Thing I want to exist: a good intro to effective giving

Headshot of Adam Jones

Adam Jones

(This is a highvol post, and much scrappier than usual!)

Two children smiling under a mosquito net. Public domain photo by Riccardo Gangale

Image: Twins Dorcas and Deborah, 7, under their mosquito net at home in Musoma, Tanzania.

A bunch of people could get pretty rich pretty soon, and will be thinking about their finances. It'd be useful to have a good intro to effective giving for them.

The best resource would:

  • Target "normal" folk, who:
    • Might look like average "big tech" employees.
    • Are not effective altruists or rationalists: they have the regular "normal" people biases (scope insensitivity, proximity bias, etc.), might not have thought about having impact at all, and won't automatically subscribe to 'I should have the most impact with my money'. It's probably the wrong approach to bring people around to EA / rationalist thinking first; we should convince them of effective giving directly.
    • View doing good as a "nice thing to do", but don't build their lives around it. They might also be skeptical of giving money, especially to far away places, as a way to do good ("How can I trust it's used sensibly? It just goes to rich charity CEOs / subsidises foreign governments / gets diverted. I'd rather give to my local school's ski trip fund - at least I know how that gets spent.").
  • Be tested with the target audience, and revised until it actually persuades. It shouldn't just "seem right": we should have data that it works.
  • Probably contain some of the following, modulo that testing (the links gesture at what I mean):
  • Push for donating or pledging a meaningful %, not just nodding at the idea of giving.

There's a good chance something like this already exists and I'm just not aware of it. If so, send it to me! And if it doesn't, writing it could be extremely valuable - then definitely send it to me.

Appendix: things that Claude found

I asked Claude to find existing resources matching this description. I don't think any of these match what I want end to end (top-level bullets by Claude, sub-bullets by me):

  • Giving Multiplier: the standout on "tested until it actually persuades", which almost everything else fails. Built by Harvard/Cambridge psychologists out of published experiments: letting people split between their favourite charity and a "super-effective" one increased effective giving by ~76%. No jargon, concrete examples ("$7 protects a child from malaria"). Misses: it's a donation platform rather than an intro you'd send someone to read, and it optimises for a one-off donation rather than a meaningful-% pledge.
    • Agree the main failure is that it's a donation platform rather than an intro.
    • It also doesn't motivate giving in the first place: it assumes you're going to give to a charity, then asks "why not tag in another?"
    • It doesn't get people to reconsider the scale of their donations: someone already planning a $50 donation might divert some of it to a more effective charity (+ matching), or give 20% more. But nothing inspires that $50 donation in the first place, or asks "why $50 and not $10,000 or $100,000?"
  • Giving What We Can's pledge page: the closest full package on the funnel criterion: opportunity framing ("anyone earning $65k post-tax is in the global top 1%"), light on jargon, and a trial pledge as a low-commitment entry ramp. Their How Rich Am I calculator might be the best cold-intro artifact. Misses: doesn't seem to have been rigorously tested on non-EA audiences, and the surrounding site is still written by-and-for EA-adjacent people.
    • I disagree a bit that this is written for EA-adjacent people: it feels more approachable than most of these.
    • It may have been tested on the public; I'm not sure. I'm surprised the first two bullets lead with "you are rich" and "effective charities can be 100x more effective": the lead should probably be reshaping the world (the third bullet?).
    • The pie chart of what we could accomplish is pretty awesome - though people would probably be more motivated by what just they can accomplish.
  • The Life You Can Save: explicitly aimed at ordinary donors; free ebook/audiobook narrated by Kristen Bell, Stephen Fry, etc. Misses: Singer's drowning-child argument is exactly the obligation framing I don't want, and a book is a high-friction funnel entry.
    • The main thing is that a book is just much, much more heavyweight - the audiobook is 7 hours 19 minutes! An actual book is faster, but still multiple hours: a commitment most people won't make, especially if they're not already motivated.
    • Agree drowning-child is a good argument, but it has the obligation frame that (I think?) turns people off.
    • I haven't read the book myself, so don't know how it scores elsewhere.
  • One for the World: deliberately normie-friendly pitch to students and young professionals, with a pledge funnel. Misses: 1% rather than a meaningful %, and it's an outreach org more than a shareable resource.
    • One for the World does great work, but their website doesn't seem well optimised for converting people, or as an intro resource. It flags the big problem of extreme poverty, then immediately suggests a 1% pledge to nonprofits. The impact feels too diffuse and abstract, and it doesn't tackle many of the objections people have. I think Giving What We Can's pledge page is probably strictly better.
  • Raise: perhaps the purest example of the positive framing: it bills itself as "a celebration of giving" and asks students for a "personally significant donation" - the meaningful-amount-not-just-nodding criterion, scaled to student means. No EA jargon, and the community celebration (a summer party reflecting on collective impact) makes giving feel good rather than dutiful. Misses: students rather than soon-to-be-rich professionals, and an in-person chapter movement rather than a shareable intro - it doesn't reach someone sitting at home with appreciating equity.
    • Agree the focus is students, and the pages introduce chapters rather than being an end-to-end intro.
  • Founders Pledge: best match for "people about to get pretty rich": pledge a % of your exit before the money lands, when it's psychologically cheap. Misses: founders only, and assumes you're already sold on giving. Nobody seems to have built the equivalent for employees with appreciating equity - arguably the exact gap this post points at.
    • The main miss is that it's focused on founders. I mean, it is in the name.
    • It's also vague about the impact one person can have, and lacks the intro that convinces people to consider giving at all: it assumes people arrive wanting to give, and just need advice.
  • Charity Navigator's Introduction to Effective Giving: weak as persuasion, but from the brand skeptical normal people already trust - which speaks directly to the "rich charity CEOs" objection.
    • Again, this assumes the frame "I want to donate; how do I do the most good with it?"
    • It also doesn't motivate giving big, e.g. $100k over $50.
  • The School for Moral Ambition: the best recent example of selling EA-ish ideas to a mainstream audience with pure opportunity framing and zero EA branding. Misses: it's about careers, not giving a %.
    • Yeah, this is much more about training people up and building community than effective giving.