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this is: A new strategy for broadening the appeal of effective giving (GivingMultiplier.org), published by Lucius_Caviola on the effective altruism forum.
In this post, I introduce an ongoing research project with the aim of bringing effective giving to a wider range of altruists. The strategy combines 1) donation bundling (splitting between your favorite and an effective charity), 2) asymmetrical matching (offering higher matching rates for allocating more to an effective charity), 3) a form of donor coordination (to provide the matching). After conducting a series of experiments, we will test our strategy in the real-world using our new website GivingMultiplier.org. This project is a collaboration with Prof Joshua Greene and is supported by an EA Funds grant.
Background
It is difficult to motivate people to give more effectively. Presenting people with information about charity effectiveness can increase effective giving to some extent (Caviola, Schubert, et al., 2020a; 2020b). However, the effect is limited because most people prefer to give to their favorite charity even when they know that other charities are more effective (Berman et al., 2018). This is because people are motivated by ‘warm glow’ of giving (Andreoni, 1990), which isn’t a good proxy for effectiveness. Another issue is that most people aren’t motivated to proactively seek out information about the most effective charities. But making people care more about effectiveness is difficult. In multiple studies I have found that presenting people with moral arguments makes little to no difference. (Though moral arguments might work for some people and under the right circumstances, cf. Lindauer et al., 2020; Schwitzgebel et al., 2020.) Therefore, the approach we take here is to work with people’s preferences instead of trying to change them.
The strategy
Below is a short summary of the set of techniques our strategy relies on. In our experiments, 2,000 (Amazon MechanicalTurk) participants made probabilistically implemented decisions involving real money. If you are interested in more details about our studies and results, you can find an early working draft here.
1) Donation bundling
We found that donations to effective charities can be increased by up to 75% when people are offered the option to split their donation between their favorite and a highly effective charity (Study 1). We call this technique donation bundling. Most donors find such bundle options appealing because they enjoy nearly all the warm-glow of giving exclusively to their favorite charity, but also gain the satisfaction of giving more effectively and fairly (Study 2). Likewise, we find that third-parties perceive bundle donors as both highly warm and highly competent, as compared to donors who give exclusively to an emotionally appealing charity (warm, but less competent) or exclusively to a highly effective charity (competent, but less warm) (Study 3).
2) Asymmetrical matching
The bundling technique can be enhanced by offering matching funds in an asymmetrical way, i.e. the matching rate increases as more is allocated to the effective charity. In our studies, participants were offered higher matching rates, the more they would give to the effective charity as opposed to their favorite charity. For example, they might get a 10% matching rate for giving 50% to their favorite and 50% to the effective charity, but a 20% matching rate for giving 100% to the effective charity. We found that asymmetrical matching can increase donations to effective charities by an additional 55% (Study 4). A key advantage of offering donation matching is that it provides people with no prior interest in effective giving to visit the site and choose to support a highly effective charity.
3) Matching as donor coordination
Where does the matching funding come from? We ...
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