Hi folks! Building up on the recent experiment and the #LessWrongMoreNice meme, this thread is devoted to any and all expressions of gratitude. Special rules for communication and voting apply here. Please play along!

A lot of research shows that expressing gratitude improves mental and physical health, qualities that most of us want to increase. So in this thread, please express anything you are grateful for, big or small, one-time or continuing, and feel free to post stuff that you would not normally post to Less Wrong. Encourage and support others in what they post in comments, and upvote posts that you like, while downvoting those that don't express the spirit of this thread.

If you want to discuss this thread, please do so in response to this open thread comment.

I'm grateful to you for following the spirit of this thread!

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.

Trigger warning: politics is hard mode.

"How to you make America safer from terrorists" is the title of my op-ed published in Sun Sentinel, a very prominent newspaper in Florida, one of the most swingiest of the swing states in the US for the presidential election, and the one with the most votes. The maximum length of the op-ed was 450 words, and it was significantly edited by the editor, so it doesn't convey the full message I wanted with all the nuances, but such is life. My primary goal with the piece was to convey methods of thinking more rationally about politics, such as to use probabilistic thinking, evaluating the full consequences of our actions, and avoiding attention bias. I used the example of the proposal to police heavily Muslim neighborhoods as a case study. Hope this helps Floridians think more rationally and raises the sanity waterline regarding politics!

EDIT: To be totally clear, I used guesstimates for the numbers I suggested. Following Yvain/Scott Alexander's advice, I prefer to use guesstimates rather than vague statements.

My peer-reviewed article in a psychology journal on the topic of meaning and purpose in a non-religious setting is now accessible without a paywall for a limited time, so get it while it's free if you're interested. I'd be interested in hearing your feedback on it. For those curious, the article is not directly related to my Intentional Insights project, but is a part of my aspiration to raise the sanity waterline regarding religion, the focus of Eliezer's original piece on the sanity waterline.

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!

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

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.

Based on an earlier suggestion, here's an outreach thread where you can leave comments about any recent outreach that you have done to convey rationality-style ideas broadly. The goal of having this thread is to organize information about outreach and provide community support and recognition for raising the sanity waterline. Likewise, doing so can help inspire others to emulate some aspects of these good deeds through social proof and network effects.

Summary/TL;DR: this piece offers Fermi Estimates of the value of those in EA, focusing on the distinctions between typical EA members and dedicated members (defined below). These estimates suggest that, compared to the current movement baseline, we should prioritize increasing the number of “typical” EA members and getting more non-EA people to behave like typical EA members, rather than getting typical EAs to become dedicated ones.

[Acknowledgments: Thanks to Tom Ash, Jon Behar, Ryan Carey, Denis Drescher, Michael Dickens, Stefan Schubert, Claire Zabel, Owen Cotton-Barratt, Ozzie Gooen, Linchuan Zheng, Chris Watkins, Julia Wise, Kyle Bogosian, Max Chapnick, Kaj Sotaja, Taryn East, Kathy Forth, Scott Weathers, Hunter Glenn, Alfredo Parra, William Kiely,  Jay Quigley, and others who prefer to remain anonymous for looking at various draft versions of this post. Thanks to their feedback, the post underwent heavy revisions. Any remaining oversights, as well as all opinions expressed, are my responsibility.]

This article is a follow-up to "Celebrating All Who Are In Effective Altruism"