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[Effective Altruism] Promoting Effective Giving at Conferences via Speed Giving Games
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:
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Evaluating the demographic group you want to target;
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Evaluating the potential impact and cost of the conference;
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Steps to prepare for the conference;
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Outcomes of the conference;
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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.
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9 Strategies for Effective Donors
Summary: This piece is mainly of relevance to EA-oriented Less Wrongers. It provides 9 strategies meant to help donors be more effective. It's prompted by conversations about the desire for more introductory-style pieces on various issues aimed at newer members of the EA movement who are trying to get up to speed on both intellectual and pragmatic issues around becoming full-fledged participants. I welcome you to suggest improvements on the strategies described here, and also add other strategies that you think are important.
Acknowledgments: Thanks to Rhema Hokama for providing feedback on this post. Any mistakes or oversights and I take full responsibility for all opinions expressed here. Versions of this piece will be published on The Life You Can Save blog and the Intentional Insights blog.
Introduction
You're generous and kind. You care about other people and want to help them have great lives. You want to make a positive impact on the world and give from your heart to worthy causes. You're a great person!
Yet there's a niggling feeling of doubt at the back of your head when you donate. How do you know that you're giving to the right causes? How do you know that you're giving the right amount and at the right time? How do you know that your generous gifts of time and money actually have the kind of impact you want on the world?
Yet some donors don't have that doubt. They are confident that they give to the right causes, the right amount, and that they are getting what they paid for with their generosity and kindness. They are effective donors!
What are their secrets? They still listen to their heart -- that's why they want to give in the first place -- but they combine the heart and the head to give effectively and avoid giving regret. You can be an effective donor too, and be truly confident that you're making the best decisions with your giving by following nine simple strategies.
1. Be Intentional
Knowledge is power! Effective donors are intentional about figuring out their aims and strategies for giving. They take the time to sit down and decide what goals they want to achieve through their generosity. They think about the kind of impact they want to have in the world. They decide what causes are most important to them - poverty, disease, animal welfare - and rank them by order of importance. Consider the benefit of donations to meta-charities that promote effective giving in the first place. Now, this ranking can be quite difficult to achieve, and there's no right answer, as it depends on your values. Follow this strategy, and you'll know that you are giving to the causes that are right for you!
2. Listen To Yourself
Another rule that effective donors use to give to the right causes is to make sure to listen to themselves above everyone else. They know that they themselves should determine their giving decisions. While they don't let anyone dictate to them what to do, they listen to and consider the opinions of others, and shift their mental maps of reality based on new information they did not know before. Indeed, effective donors are masters at changing their minds with appropriate evidence. However, the key is that they do so for their own reasons, not to please others.
3. Budget Well
There are so many great causes out there that you can't reasonably contribute to all of them. Effective donors prevent that problem by preparing a giving budget! They decide in advance how much resources they want to spend, of both time and money. They distribute their resources to the causes they outlined above by order of importance to themselves. If you do so yourself, you'll be confident that you are giving the right amount!
4. Plan Ahead
Effective donors plan their giving in advance. They know that most people tend to give during the winter holidays, but charities need money throughout the year. So they time their giving to counter the "holiday effect." They also know that charities most benefit from monthly donors who automate monthly donations from their bank accounts or credit cards. Monthly donors enable charities to plan ahead themselves and make the most effective use of each dollar. Another benefit of monthly donations is that effective donors get to feel positive emotions every month when they get a warm thank-you note from the nonprofit. Since both giving and experiencing gratitude are science-based strategies for improving happiness, effective donors are happier! Likewise, effective donors take advantage of holidays to give to nonprofits. By using this strategy, you can ensure that you are giving at the right time, for your own happiness and satisfaction, and for the charities to which you give.
5. Be Flexible
Effective donors are flexible about their giving. They know that their resources change over time in unexpected ways. For example, they might get an unexpected bonus, and decide they have more to give each month. However, they might be laid off and then have less money to give, but more time. They revise their giving budget and plan to make sure it aligns with their resources and priorities. You can commit to giving something every month but allow yourself to change this plan as your circumstances change. Doing so will enable you to make sure you keep giving the right amount and at the right time, no matter what happens.
6. Be Smart
You're a smart shopper. You don't buy the first thing you see on television or in the store window. You take the time to gain confidence that you'll get what you want, for example by reading reviews from well-known websites. Similarly, effective donors don't give to the first charity that puts a commercial on television, or has volunteers going door-to-door or standing in the street and asking for money. In fact, super-donors know that the charity that spends its money on commercials and volunteer time on gathering donations is not using those resources to make an impact in the world. Super-donors read reviews of charities by reputable charity evaluators. For example, GiveWell provides extensive research and makes recommendations for the kind of charities that make the most powerful and positive impact on the world in various cause areas. The Life You Can Save provides not only recommendations, but also an Impact Calculator that can help you see right away what kind of impact your giving can make! Using such tactics will help you make sure that you make the impact you want on the world with your generosity and kindness.
7. Be Effective
You can also gain confidence about your shopping decisions by talking to other smart shoppers. Those shoppers are generally glad to give you advice - they feel good helping you make wise shopping decisions and get to share their knowledge! Similarly, you can talk to effective donors to ensure that your generous donations are going to the best place. More broadly, they can share lots of strategies for being an effective donor. To get some good tips online, you can check out the Effective Altruism Facebook group, read the Effective Altruism Wiki, or simply put the phrase "Effective Altruism" into a search engine and see what comes up. Even better is joining in-person meetings, and you can find a local one near you at the Effective Altruism Hub, or by contacting the Local Effective Altruism Network.
8. Be Committed
It’s not easy to keep remembering to make donations and overcoming that part of us that wants to keep the money for ourselves. Fortunately, there’s an easy fix for that used by effective donors! Precommitment is a psychological strategy to help us ensure that our future selves will act in accordance with our current desires. In other words, you can help ensure that your future you will keep making the kind of donations that you want to make. The easiest way of doing so is to take a pledge, such as the Giving What We Can or The Life You Can Save pledge, to commit a portion of your income to charity.
9. Be Proud
Effective donors are not only committed to giving intentionally, but also proud of doing so! They spread this message of the benefits of being an effective donor to others they know. They know that doing so helps other people have better lives by getting rid of that niggling doubt at the back of their heads, and also channels their giving in the most effective fashion. Following this strategy by starting conversations with friends and family, being public about your good deeds, as well as sharing this article with others, can help you multiply the kind of positive impact you have on the world!
Conclusion
I hope these strategies prove helpful to you. I welcome your thoughts about this piece, and encourage you to suggest improvements on the strategies described here, and also add other strategies that you think are important.
The Valentine’s Day Gift That Saves Lives
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
Last year, my wife gave me the most romantic Valentine’s Day gift ever.
We had previously been very traditional with our Valentine’s Day gifts, such as fancy candy for her or a bottle of nice liquor for me. Yet shortly before Valentine’s Day, she approached me about rethinking that tradition.
Did candy or liquor truly express our love for each other? Is it more important that a gift helps the other person be happy and healthy, or that it follows traditional patterns?
Instead of candy and liquor, my wife suggested giving each other gifts that actually help us improve our mental and physical well-being, and the world as a whole, by donating to charities in the name of the other person.
She described an article she read about a study that found that people who give to charity feel happier than those that don’t give. The experimenters gave people money and asked them to spend it either on themselves or on others. Those who spent it on others experienced greater happiness.
Not only that, such giving also made people healthier. Another study showed that participants who gave to others experienced a significant decrease in blood pressure, which did not happen to those who spent money on themselves
So my thoughtful wife suggested we try an experiment: for Valentine’s Day, we'd give to charity in the name of the other person. This way, we could make each other happier and healthier, while helping save lives at the same time. Moreover, we could even improve our relationship!
I accepted my wife’s suggestion gladly. We decided to donate $50 per person, and keep our gifts secret from each other, only presenting them at the restaurant when we went out for Valentine’s Day.
While I couldn’t predict my wife’s choice, I had an idea about how she would make it. We’ve researched charities before, and wanted to find ones where our limited dollars could go as far as possible toward saving lives. We found excellent charity evaluators that find the most effective charities and make our choices easy. Our two favorites are GiveWell, which has extensive research reports on the best charities, and The Life You Can Save, which provides an Impact Calculator that shows you the actual impact of your donation. These data-driven evaluators are part of the broader effective altruism movement that seeks to make sure our giving does the most good per dollar. I was confident my wife would select a charity recommended by a high-quality evaluator.
On Valentine’s Day, we went to our favorite date night place, a little Italian restaurant not far from our house. After a delicious cheesecake dessert, it was time for our gift exchange. She presented her gift first, a donation to the Against Malaria Foundation. With her $50 gift in my name, she bought 20 large bed-size nets that would protect families in the developing world against deadly malaria-carrying mosquitoes. In turn, I donated $50 to GiveDirectly, in her name. This charity transfers money directly to recipients in some of the poorest villages in Africa, who have the dignity of using the money as they wish. It is like giving money directly to the homeless, except dollars go a lot further in East Africa than in the US.
We were so excited by our mutual gifts! They were so much better than any chocolate or liquor could be. We both helped each other save lives, and felt so great about doing so in the context of a gift for the other person. We decided to transform this experiment into a new tradition for our family.
It was the most romantic Valentine’s Day present I ever got, and made me realize how much better Valentine’s Day can be for myself, my wife, and people all around the world. All it takes is a conversation about showing true love for your partner by improving her or his health and happiness. Is there any reason to not have that conversation?
The Charity Impact Calculator
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.
Yet with the help of a calculator, I learned how to multiply that positive experience manifold! Imagine that when you give five dollars, you don’t give just to one person, but to seven people. When you reach into your pocket, you see seven smiles. When you put the money in the hat, you hear seven people say “Thank you so much.”
The Life You Can Save has an Impact Calculator that helps you calculate the impact of your giving. You can put in any amount of money you want, then click on a charity of your choice, and see how much of an impact your money can have.
When I learned about this calculator, I decided to check out how far $5 can take me. I went through various charities listed there and saw the positive difference that my money can make.
I was especially struck by one charity, GiveDirectly is a nonprofit that enables you to give directly to people in East Africa. When I put in $5, I saw that what GiveDirectly does is transfers that money directly to poor people who live on an average of $.65 per day. You certainly can’t buy a McDonald’s meal for that, but $.65 goes far in East Africa.
That really struck me. I realized I can get a really high benefit from giving directly to people in the developing world, much more than I would from giving to one person in the street here in the US. I don’t see those seven people in front of me and thus don’t pay attention to the impact I can have on them, a thinking error called attentional bias. Yet if I keep in mind this thinking error, I can solve what is known as the “drowning child problem” in charitable giving, namely not intuitively valuing the children who are drowning out of my sight. If I keep in my mind that there are poor people in the developing world, just like the poor person I see on the street in front of me, I can remember that my generosity can make a very high impact, much more impact per dollar than in the US, in developing countries through my direct giving.
GiveDirectly bridges that gap between me and the poor people across the globe. This organization locates poor people who can benefit most from cash transfers, enrolls them in its program, and then provides each household with about a thousand dollars to spend as it wishes. The large size of this cash transfer results in a much bigger impact than a small donation. Moreover, since the cash transfer is unconditional, the poor person can have true dignity and spend it on whatever most benefits them.
Helida, for example, used the cash transfer she got to build a new house. You wouldn’t intuitively think that was most useful thing for her to do, would you? But this is what she needed most. She was happy that as a result of the cash transfer “I have a metal roof over my head and I can safely store my farm produce without worries.” She is now much more empowered to take care of herself and her large family.
What a wonderful outcome of GiveDirectly’s work! Can you imagine building a new house in the United States on a thousand dollars? Well, this is why your direct donations go a lot further in East Africa.
With GiveDirectly, you can be much more confident about the outcome of your generosity. I know that when I give to a homeless person, a part of me always wonders whether he will spend the money on a bottle of cheap vodka. This is why I really appreciate that GiveDirectly keeps in touch and follows up with the people enrolled in its programs. They are scrupulous about sharing the consequences of their giving, so you know what you are getting by your generous gifts.
GiveDirectly is back by rigorous evidence. They conduct multiple randomized control studies of their impact, a gold standard of evidence. The research shows that cash transfer recipients have much better health and lives as a result of the transfer, much more than most types of anti-poverty interventions. Its evidence-based approach is why GiveDirectly is highly endorsed by well-respected charity evaluators such as GiveWell and The Life You Can Save, which are part of the Effective Altruist movement that strives to figure out the best research-informed means to do the most good per dollar.
So next time you pass someone begging on the street, think about GiveDirectly, since you can get seven times as much impact, for your emotional self and for the world as a whole. What I do myself is each time I choose to give to a homeless person, I set aside the same amount of money to donate through GiveDirectly. That way, I get to see the smile and hear the “thank you” in person, and also know that I can make a much more impactful gift as well.
Check out the Impact Calculator for yourself to see the kind of charities available there and learn about the impact you can make. Perhaps direct giving is not to your taste, but there are over a dozen other options for you to choose from. Whatever you choose, aim to multiply your generosity to achieve your giving goals!
Effective Giving vs. Effective Altruism
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.
Maximizing Donations to Effective Charities
Don’t you want your charitable efforts to do the utmost good they can in the world? Imagine how great it feels to know that you’re making the most difference with your gift. Yet how do you figure out how to bring about this outcome? Maximizing the impact of your money requires being intentional and strategic with your giving.
Let me share my personal perspective on giving intentionally. I am really passionate about using an evidence-based approach to do the most good with my donations. I take the time to research causes so that my money and time go to the best charities possible. Moreover, I have taken the Giving What We Can and The Life You Can Save pledges to dedicate a sizable chunk of my income to effective charities. It felt great to take those pledges, and to commit publicly to effective giving throughout my life.
I am proud to identify as an effective altruist: a member of a movement dedicated to combining the heart and the head, using research and science to empower the urges of my emotional desire to make the world a better place. I pay close attention to data-driven charity evaluators such as GiveWell. The large majority of effective altruists closely follow its guidance. GiveWell focuses on charities that do direct activities to improve human life and alleviating suffering and have a clearly measurable impact. One example is Against Malaria Foundation (AMF), one of The Life You Can Save's recommended charities and one of four of GiveWell’s top choice charities for 2015.
Yet while I give to AMF, it and other highly effective charities represent only a small fraction of my donated time and money. This might sound surprising coming from an effective altruist. Why don’t I conform to the standard practice of most effective altruists and donate all of my money and time to these effective, research-based, well-proven charities?
First, let me say that I agree with most effective altruists that reducing poverty via highly effective charities that work directly on poverty alleviation is very worthwhile, and I do make donations to highly effective charities. In fact, this morning I donated enough money for AMF to buy two mosquito bed nets to protect families from malaria-carrying mosquitoes. I certainly got positive feelings from knowing that my gift will go directly towards saving lives, and have a very clear and measurable impact on the world
Yet when I make large or systematic contributions of money and time, effective charity is not where I give. I don't think donating to these direct-action charities is the best use of my own money and time. After all, my goal is to save lives and maximize cash flow to effective charities, whether or not I’m personally giving money to effective organizations. To evaluate the impulses coming from my heart to ensure that my actions match my actual goals, I take the time to sit down and consult my head.
I use rational decision-making strategies such as a MAUT analysis to evaluate where my giving would make the most difference in getting resources to effective charities. As a result, I have spent the majority of my money and time on higher-level, strategic giving that channels other people’s donations towards more effective charities, facilitating many more donations to them than I alone could provide.
This is why I am passionate about contributing to the kind of projects that spread widely the message of effective giving. Doing so doesn’t necessarily involve getting other people to become part of the effective altruist movement. Instead, it prompts them to adapt effective giving strategies such as taking the time to list their goals for giving, consider their giving budgets, research the best charities, and use data-based charity evaluators to choose the optimal charity that matches their giving goals.
What does spreading these messages involve? Since there are few organizations devoted to spreading effective giving strategies to a broad audience, I decided to practice charity entrepreneurship. Together with my wife, I co-founded a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization devoted to spreading effective giving and rational thinking strategies, Intentional Insights (InIn). InIn creates content devoted to this purpose, for example this article about how I became an effective altruist in the first place. Such articles, published in the organization’s own blog and places such as the Huffington Post and Lifehack, are shared widely online, and reach hundreds of thousands of readers. For example, a recent Lifehack article I published was shared over 2.5 thousand times on social media. A widely-used general estimate is that for every 1 person who shares an article, 100 people read an article thoroughly, while many more skim it. Plenty of people follow the links back to the organizations mentioned in the articles I publish, including organizations devoted to effective giving when the article deals with that topic.
For some, a single article that makes a strong enough case is sufficient to sway their thinking. For example, I published an article in The Huffington Post that combines an engaging narrative, emotions, and a rational argument to promote giving to effective charities as opposed to ineffective ones. This article explicitly highlighted the benefits of Against Malaria Foundation, GiveWell's top choice for 2015. On a higher, meta level, it encouraged giving to effective charities, and using GiveWell and The Life You Can Save, including its Impact Calculator, to make decisions about giving. I also want to express gratitude to Elo and others who helped give suggestions to improve my writing in the future regarding this specific article.
Despite these opportunities for improvement, as you'll see from this Facebook comment on my personal page, it helped convince someone to decide to donate to an effective charity. 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. In fact, the article was shared quite widely on social media, so it made quite some impact, and still going - the StumbleUpon clicks went from 50ish to over 1K in the last couple of days, for example.
However, others need more than a single article. I place myself in that number - I generally want significant exposure to ideas and shift my mind gradually. Or perhaps the initial articles I read did not make a strong enough case. In any event, like many others, I first discovered the idea of effective giving through an article, and followed the breadcrumbs in the links to GiveWell, Giving What We Can, The Life You Can Save, and other similar organizations. I was then intrigued enough to go to a presentation about it given by Max Harms. While already oriented toward effective giving by my previous reading, the presentation sold me on effective altruism as a movement. Presentations give people a direct opportunity to engage with and consider in-depth the big questions surrounding effective giving. This is why I devote my time and money not only into writing articles, but also into promoting effective altruist-themed presentations.
For example, I am collaborating with Jon Behar from The Life You Can Save to spread Giving Games. This participatory presentation educates the audience about effective giving by providing all participants with a pool of actual money, $10 per attendee, and has them discuss fundamental questions about where to give that money. In the course of the Giving Game, participants explore their values and motivations for donations, what kind of evidence they should use to evaluate charities, and how to avoid thinking errors in their giving. After the discussion, the group votes which charity should get the money. The Life You Can Save then donates that money on behalf of the group.
InIn has strong connections with reason-oriented organizations due to our focus on spreading rational thinking, and is partnering with The Life You Can Save to bring the Giving Game to these organizations, starting with the Secular Student Alliance (SSA). The SSA is an international organization uniting hundreds of reason-oriented student clubs around the world, but mainly in the United States. I proposed the idea to August Brunsman, the Executive Director of the SSA and a member of the InIn Advisory Board. He himself is passionate about promoting social justice, but had little familiarity with Effective Altruism. I told him more about Effective Altruism and the Giving Game model, and he and other SSA staff members decided to approve the event. Together, InIn and The Life You Can Save created a Giving Game event specifically targeted to SSA clubs, and the SSA is now actively promoting the Giving Game to its members.
I am delighted with this outcome. As a former member President of a SSA club, I can attest that my past self would have been very eager to host this type of event. Looking back, I would have greatly benefitted from taking the time to sit down, discuss, and reflect seriously on my giving in a context where my decision had real-world consequences. This is the type of activity that would have strongly impacted my thinking and behavior around donations going forward. The Life You Can Save has dedicated $10,000 to its initial pilot program for SSA members, and has promised to fundraise more if it works out, but at least 1000 students will participate in these games as a result of the collaboration between InIn and The Life You Can Save.
How much impact will this have on the world? I cannot say for sure. I do not have the kind of carefully defined measures of impact that GiveWell can provide for direct-action charities. Indeed, it is really difficult to measure the actual impact of any marketing efforts. The best we can do is to build chains of evidence. For example, this article that suggests a powerful long-term impact of donations to support Giving Games. Such estimates apply more broadly to contributions that promote effective giving to the public.
Sure, it is hard to know for sure the exact effects that my efforts spreading the message of effective giving has on the world. Yet when I sit down and think about it, and make my decisions rationally, I am very happy to dedicate my large donations, my monthly giving, as well as my systematic volunteer efforts to publicizing the message of effective giving. While it does not get me the same warm feelings as giving to direct action charities, when I use my head to direct my heart I realize that sponsoring such activities makes the most difference to maximizing donations to effective charities.
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