venues you will submit it to, and send out the piece to as many appropriate venues as you think are reasonable. Here is an incomplete but pretty good list of places that accept op-eds. When you decide on the venues, write up a pitch for the piece which you will use to introduce the article to editors at various venues. Your pitch should start with stating that you think the readers of the specific venue you are sending it to will be interested in the piece, so that the editor knows this is not a copy-pasted email but something you specifically customized for that editor. Then continue with 3-5 sentences summarizing the article's main points and any unique angle you're bringing to it. Your second paragraph should describe your credentials for writing the piece. Here's my successful pitch to Time:

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

Good day, 

I think TIME readers will be interested in my timely piece, “Why The Wounded Warrior Fiasco Hurts Everyone (And How To Prevent It).” It analyzes the problems in the nonprofit sector that lead systematically to the kind of situation seen with Wounded Warrior. Unlike other writings on this topic, the article provides a unique angle by relying on neuroscience to clarify these challenges. The piece then gives clear suggestions for how your readers as individual donors can address these kinds of problems and avoid suffering the same kind of grief that Wounded Warrior supporters are dealing with. Finally, it talks about a nascent movement to reform and improve  the nonprofit sector, Effective Altruism. 

My expertise for writing the piece comes from my leadership of a nonprofit dedicated to educating people in effective giving,  Intentional Insights. I also serve as a professor at Ohio State, working at the intersection of history, psychology, neuroscience, and altruism, enabling me to have credibility as a scholar of these issues. I have written for many popular venues, such as The Huffington Post, Salon, The Plain Dealer, Alternet, and others, which leads me to believe your readership will enjoy my writing style.

Hope you can use this piece!

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4) I bet I know what at least some of you are thinking. My credentials make it much easier for me to publish in TIME than someone without those credentials. Well, trust me, you can get published somewhere :-) Your hometown paper or university paper is desperately looking for good content about breaking stories, and if you can be the someone who provides that content, you can get EA and Rationality ideas out there. Then, you can slowly build up a base of publications that will take you to the next level.

Do you think I started with publishing in The Huffington Post? No, I started with my own blog, and then guest blogging for other people, then writing op-eds for smaller local venues which I don't even list anymore, and slowly over time got the kind of prominence that leads me to be considered for TIME. And it's still a crapshoot even for me: I sent out more than 30 pitches to editors at different prominent venues, and a number turned down the piece, before TIME accepted it. When it's accepted, you have to let editors at places that prefer original content, which is most op-ed venues, who get back to you and express interest, know that you piece has already been published - they may still publish it, or they may not, but likely not. So the fourth step is to be confident in yourself, try and keep trying, if you feel that this type of writing is a skill that you can contribute to spreading Rationality/EA.

5) There's a fifth step - repurpose your content at venues that allow republication. For instance, I wrote a version of this piece for The Life You Can Save blog, for the Intentional Insights blog, and for The Huffington Post, which all allow republication of other content. Don't let your efforts go to waste :-)

Conclusion

I hope this step-by-step guide to newsjacking a breaking story for Rationality or EA will encourage you to try it. It's not as hard as it seems, though it requires effort and dedication. It helps to know how to write well for a broad public audience in promoting Rationality and EA ideas, which is what we do at Intentional Insights, so email me at gleb@intentionalinsights.org if you want training in that or to discuss any other aspects of marketing such ideas broadly. You're also welcome to get in touch with me if you'd like editing help on such a newsjacking effort. Good luck spreading these ideas broadly!

P.S. To amplify the signal and get more people into EA and Rationality modes of thinking, you are welcome to share the story I wrote for TIME.

This is mainly of interest to Effective Altruism-aligned Less Wrongers. Thanks to Agnes Vishnevkin, Jake Krycia, Will Kiely, Jo Duyvestyn, Alfredo Parra, Jay Quigley, Hunter Glenn, and Rhema Hokama for looking at draft versions of this post. At least one aspiring rationalist who read a draft version of this post, after talking to his girlfriend, decided to adopt this new Valentine's Day tradition, which is some proof of its impact. The more it's shared, the more this new tradition might get taken up, and if you want to share it, I suggest you share the version of this post published on The Life You Can Save blog. It's also cross-posted on the Intentional Insights blog and on the EA Forum.

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The Valentine’s Day Gift That Saves Lives

This will be of interest mainly to EA-friendly LWs, and is cross-posted on the EA Forum, The Life You Can Save, and Intentional Insights

The Life You Can Save has an excellent tool to help people easily visualize and quantify the impact of their giving: the Impact Calculator. It enables people to put in any amount of money they want, then click on a charity, and see how much of an impact their money can have. It's a really easy way to promote effective giving to non-EAs, but even EAs who didn't see it before can benefit. I certainly did, when I first played around with it. So I wrote a blog post, copy-pasted below, for The Life You Can Save and for Intentional Insights, to help people learn about the Impact Calculator. If you like the blog, please share this link to The Life You Can Save blog, as opposed to this post. Any feedback on the blog post itself is welcomed!

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How a Calculator Helped Me Multiply My Giving

It feels great to see hope light up in the eyes of a beggar in the street as you stop to look at them when others pass them by without a glance. Their faces widen in a smile as you reach into your pocket and take out your wallet. "Thank you so much" is such a heartwarming phrase to hear from them as you pull out five bucks and put the money in the hat in front of them. You walk away with your heart beaming as you imagine them getting a nice warm meal at McDonalds due to your generosity.

Secular people are a natural target group for pitching rationality, since they don't suffer from one of the most debilitating forms of irrationality and also because they have warm fuzzies toward the concept of reason. From reason, it's easy to transition toward what it would be reasonable to do, namely be reasonable about how our minds work and how we should improve them. I did a Rationality 101 for Secular People presentation that was pretty successful, with a number of people following up and showing an interest in gaining further rationality knowledge. Here's a video of the presentation I made, and it has the PP slides I made uploaded into SlideShare. Anyone who wishes to do so is free to use these materials for their own needs, whether sharing the video with secular friends or doing a version of this workshop for local secular groups.

This post is cross-posted on the EA forum and is mainly of interest to EAs. It focuses on the engagement of Intentional Insights with the EA movement, and does not address the engagement of InIn with promoting rationality-informed strategies, which is a hotly-debated issue.

Introduction

I wanted to share InIn’s background and goals and where we see ourselves as fitting within the EA movement. I also wanted to allow all of you a chance to share your opinions about the benefits and drawbacks of what InIn is doing, put forth any reservations, concerns, and risks, and provide suggestions for optimization.

Background

InIn began in January 2014, when my wife and I decided to create an organization dedicated to marketing rational, evidence-based thinking in all areas of our lives, especially charitable giving, to a broad audience. We decided to do so because we looked around for organizations that would provide marketing resources for our own local activism in Columbus, OH, trying to convey these ideas to a broad public and found no such organizations. So we decided – if not us, then who? If not now, then when? My wife would use her experience in nonprofits to run the organisation, while I would use my experience as a professor to work on content and research.

We gathered together a group of local aspiring rationalists and Effective Altruists interested in the project, and launched the organization publicly in 9/2014. We got our 501(c)(3) nonprofit status, began running various content marketing experiments, and established the internal infrastructure. We also built up a solid audience in the secular and skeptical market, who we saw as the easiest-to-reach audience with promoting effective giving and rational thinking. By the early fall of 2015, we had established some connections and reputation, a solid social media following, and our articles began to be accepted in prominent venues that reach a broad audience, such as The Huffington Post and Lifehack. At that point, we felt comfortable enough to begin our active engagement with the EA movement, as we felt we could provide added value.

Fit in EA Movement

As an Effective Altruist, I have long seen opportunities of optimization in the marketing of EA ideas using research-based, modern content marketing strategies. I did not feel comfortable speaking out about that until I had built up InIn enough to be able to speak from a position of some expertise in the early fall of 2015, and to demonstrate right away the benefit we could bring through publishing widely-shared articles that promoted EA messages.

Looking back, I wish I had started engaging with the EA Forum sooner. It was a big mistake on my part that caused some EAs to treat InIn as a sudden outsider that burst on the scene. Also, our early posts were perceived as too self-promotional. I guess this is not surprising, looking back – although the goal was simply to demonstrate our value, the content marketing nature of our work does show through. Ah well, lessons learned and something to update on for the future.

As InIn has become more engaged in various projects within the EA movement, we have begun to settle on how to add value to the EA community and have formulated our plans for future work.

1) We are promoting EA-themed effective giving ideas to a broad audience through publishing shareable articles in prominent venues.

1A) Note: we focus on spreading ideas like effective giving without associating them overtly with the movement of Effective Altruism, though leaving buried hooks to EA in the articles. This approach has the benefit minimizing the risk of diluting the movement with less value-aligned members, while leaving opportunities for those who are more value-aligned to find the EA movement. Likewise, we don’t emphasize EA as we believe that overt uses of labels can lead some people to perceive our messages as ideological, which would undermine our ability to build rapport with them.

2) We are specifically promoting effective giving to the secular and skeptic community, as we see this audience as more likely to be value aligned, and also have strong existing connections with this audience.

3) We are providing content and social media marketing consulting to the EA movement, both EA meta-charities and prominent direct-action charities.

4) We are collaborating with EA meta-charities in boosting the marketing capacities of the EA movement as a whole being.

5) We are helping build EA capacity around effective decision-making and goal achievement through providing foundational rationality knowledge.

6) By using content marketing to promote rationality to a broad audience, we are aiming to help people be more clear-thinking, long-term oriented, empathetic, and utilitarian. This not only increases their own flourishing, but also expands their circles of caring beyond biases based on geographical location (drowning child problem), species (non-human animals), and temporal distance (existential risk).

Conclusion

InIn is engaged in both EA capacity-building and movement-building, but movement-building of a new type, not oriented toward directing people into the EA movement, but getting EA habits of thinking into the broader world. I specifically chose not to include our achievements in doing so in this post, as I had previously fallen into the trap of including too much and being perceived as self-promotional as a result. However, if you wish, you can learn more about the organization and its activities at this link.

What are your impressions on the value of this fit of InIn within the EA movement and our plans, including advantages and disadvantages, as well as suggestions for improvement? We are always eager to learn and improve based on feedback from the community.

(This will be mainly of interest to Effective Altruists, and is cross-posted on the Giving What We Can blog, the Intentional Insights blog, and the EA Forum)

When I first started donating, I did so anonymously. My default is to be humble and avoid showing off. I didn’t want others around me to think that I have a stuffed head and hold too high an opinion of myself. I also didn’t want them to judge my giving decisions, as some may have judged them negatively. I also had cached patterns of associating sharing about my good deeds publicly with feelings that I get from commercials, of self-promotion and sleaziness.

I wish I had known back then that I could have done much more good by publicizing my donations and other goods deeds, such as signing the Giving What We Can Pledge to donate 10% of my income to effective charities, or being public about my donations to CFAR on this LW forum post.

Why did I change my mind about being public? Let me share a bit of my background to give you the appropriate context.

As long as I can remember, I have been interested in analyzing how and why individuals and groups evaluated their environment and made their decisions to reach their goals – rational thinking. This topic became the focus of my research as a professor at Ohio State in the history of science, studying the intersection of psychology, cognitive neuroscience, behavioral economics, and other fields.

While most of my colleagues focused on research, I grew more passionate about sharing my knowledge with others, focusing my efforts on high-quality, innovative teaching. I perceived my work as cognitive altruism, sharing my knowledge about rational thinking, and students expressed much appreciation for my focus on helping them make better decisions in their lives. Separately, I engaged in anonymous donations to causes such as poverty alleviation.

Yet over time, I realized that by teaching only in the classroom, I would have a very limited impact, since my students were only a small minority of the population I could potentially reach. I began to consult academic literature on how to spread my knowledge broadly. Through reading classics in the field of social influence such as Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion and Made To Stick, I learned a great many strategies to multiply the impact of my cognitive altruism work, as well as my charitable giving.

One of the most important lessons was the value of being public about my activities. Both Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion and subsequent research showed that our peers deeply impact our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. We tend to evaluate ourselves based on what our peers think of us, and try to model behaviors that will cause others to have positive opinions about us. This applies not only to in-person meetings, but also online communities.

A related phenomenon, social proof, illustrates how we evaluate appropriate behavior based on how we see others behaving. However, research also shows that people who exhibit more beneficial behaviors tend to avoid expressing themselves to those with less beneficial behaviors, resulting in overall social harm.

Learning about the importance of being public, including in online communities that reach far more people than in-person communities, especially by people engaging in socially beneficial habits, led to a deep transformation in my civic engagement. While it was not easy to overcome my shyness, I realized I had to do it if I wanted to optimize my positive impact on the world – both in cognitive altruism and in effective giving.

I shared this journey of learning and transformation with my wife, Agnes Vishnevkin, an MBA and non-profit professional. Together, we decided to co-found a nonprofit dedicated to spreading rational thinking and effective giving to a broad audience using research-based strategies for maximizing social impact, Intentional Insights. Uniting with others committed to this mission, we write articles, blogs, make videos, author books, program apps, and collaborate with other organizations to share these ideas widely.

I also rely on research to make other decisions, such as my decision to take the Giving What We Can pledge. The strategy of precommitment is key here – we make a decision in a state where we have the time to consider their consequences in the long term, and specifically wish to constrain the options of our future selves. That way, we can plan within a narrowed range of options and make the best possible use of the resources available to us.

Thus, I can plan to live on 90% of my income over my lifetime, and plan to decrease some of my spending in the long term so that I can give to charities that I believe are most effective for making the kind of impact I want to see in the world.

Knowing about the importance of publicizing my good deeds and commitments, I recognize that I can do much more good by sharing my decision to take the pledge with others. All of us have friends, and the large majority of us have social media channels and we all have the power to be public about our good deeds. You can also consider fundraising for effective charities, and being an advocate for effective altruism in your community. 

According to the scholarly literature, by being public about our good deeds we can bring about much good in the world. Even though it may not feel as tangible as direct donations, sharing with others about our good deeds and supporting others doing so may in the end allow us to do even more good.

Happy to share that, after multiple rounds of feedback, here is the set of rationality-themed T-shirts and bags with the slogan that got most support from the community, "The Difference Between Medicine and Poison is Dosage."

These t-shirts and bags are an effort to update based on the feedback received on the original set of rationality shirts and optimizing suggestions. This includes use of graphic images in the words, use of more professional designers, etc. We went back to the drawing board, and tried to design a new shirt that used a slogan that was quite popular. We ran the design by the Less Wrong FB group a couple of times (1, 2) and this is the final product.

As you can see, there are two styles available, one with "Dosage" empty and with the image of the dropper, and one with "Dosage" filled in and without the dropper. Various colors, sizes, and materials are available for each shirt/bag.

The first style is available for purchase on CafePress here.

The second style is available for purchase on CafePress here.

Look forward to hearing about your experience and thoughts about these t-shirts and bags, and the impact they make in carrying good rationality-themed memes into the world! We will be making more shirts and running them by the community as we did with these. All revenue will go into promoting rational thinking strategies to a broad audience.

This is cross-posted from the EA Forum and will be mainly of interest to Effective Altruists

Brief Summary

This post describes the work of Intentional Insights to promote EA-style effective giving ideas to a broad audience in order to channel people's giving to effective charities. It does not address the kind of work that Intentional Insights does to promote rationality outside of Effective Altruism, which is a distinct topic, addressed in recent posts (1, 2, 3). InIn sees promoting effective giving as a really important area of our work, one that contributes both to promoting rational thinking and thus raising the sanity waterline, and to what CFAR refers to as "Do-Gooding," meaning making the world a better place and advancing human flourishing.

This post first shares the methods InIn uses to promote effective giving, describes the outcomes of InIn's work, presents various collaborations with other organizations, describes InIn's financials, and shares its plans for the future, within the sphere of EA. The post is explicitly a request for support, and makes a case for how by contributing your time and talents, and/or your money, to InIn as an EA meta-charity you can make a bigger difference in the world to advance human flourishing than by contributing to a GiveWell-recommended direct-action charity. The point of doing so is that an EA you should not contribute your resources to InIn as a meta-charity if you don't think that by doing so you can do more good for the world than by contributing to a GiveWell-recommended direct-action charity.

Full post

Introduction

Intentional Insights aims to spread EA-themed effective giving ideas to a broad audience, and channel the giving activities of non-EAs into effective charities endorsed by GiveWell. In other words, by contributing time and money to Intentional Insights, EAs can get the outcome of non-EAs giving to effective charities, multiplying the impact of their support to effective charities manifold. Moreover, you can support InIn with time as well as with money, while GiveWell-endorsed charities are generally best supported with money.

Methods

How does InIn promote effective giving? We use modern content marketing strategies and speak to people’s hearts as well as their heads. We distinguish promoting effective giving and individual EA organizations from promoting EA as a movement, to avoid the threat of rapid movement growth, while still leaving hidden hooks that would enable those interested to find the movement. We orient toward being quite transparent about what we are doing, getting feedback from members of the EA community and updating based on that feedback, including acknowledging mistakes and trying to improve going forward.

Specific Examples of Our EA Work

• As a specific example of our work, we published this article on The Huffington Post, which was shared on social media over 1K times. A general rule of thumb is that for every person who shares an article on social media, about 100 people read it thoroughly, and many more skim it. This article is impactful for shifting people’s giving toward effective charities. As you'll see from this Facebook comment on my personal page, it helped convince someone to decide to donate to effective charities. Furthermore, this comment is someone who is the leader of a large secular group in Houston, and he thus has an impact on a number of other people. Since people rarely make actual comments, and far from all are fans of my Facebook page, we can estimate that many more made similar decisions but did not comment about it.

• Another example. Here is a link to the outcome of an Intentional Insights collaboration with The Life You Can Save and the Secular Student Alliance to spread effective giving to secular and skeptic-oriented communities through Giving Games. This article explains the strong impact of Giving Games, and shows how they direct people’s giving to effective charities.

These examples illustrate the kind of work that we do: publishing pieces that promote effective giving directly, and collaborating with other organizations to promote effective giving through their channels. Besides our direct work promoting effective giving, we also promote rational thinking and effective decision-making strategies, which helps EAs build their capacity, and has a variety of other robustly positive outcomes for human flourishing. To learn more about the methods, assumptions, and impact of Intentional Insights, check out our Theory of Change and our Annual Report.

I want to highlight that InIn is a new project, and promoting effective giving ideas, as opposed to EA as a movement, is a new field of endeavor for EAs. So I would be enthusiastic to learn about what reservations folks have. We are quite open to revising the nature of our work if it seems we are headed in a suboptimal direction, and want to learn more from the community about what the community thinks about what works, and proceeding forward in a collaborative truth-seeking spirit about what would most benefit human flourishing.

Future Plans

In the next year, we are planning to expand our activities in promoting effective giving in five major directions:

• We aim to experiment with new forms of content, such as list-style articles, memes, and short videos. We want to see what types of content works best for promoting effective giving messages for which specific audiences, and build up a knowledge bank on that topic.
• While experimenting, we also plan to test rigorously the impact of our content to see what kind of impact our content has on people’s giving behavior. We want to conduct randomized control studies to see whether people change their giving behavior after engaging with InIn content and InIn-sponsored activities such as the Giving Games for secular and skeptic audiences.
• We want to use our strong connections with US and international secular and skeptic organizations to spread effective giving ideas to these communities. Afterward, we want to spread effective giving to liberal churches such as the Unitarian Universalists, with whom we also have solid connections.
• We plan to expand our collaboration with EA meta-charities, as well as highly effective direct-action charities. We want to find areas where we can add the most value to the movement based on our internal expertise and capacities, and add that value in a way that benefits all parties. We have had a number of conversations with a variety of different organizations and more are scheduled in the next few weeks (The Life You Can Save, Giving What We Can, EA Action, GiveDirectly, Against Malaria Foundation), and have some promising projects in the works. Likewise, by promoting direct-action charities such as GiveDirectly and AMF, we allow these organizations to save money on their marketing. This helps these organizations appear better in the eyes of less well-educated donors who do not understand the value of spending resources on marketing and want all their money to go toward programming.
• We would like to develop a resource bank that would enable EAs around the world to promote effective giving to a broad audience. This resource bank would enable EAs in local groups to learn content marketing strategies quickly, with guides for marketing strategies and other tools for this purpose. It would also hold a bank of direct content and templates that promotes effective giving ideas, such as articles, videos, memes, t-shirts, etc. Local EAs would then take whatever they need and adapt it to their local context – whether translating it to other languages, putting in a hook that ties it to a local event, etc.

Financials

Financially, we have just started our fundraising outside of a narrow circle of initial supporters, since we wanted to get our content to a level where it would be publishable in The Huffington Post. Our basic operations budget is $42050, and we are currently in the red, with the co-founders covering about 88% of the basic expenses, which is not sustainable past the next year. We also want funding to get a new website and integrated donor and financial database, and most importantly hire a staff member, since we are an all-volunteer organization, and that is not sustainable in the long run. You can see our funding breakdown and priorities at the bottom of the Annual Report.

Conclusion

To conclude, the reason you would support InIn as an EA meta-charity, over a direct-action charity endorsed by GiveWell, is that by doing so you would highly likely direct many more dollars into effective charities than by contributing to direct-action charities themselves. Likewise, you can support InIn effectively with your time and talents, while direct-action charities would generally benefit most from financial contributions. Of course, as the section on InIn financial needs discusses, it needs some financial contributions as well, so make your own decisions about what kind of impact you want to see in the world through your donations.

Next Steps

If you would like to support this work to promote effective giving to a broad audience, but are not sure yet how you would like to do so, please fill out this supporters form. If you are interested in contributing your time, for example to creating content, providing feedback, or developing the resource bank, please fill out this volunteers form. If you are capable of financial donations and are interested in using your dollars to channel the spending of others into effective giving, please donate. The next ten days are a very high-leverage opportunity to donate, as InIn was awarded a challenge grant – if we get 10 new donors and 10 monthly donors by the end of the year, we will get $2000. So donations from new monthly donors, which double-count, are particularly welcomed.

Thanks again, and I look forward to your thoughts and feedback! You can also PM me on the forum or email me at gleb@intentionalinsights.org

This is mainly of interest to Effective Altruists and Cross-posted on the EA forum

Wanted to get community feedback and optimization suggestions on promoting effective giving using list-style articles.

The purpose for list-style articles would be similar to other types of effective giving content, namely to lead people to shift their giving toward more effective charities from less effective ones. To be clear, it is not to get people to join the Effective Altruism movement, to avoid the danger of rapid movement growth (see this video and paper). It is also not to get people to go down the Earning To Give path, as most likely only a small portion of people should go down that road, and moreover the EA movement as such faces a higher talent gap than funding gap. Instead, the goal is to redirect some of the hundreds of billions spent per year on charitable giving toward effective causes.

Now, getting to why use list-style articles as such. On the one hand, most list-style articles pattern-match with shallow content, not something that Less Wrongers typically appreciate - in fact, there has been some intense debate about this topic. On the other hand, list-style articles are one of the most widely read and shared types of content on the web, and there are specific strategies for doing high-quality list-style articles.

One concern is that these articles might be a turn-off for people who are oriented toward more high-brow content, and would not be inclined to learn about effective giving and especially effective altruism due to it being presented in a list-style article form. To address this concern, I think we should aim to avoid using the term "Effective Giving" and certainly "Effective Altruism" in the title of a list-style article. Thus, anyone just glancing at the headline would not be turned off by seeing this term in association with a list-style article. Only the people who click on the article and read it would learn about this term and the organizations associated with it. Since the readers of a list-style article are the ones who would enjoy list-style articles and not be put off by them, they would be highly unlikely to be negatively impacted by this type of article and the message of effective giving as conveyed by it, and instead would be impacted positively, on a weak to strong range.

To practice an experimental and data-gathering approach, I decided to try to publish a list-style article, and got this one, "8 Secrets of Savvy Donors," placed in The Huffington Post. It does not reference effective giving in the title, but talks about it in the body of the text. It is written in an engaging manner, has a clear narrative, conveys emotions, has a variety of images, and conveys a mixture of helpful ideas with promotion of EA organizations, such as Giving What We Can, GiveWell, and The Life You Can Save. It briefly mentions effective altruism as a movement, but does not specifically tie positive emotions with it, and suggests readers contact effective altruists for strategies on donating effectively. I suspect this is the first EA-written and EA-themed list-style article, but please correct me if I'm wrong - I know EAs made other broad-type content, such as memes, but not list-style articles.

Posted less than 48 hours ago, this article is spreading organically on social media with minimum publicity. I have not yet shared it with any EA groups, but it has already been shared more than 160 times on StumbleUpon, for example, as of the time of this writing (most articles published at the same time as this one on The Huffington Post Impact section, where this article was published, have less than 20 social shares). Social media shares provide significant evidence of reader enthusiasm for this article, since people are willing to put their personal social capital into sharing the article for their Facebook friends, Twitter followers, StumbleUpon followers etc. to read. Of course, social media sharing also has the additional benefit of many more people getting exposed to the content - a general rule of thumb is that for every social media share, 100 people read the article thoroughly, and many more skim it.

Another benefit of list-style articles is that they are well suited for fellow EAs to share on their social media. This is because EAs who are social media savvy know that this type of article will be more likely to be read by non-EAs in their social circle, and shared by other EAs. Thus, EAs can help spur social sharing of this type of article strategically, knowing the positive consequences of doing so.

A more broad medium-term goal would be to provide a depository of such articles that EAs can draw from and adapt to their local context. All of you should feel free to do so as well. Another medium-term goal is to have some EAs who specialize in marketing effective giving ideas for a broad audience. This should help address one area of talent gap in the current EA movement. For more on promoting effective giving from a systematic perspective, see this post.

Now, I'd appreciate your thoughts on this article. Does it work to convey the benefits of effective giving in an easy-to-read and engaging manner? Knowing about the benefits of sharing this type of article, would you share this article on your social media?

Also, would appreciate your thoughts on the meta issues, the strategy of using list-style articles as a way of spreading EA-style ideas about effective giving. Thanks!

This is mainly of interest to Effective Altruists, and was cross-posted on the EA forum

Why separate effective giving from Effective Altruism? Isn't the whole point of EA about effective giving, meaning giving to the most impactful charities to advance human flourishing? Sure, effective giving is the point of EA, but there might be a lot of benefit to drawing a distinct line between the movement of Effective Altruism itself, and the ideas of effective giving that it promotes. That's something that Kerry Vaughn, the Executive Director of Effective Altruism Outreach, and I, the President of Intentional Insights, discussed in our recent phone call, after having an online discussion on this forum. To be clear, Kerry did not explicitly endorse the work of Intentional Insights, and is not in a position to do so - this just reflects my recollection of our conversations.

Why draw that line? Because there's quite a bit of danger in rapid movement growth of attracting people who might dilute the EA movement and impair the building of good infrastructure down the road (see this video and paper). This exemplifies the dangers of simply promoting Effective Altruism indiscriminately, and just trying to grow the movement as fast as possible.

Thus, what we can orient toward is using modern marketing strategies to spread the ideas of effective altruism - what Kerry and I labeled effective giving in our conversations - without necessarily trying to spread the movement. We can spread the notion of giving not simply from the heart, but also using the head. We can talk about fighting the drowning child problem. We can talk about researching charities and using GiveWell, The Life You Can Save, and other evidence-based charity evaluators to guide one's giving. We can build excitement about giving well, and encourage people to think of themselves as Superdonors or Mega-Lifesavers. We can use effective marketing strategies such as speaking to people's emotions and using stories, and contributing to meta-charities such as EA Outreach and others that do such work.  That's why we at Intentional Insights focus on spending our resources on spreading the message of effective giving, as we believe that getting ten more people to give effectively is more impactful than us giving of our resources to effective charities ourselves. At the same time, Kerry and I spoke of avoiding heavily promoting effective altruism as a movement or using emotionally engaging narratives to associate positive feelings with it - instead, just associating positive feelings with effective giving, and leaving bread crumbs for people who want to explore Effective Altruism through brief mentions and links.

Let's go specific and concrete. Here's an example of what I mean: an article in The Huffington Post that encourages people to give effectively, and only briefly mention Effective Altruism. Doing so balances the benefits of using marketing tactics to channel money to effective charities, while not heavily promoting EA itself to ameliorate the dangers of rapid movement growth.

Check out the sharing buttons on it, and you'll see it was shared quite widely, over 1K times. As you'll see from this Facebook comment on my personal page, it helped convince someone to decide to donate to effective charities. Furthermore, this comment is someone who is the leader of a large secular group in Houston, and he thus has an impact on a number of other people. Since people rarely make actual comments, and far from all are fans of my Facebook page, we can estimate that many more made similar decisions but chose not to comment about it.

Another example. Here is a link to the outcome of an Intentional Insights collaboration with The Life You Can Save to spread effective giving to the reason-oriented community through Giving Games. In a Giving Game, participants in a workshop learn about a few pre-selected charities, think about and discuss their relative merits, and choose which charity will get a real donation, $10 per participant. We have launched a pilot program with the Secular Student Alliance to bring Giving Games to over 300 secular student groups throughout the world, with The Life You Can Save dedicating $10,000 to the pilot program, and easily capable of raising more if it works well. As you'll see from the link, it briefly mentions Effective Altruism, and focuses mainly on education in effective giving itself.

Such articles as the one in The Huffington Post, shared widely in social media, attest to the popularity of effective giving as a notion, separate from Effective Altruism itself. As you saw, it is immediately impactful in getting some people to give to effective charities, and highly likely gets others to think in this direction. I had a conversation with a number of leaders of local EA groups, for example with Alfredo Parra in Munich, excited about the possibility of translating and adapting this article to their local context, and all of you are free to do so as well - I encourage you to cite me/Intentional Insights in doing so, but if you can't, it's fine as well.

That gets to another point that Kerry and I discussed, namely the benefits of having some EAs who specialize in promoting ideas about effective giving, and more broadly integrating promotion of effective giving as something that EAs do in general. Some EAs can do the most good by working hard and devoting 10% of their money to charity. Some can do the most good by thinking hard about the big issues. Some can do the most good by growing the internal capacity and infrastructures of the movement, and getting worthy people on board. Others can do the most good by getting non-EAs to channel their money toward effective charities through effective marketing and persuasion tactics.

Intentional Insights orients toward providing the kind of content that can be easily adapted and shared by these EAs widely. It's a work in progress, to create and improve this content. We are also working with other EA meta-charities such as The Life You Can Save and others. Another area to work on is not only content creation, but content optimization and testing - I talked with Konrad Seifert from Geneva about testing our content at a university center there. Moreover, we should develop the infrastructure to integrate spreading effective giving into EA activities, something EA Outreach may potentially collaborate with us on, depending on further discussions.

So these are some initial thoughts, which I wanted to bring to the community for discussion. What do you think of this line of work, and what are your ideas for optimization? Thanks!

**EDIT** Edited to clarify that Kerry Vaughn did not explicitly endorse the work of Intentional Insights.

Disclaimer: This post is mainly of interest to EA-oriented Less Wrongers

Happy to share that I got this article promoting effective giving, and especially advocating Against Malaria Foundation, GiveWell, and The Life You Can Save, published in The Huffington Post.

This piece is part of my broader work at Intentional Insights, a nonprofit devoted to promoting effective altruism and rational thinking to a broad audience effectively, by using modern promotion and marketing methods. Our goals with this and similar articles is to channel both money to effective charities and encourage people to think about donations in a rational, science-based, data-driven manner. These articles are also aimed to be a good fit for those supportive of EA ideas to share with others on social media, to help encourage non-EAs to adopt effective giving strategies, since the articles are aimed to be easy to read and engaging.

We at Intentional Insights​, the nonprofit devoted to promoting rationality and effective altruism  to a broad audience, are finalizing our Theory of Change (a ToC is meant to convey our goals, assumptions, methods, and metrics). Since there's recently been extensive discussion on LessWrong of our approaches to promoting rationality and effective altruism to a broad audience, one that was quite helpful for helping us update, I'd like to share our Theory of Change with you and ask for your feedback.

Here's the Executive Summary:

• The goal of Intentional Insights is to create a world where all rely on research-based strategies to make wise decisions and lead to mutual flourishing.
• To achieve this goal, we believe that people need to be motivated to learn and have broadly accessible information about such research-based strategies, and also integrate these strategies into their daily lives through regular practice.
• We assume that:
  • some natural and intuitive human thinking, feeling, and behavior patterns are flawed in ways that undermine wise decisions.
  • problematic decision making undermines mutual flourishing in a number of life areas.
  • these flawed thinking, feeling, and behavior patterns can be improved through effective interventions.
  • we can motivate and teach people to improve their thinking, feeling, and behavior patterns by presenting our content in ways that combine education and entertainment.
• Our intervention is helping people improve their patterns of thinking, feeling, and behavior to enable them to make wise decisions and bring about mutual flourishing.
• Our outputs, what we do, come in the form of online content such as blog entries, videos, etc., on our channels and in external publications, as well as collaborations with other organizations.
• Our metrics of impact are in the form of anecdotal evidence, feedback forms from workshops, and studies we run on our content.

Here is the full version.

I'd appreciate any feedback on the full version from fellow Less Wrongers, on things like content, concepts, structure, style, grammar, etc. I look forward to updating the organization's goals, assumptions, methods, and metrics based on your thoughts. Thanks!

Nice to get this list-style article promoting LessWrong, Rationality Dojo, and Rationality: From AI to Zombies, as part of a series of strategies for growing mentally stronger, published on Lifehack, a very popular self-improvement website. It's part of my broader project of promoting rationality and effective altruism to a broad audience, Intentional Insights.

EDIT: To be clear, based on my exchange with gjm below, the article does not promote these heavily and links more to Intentional Insights. I was excited to be able to get links to LessWrong, Rationality Dojo, and Rationality: From AI to Zombies included in the Lifehack article, as previously editors had cut out such links. I pushed back against them this time, and made a case for including them as a way of growing mentally stronger, and thus was able to get them in.

(Cross-posted on The Life You Can Save blog, the Intentional Insights blog, and the Effective Altruism Forum).

This will be mainly of interest to Effective Altruists

Effective Altruism does a terrific job of appealing to the head. There is no finer example than GiveWell’s meticulously researched and carefully detailed reports laying out the impact per dollar on giving to various charities. As a movement, we are at the cutting edge of what we can currently evaluate about the effectiveness of how we optimize QALYs, although of course much work remains to be done.

However, as seen in Tom Davidson’s recent piece, "EA's Image Problem," and my “Making Effective Altruism More Emotionally Appealing,” we currently do not do a very good job of appealing to the heart. We tend to forget Peter Singer’s famous quote that Effective Altruism “combines both the heart and the head.” When we try to pitch the EA movement to non-EAs, we focus on the head, not the heart.

Now, I can really empathize with this perspective. I am much more analytically oriented than the baseline, and I find this to be the case for EAs in general. Yet if we want to expand the EA movement, we can't fall into typical mind fallacy and assume that what worked to convince us will convince others who are less analytical and more emotionally oriented thinkers.

Otherwise, we leave huge sums of money on the table that otherwise could have gone to effective charities. For this reason, I and several others have started a nonprofit organization, Intentional Insights, dedicated to spreading rational thinking and effective altruism to a wide audience using effective marketing techniques. Exploring the field of EA organizations, I saw that The Life You Can Save already has some efforts to reach out to a broad audience, through its Charity Impact Calculator and its Giving Games, and actively promoted its efforts.

I was excited when Jon Behar, the COO & Director of Philanthropy Education at TLYCS, reached out to me and suggested collaborating on promoting EA to a broad audience using contemporary marketing methods that appeal to the heart. In a way, this is not surprising, as Peter Singer’s drowning child problem is essentially an effort to appeal to people’s hearts in a classroom setting. Using marketing methods that aim to reach a broad audience is a natural evolution of this insight.

Jon and I problem-solved how to spread Effective Altruism effectively, and came up with the idea of a catchphrase that we thought would appeal to people’s emotions well: “Be a Superdonor!” This catchphrase conveys in a short burst crucial information about Effective Altruism, namely that one can have the most powerful impact of one’s donations through giving to the charities that optimize QALYs for the most.

More importantly, it appeals to the heart well. Superdonor conveys the feeling of power – you can be super in your donations! Superdonor conveys an especially strong degree of generosity. Superdonor conveys a feeling of superiority, as in better than other donors. In other words, even if you donate less, if you donate more effectively, you can still be better than other donors by donating more effectively. This appeals to the “Keeping Up With the Joneses” effect, a powerful force in guiding our spending.

Just as importantly, “Be a Superdonor!” is easily shareable on social media, a vital component of modern marketing in the form of social proof. People get to show their pride and increase their social status by posting on their Facebook or Twitter how they are a Superdonor. This makes their friends curious about what it means to be a Superdonor, since that is an appealing and emotionally resonant phrase. Their friends check out their links, and get to find out about Effective Altruism. Of course, it is important that the link go to a very clear and emotionally exciting description of how one can be a Superdonor through donating.

Likewise, people should get credit for being a Superdonor through getting others to donate through sharing about it on social media, through talking about it to friends, through getting their friends to go to their local EA groups. Thus, we get the power of social affiliation, a crucial aspect of motivation, working on behalf of Effective Altruism. A particularly effective strategy for social affiliation here might be to combine “Be A Superdonor” with Giving Games, both the in-person version that TLYCS runs now and perhaps a web app version that helps create a virtual community setting conducive to social affiliation.

Now, some EAs might be concerned that the EA movement would lose its focus on the head through these efforts. I think that is a valid concern, and we need to be aware of the dangers here. We still need to put energy into the excellent efforts of GiveWell and other effective charity evaluators. We still need to be concerned with existential risk, even if it does not present us in the best light to external audiences.

Therefore, as part of the Superdonor efforts, we should develop compassionate strategies to educate emotionally-oriented newcomers about more esoteric aspects of Effective Altruism. For example, EA groups can have people who are specifically assigned as mentors for new members, who can help guide for their intellectual and emotional development alike. At the same time, we need to accept that some of those emotionally-oriented thinkers will not be interested in doing so.

This is quite fine, as long as we remember our goal of making the strongest impact on the world by optimizing QALYs through not leaving huge sums of money on the table. Consider the kind of benefit you can bring to the EA movement if you can channel the giving of emotionally-oriented thinkers toward effective charities. Moreover, think of the positive network effect of them getting their friends to donate to effective charities. Think of whether you can make a much bigger difference in doing the most good per energy of effort by focusing more of your own volunteering and giving on EA outreach in comparison to other EA-related activities. This is what inspired my own activities at Intentional Insights, and the recent shifts of the TLYCS toward effective outreach.

What are your thoughts about reaching out to more emotionally-oriented thinkers using these and other modern marketing strategies? If you support doing so, what do you think you can do personally to promote Effective Altruism effectively? Would love to hear your thoughts about it in comments below, and happy to talk to anyone who wants to engage with the Intentional Insights project: my email is gleb@intentionalinsights.org.

Disclaimer: This post is mainly relevant to those who are interested in Effective Altruism

Introduction

As a Less Wronger and Effective Altruist who is skilled at marketing, education, and outreach, I think we can do a lot of good if we improve the effectiveness of Effective Altruism outreach. I am not talking about EA pitches in particular, although these are of course valuable in the right time and place, but more broadly issues of strategy. I am talking about making Effective Altruism outreach effective through relying on research-based strategies of effective outreach.

To be clear, I should say that I have been putting my money/efforts where my mouth is, and devoting a lot of my time and energy to a project, Intentional Insights, of spreading rationality and effective altruism to a broad audience, as I think I can do the most good through convincing others to do the most good, through their giving and through rational thinking. Over the last year, I devoted approximately 2400 hours and $33000 to this project. Here's what I found helpful in my own outreach efforts to non-EAs, and lots of these ideas also apply to my outreach regarding rationality more broadly.

Telling Stories

I found it quite helpful to focus much more on speaking to people's emotions rather than their cognition. Now, this was not intuitive to me. I'm much more motivated by data than the typical person, and I bet you are too. But I think we need to remember that we suffer from a typical mind fallacy, in that most EAs are much more data-driven than the typical person. Moreover, after we got into the EA movement, we forget how weird it looks from the outside - we suffer from the curse of knowledge.

So does spreading rationality contribute to Effective Altruism? I certainly think so, as a rationality popularizer and an Effective Altruist myself. My own donations of money and time is focused on my project, Intentional Insights, of trying to spread rationality to a broad audience and thus raise the sanity waterline, including about effective, evidence-based philanthropy. Specifically in relation to EA, in blogs for Intentional Insights, and in our resources page, I make sure to highlight EA as an awesome thing to get involved in.

I'd particularly appreciate feedback on a draft fundraising letter (link here) for Effective Altruists on the way that Intentional Insights contributes to improving the world and specifically by getting people more engaged with Effective Altruism. I'd like to hear any thoughts on how I can optimize the letter to make it more effective. You can simply respond in comments, or send an email to gleb@intentionalinsights.org

I'd also like to hear your opinion of the broader issue of how spreading rationality helps contribute to improving the world and the EA movement in particular. Let me share my take. For the first, I think that, as shown by Brian Tomasik in this essay, increasing rational thinking is robustly positive for a broad range of short and long term future outcomes, and thus our broader work contributes to improving people’s lives overall. For the second, getting people to think rationally about themselves and their interactions with the world and use evidence-based means to evaluate reality and make their decisions will result in people applying these methods of thinking to their altruism.

What do you think?

LessWrongers who like GiveWell recommended charities may be interested in taking part in or donating to a new fundraiser called Experience Poverty. As well as deworming hundreds of children, it's an unusually good opportunity to find people who are interested in cost-effective charity and start conversations with them - something it's rare to find an excuse to do. Dozens of people and many effective altruist groups around the world are going to take part. Here are the details:

What: Spend only $2.50 a day on food for three days. Get sponsored to raise money to fight poverty.
Why: Half of the world spends $2.50 or less on food each day. This reflects income levels at which people often can’t afford basic health care. All money raised goes to buy medicines that cost only 50 cents. It is so cheap to us, but people still cannot afford it.
Who: People who want to do something to help the global poor and get a sense of what poverty's like.
When: April 22-24, 2015. If those dates don’t work for you you can set your own. For example, if you're at a US university you can choose to do it on April 6-8, when some American college groups are doing it.
What you can vary: Any of this: the amount you spend, the number of days and the date. For example, see below for the ‘challenge mode’ of spending only $1.50.
How: Sign up via these links for the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, Switzerland, Sweden and the Eurozone. Then ask friends and family to sponsor you. We’ll send you guides, pointers, and we can even do a one-on-one Skype to help you help the most people possible. Just contact us at info@charityscience.com with “Experience Poverty Skype” as the subject line.


Left: What a typical American family eats in a week. Right: What a typical family in Chad (an African country) eats in a week.

Where does the money go? SCI

The money raised goes to the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI for short). Experience Poverty is a partnership between Charity Science and SCI. SCI gives out medicine that cures children who have parasitic worms (including those that cause the disease schistosomiasis). These parasites live inside your body and suck your blood. The effects include fatigue, bloody diarrhoea, fever, chills, and other such lovely symptoms. Rather understandably, being so ill leads to many sick days from school and work. In fact, this is why deworming is arguably one of the most cost-effective ways to give children an education, among other things (Miguel and Kremer 2004 found that it led to a 25% reduction in school absenteeism, although this is a difficult effect to pin down; for more details, see this from GiveWell).

There isn't really a single figure which gives a good sense of SCI's strength - the closest would an estimate of its cost per QALY, but I believe GiveWell sees extant estimates of this as problematic. (In our own marketing we use the figure for the cost of the drugs - around 50 cents - but this is purely to maximise the amount raised.) By far the strongest reason to raise money for SCI is that it's been picked as one of the world's most effective charities by GiveWell, the most reliable and empirical charity evaluator by a long way. For more information see GiveWell's detailed review, or Charity Science's simpler summary. 

How do you join? - Click Here

Click here then follow the prompts. You set your goal for how much you’d like to raise (we suggest setting it as $500 or more), write about why you’re doing it, and then it’s as simple as asking your friends and family to sponsor you. Most people will be touched by your dedication to helping those less fortunate and will be happy to help you out.

Or you can just donate to the campaign! 50 cents gives a treatment to a child, so just $20 treats 40 children.

If you'd like to use a currency other than US dollars, you can use our pages for Canada, the UK, Australia, Switzerland, Sweden and the Eurozone.

What could you possibly eat for only $2.50 a day?

Not much. But that’s kind of the point. It’s to get a sense of how limiting $2.50 is. It’s like running a marathon for charity, but a lot more related.

However, it’s not all abstinence. (That’s reserved for the people taking the challenge mode who will spend only $1.50 a day.) Here’s a few cheap meals people have tried in the past:

• Rice, beans, and spices or soy sauce
• Butternut squash pasta
• Ramen noodles (always a guilty pleasure anyway)
• Oatmeal with chopped banana

Things you’ll have to give up:

• Starbucks or buying coffee out
• Restaurants
• Alcoholic drinks

What are the rules?

The spirit of the event involves getting a (very rough) experience of poverty, and to ultimately make it so that fewer people have to have similar experiences. As long as it is done in this spirit, do what works for you. If you need to spend a bit more money, you can set your own amount. If you can’t do it on April 22-24, do a different time. If you lapse during your three days, it’s OK. You might even want to mention it on Facebook, talking about how difficult it was. It will help people understand how hard poverty is.

Why $2.50?

Half of the world lives on less than $1,368 a year. Around 65% of that is spent on food, which means $2.43 a day. We rounded to $2.50 a day because round numbers are nicer, but you can spend only $2.43 if you’d like.

You might have traveled to a poor country and know that you can buy more for $2.50 overseas. This is a good point, which is why the $2.43 figure is adjusted to how much $2.43 could buy in the USA in 2005. That’s not much. Now imagine that you have to use the remaining $1.75 per day on shelter, transport, healthcare, and entertainment. That’s why we’re running this campaign. Because that’s just too little and we want to change it.

Challenge Mode: live on $1.50

Yawn. $2.50? You already did that in college. Well worry not my frugal friend, there is a challenge mode! $1.50 a day is roughly the international poverty line, so why not try to live on only that for 3 days?

Why do the challenge mode?

• People raise more when they suffer more. Yes, they did a study on this, and yes, people are strange creatures.
• You’ll get a better sense of what extreme poverty is like.
• You’ll get an e-high five from the Experience Poverty team.

What if I live outside the US?

We have separate pages with different currencies for the following countries:

• The US
• Canada
• The UK
• Australia
• Switzerland
• Sweden
• The Eurozone

If you don’t live in any of those countries then you can either join the US page which will let your friends donate in dollars or you can email us to see if we can add your country. Donations are tax-deductible in the US and Canada and SCI will get GiftAid in the UK.