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Luke Freeman

Giving Multiplier Interview with Joshua Greene

, a renowned psychologist and author of the book 

 along with a Giving What We Can member Lucius Caviola.

Giving Multiplier aims to make it easy to introduce people to effective giving by adding bonus money onto their donations if they include highly effective charities alongside their favourite ones. Giving What We Can members get a special higher matching rate to share with their friends and family.

Lucius Caviola and Joshua Greene (along with Stefan Schubert) also recently published '

' which covers some of the research that led to Giving Multiplier.

Here's Joshua explaining how Giving Multiplier works:

So you go to givingmultiplier.org, and after you get a little bit of an explanation about what the thing is all about, the first thing you do is pick a charity that speaks to your heart. One of your personal favourites, right?

And then the next thing you do is you get a list of highly effective charities that have been evaluated and endorsed by organizations like GiveWell, which focuses on finding the best charities for global health and poverty, Animal Charity Evaluators that works on animal charities to reduce animal suffering, and Founders Pledge also has provided evidence for the climate change charity that we're supporting. So you get one of these nine highly effective charities that serve different causes, and you get little explanations about each of those and what they do and why it's important. And you pick one of those.

So now you've got your two charities, the one you picked and the one you took from our list.

And then you decide how much you want to give and how you want to divide your gift between those two. And the more you give to the highly effective charity that we recommended, the higher the matching rate. But whatever you do, as long as you give at least 10% to one of the charities that we pick, you get an additional bonus added on top of both donations.

And then, after you've made your donation, you have the opportunity to pay it forward and support the system so that other people can do what you just did.

So for a while, I (and others in my lab) have been trying to understand what it takes to persuade people to give and to give more effectively when they're making charitable donations. For a long time, we tried what seemed like the most obvious strategy to us: to try to convince other people the way we ourselves were convinced.

So I was convinced long ago when I read the philosopher Peter Singer's famous article '

' in which he compared the predicament of charitable giving or the opportunity of charitable giving to like walking along, and there's a child who's drowning in a pond, and you can save their life at relatively little costs.

It's not zero cost because you might muddy up your clothes, but a relatively small cost compared to saving someone's life. And then Singer famously says: well, there are opportunities out there in the world where you can see save someone's life for the cost of replacing whatever clothes you're wearing.

You should do that. And as a young man, I thought, "you're right, I should do that". And I started doing that, at least to some extent. And so, the natural thought was to try to make the same argument to other people. And what we found is that there's a small number of people who are highly susceptible to this argument: and we go, "yes, of course, why didn't I think of that?", right?

But most people may think it's an interesting philosophical puzzle. They're not necessarily moved to really act on that and change the way they use their resources.

And so recently working with Lucius Caviola, who's my collaborator in the lead on all of this research, we had a different idea, which is instead of trying to persuade people: instead of doing what you're doing, give and give to the most effective charities, the ones that pull the most children out of the metaphorical drowning pond. We have this simple idea, which is just: instead of telling people to do that, instead of what they're doing, say, "why don't you do both"?

Why don't you pick a charity that you love that really speaks to you? Maybe it's something, you know, related to poverty or children, you know, in your neighbourhood or who are like you in some way.

But then also look at the research and choose a charity that is likely to do an enormous amount of good with relatively little money.

And so we presented this in experiments to people and what we found was that a lot of people were very happy to make this kind of split donation where they pick one that speaks to their heart, and they pick one that makes sense to their heads based on their understanding of the research. And they're willing to do that.

And then we did some follow-up experiments where we thought, well, huh, if we incentivize people, if we say, "Hey, we'll add 20% on top if you do this", then even more people were happy to do that. We didn't know if that would backfire or something like that, but it turns out no people were like, great. If you're going to add to my donations, I'll give even more.

And finally, we found that if we asked people after the fact, we said: "Hey, you agree to make this donation, and we added some money on top, would you take some of what you gave and contribute it to a fund which would then pay for matching funds for other people, so you can pay it forward just the way you got these extra bonus dollars for your donation, would you give some bonus dollars to somebody else?"

And we found that not everybody, but a fair number of people, were willing to do that. And enough that it looked like this whole thing could be self-sustaining that there'd be some donors who are willing to provide matching funds that encourage other people to donate and donate more effectively.

And so we put all this together, and we were like, well, it seems like this should work. So we thought we'd give it a try in the proverbial real world.

And so, with the help of some very generous web developers, we created Giving Multiplier, which gives people the opportunity to make these kinds of split donations, where you give one from the heart and one from the head, so to speak, and then you get money added on top. And if you want, you can support the whole thing so that it can keep going.

And it's been successful beyond our wildest dreams in this less than a year that it's been, it's been running.

What have been the results since it launched in November 2020?

So we launched this at the beginning of the giving season, and since then, we've raised over half a million US dollars. And actually, up to around now, I think we're up to about $600,000 total. That's not a huge amount in the grand scheme of philanthropy, but if you're using that money effectively, you know, $600,000 use that effectively, and it can do an enormous amount of good.

We're delighted with how generous people have been and how many people have supported it. The other thing that was just this wonderful surprise, even though it was what we predicted based on the research, is that it has been entirely self-sustaining.

So, you know, everyone's heard of charities having matching funds where they say, oh, we're running a matching campaign where if you give this, this other donor will match it. But it's always a kind of external angel donor. Who's sort of in cahoots with the charity as part of the promotion.

But what we have here is regular people who are finding the site on their own, being those angel donors, doing what we call 'micro matching', and that's a fundamentally new thing as far as we know in charity, and it's made it so that the system is self-sustaining that there are enough people who are willing to pay it forward and support and incentivize other people to make donations in order to cover those incentives that bring them in.

So it's just been this wonderful virtuous circle. I hate to say this, but you know, several people say, "gosh, this sounds like a Ponzi scheme". And like structurally, it does have certain kinds of elements in common with a Ponzi scheme, but with a Ponzi scheme, you know, it all runs out at some point where everyone's looking to get more money out of it and then someone's left empty-handed, but this has this inverse pyramid structure where it is grows and grows, but there's no reason why it has to end, or anyone has to be disappointed in the end. On the contrary, the natural end is when you know global poverty has been eliminated. So we're not, not there yet, but it's it creates this wonderful virtuous circle.

How have most people discovered Giving Multiplier?

So it's been a mix of things. There was a really great article in Vox by Sigal Samuel, who did a lovely job of explaining it. Lucius Caviola, who I mentioned, wrote a really great piece about it with Peter Singer in his syndicated column. Lucius and I also had an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times. And then there were a lot of just super helpful people who helped spread the word on Twitter. But it's, so it's mostly been, you know, a little bit of media and a lot of word of mouth.

(Joshua later added that his conversation on the 

 with GWWC member Sam Harris has also led to a lot of new donors discovering Giving Multiplier)

What is the special offer for the GWWC community?

Yeah, so people who are a part of Giving What We Can already get the idea of giving and giving effectively.

But what we're hoping is that members of the community can use Giving Multiplier as a really nice, friendly, positive way to introduce other people to effective giving by having a kind of offer that meets people where they are and isn't telling them to stop doing something that they already want to do.

It says, look, whatever you love, whatever you want to support, that's great. Keep doing that, but also consider supporting these charities that really do an enormous amount of good per dollar.

I think that's a very friendly way to bring people in, and to sweeten the deal a little bit, we are offering a higher matching rate to Giving What We Can members and their friends and family, the people that want to spread it too. So we will offer a 60% match for giving entirely to an effective charity, and for a 50/ 50 split, we'll offer a 30% match, and then there are different rates in between. And you can see when you go to the website, you can adjust the little slider. So hopefully, that opportunity will sound like a heartwarming good deal to people.

(If you haven't recieved an email with your special matching code, you can use 

What are the plans for Giving Multiplier in the future?

Well, right now, we can only offer people charities registered in the United States. And that's because our whole website is actually made possible by our wonderful partners at every.org. So we are working on giving Every the capacity to make donations outside of the United States. And so we hope to expand to Canada, the UK, and Australia, and then outside the English speaking world. So that's hopefully international soon. And I should say you can still donate outside the US; you just don't get the tax benefits from donating because these are the US versions of these charities.

And then the other thing is we're working on setting up a system so that people can make a recurring donation. We were delighted to see that a lot of people said: "Hey, how can I do this every month?". So hopefully there'll be greater opportunities for people to give more widely around the world and more regularly.

It's been great to have the opportunity to share these thoughts with the Giving What We Can community. There's no group of people who I admire more than the people who've made this commitment to making the world as much better as they possibly can.

I hope that Giving Multiplier can be a useful tool for bringing more people into this circle of effective giving and doing as much good as possible. And looking forward to seeing what people do with it. Thanks so much for giving me a chance to share these ideas.

Thanks to Joshua for joining us - don't forget to share GivingMultiplier.org using the unique one emailed to you if you're on our mailing list (if you haven't recieved an email with your special matching code, you can use 

Member Motivations: Why people pledged to give 10% of their income to effective charities

As of July 2021, over 6,000 people have taken 

 to give at least 10% of their lifetime incomes to highly effective charities.

Given without focusing on charity effectiveness; or

So why have they committed to taking significant action to effectively help others? We asked them.

Why people pledged to give 10% of their income to effective charities

Our team at Giving What We Can has taken on the mission of inspiring donations to the world's most effective organisations. One way in which we do that is by building a community of people who've pledged to give a meaningful portion of their income to effective charities.

To build this community, it is important to understand why people have taken (and upheld) an effective giving pledge. In a world of information overload, our attention is limited. We often only have a few seconds --- or even just a glance --- to reach someone, so understanding our existing members' motivations is an important first step in understanding what might motivate other people to join a community of people committed to giving more, and more effectively.

This might seem straightforward, but we discovered that there were so many different motivations that it was hard to know which ones were most important to lead with. Without a clear understanding of the most compelling messages, we could be missing out on significant community growth -- and thus potentially missing out on billions of dollars that could be donated to highly effective charities.

To understand the strongest motivations of our members, we started by looking at two data sources:

The pledge sign-up survey (where people left comments about their motivations in the "anything else to add" field) and;

We then coded these statements with relevant keywords that captured the underlying messages.

For example, the statement: "Being financially in a luckier position than most of the world, I feel like it is a moral duty to contribute to the good for humanity in general" was grouped with similar messages that were coded with keywords like "moral duty", "income inequality", and "financial stewardship".

Once themes emerged, we tried to capture these themes in various key messages.

In some cases, we included two very similar messages if we wanted to tease apart two similar ideas that had an important distinction (for example, income inequality creating an obligation to help others versus an opportunity to help others).

This resulted in a list of 25 key message statements, which represented most of the motivations identified.

We then asked our members to rate these statements on a five-point scale from "not at all motivating" to "highly motivating", and also by picking their top three motivations.

 124 members responded. Note that our sample is subject to selection bias, and please understand this work as an exploratory project, not as a formal study.

The 25 statements fell broadly into four motivational categories, which we labelled as inequality, emotion, effectiveness, and convenience after doing an exploratory factor analysis.

Two statements seemed to resonate with our members more than the rest: these were the two related to global income inequality.

The Opportunity Framing: "Because I was lucky enough to be born in a relatively wealthy nation, I have the opportunity to help those who need it."

The Responsibility Framing: "Because I was privileged to be born in a relatively wealthy nation, I have a responsibility to help those who need it."

This might be because this global income inequality messaging has been very prominent over the years at Giving What We Can. After all, the 

 and it also features on the homepage. This calculator shows that most people in high-income countries are in the top global 5% and that they could use that income to significantly benefit others.

What is particularly interesting is the difference in ratings between these two framings. The responsibility framing was almost twice as popular when members were asked to select three primary motivations. Almost half the members selected this motivation. However, the opportunity framing had a higher mean score because a small number of members gave the responsibility framing a very low rating. This suggests that the responsibility framing is more popular --- but also more polarising --- than the opportunity framing.

The next two highest-scoring statements were related to charity effectiveness:

GWWC's approach to giving is rational and impact-focused.

 are rigorously vetted and evidence-based

Impact appears to be a highly motivating factor and many members believe that the way to achieve that desired impact is by using evidence and rigour.

The effectiveness statements were incredibly closely followed by two statements that fell in the convenience group of statements, but both specifically focused on how making a pledge helps people follow through:

Making a pledge has helped me to act in better accordance with my own values.

Making a pledge has helped me build a long-term habit around charitable giving; it will keep me accountable over time.

Most of the emotion-related motivations ranked lower than the other groups of statements. However, they were still predominantly averaging "moderately motivating" or higher. The outlier of the emotion group was one that related to meaning and purpose. While its average score ranked 10th (out of 25), it was the third-most selected when members could only pick three motivations:

Making a giving pledge provides meaning or purpose in my life.

Yellow = Inequality, Green = Effectiveness, Blue = Convenience, Red = Emotion

This project was exploratory in nature. We have much more work to do before we can fully understand these motivations and which ones will resonate most with new potential members. In particular, we'd like to develop an understanding of the extent to which the motivations of our current members can also motivate new members. At this stage, a few things seem pretty clear as motivators:

People with means have an enormous opportunity to help others;

They can have a much bigger impact if they donate effectively;

Committing to act on this opportunity can help them to follow through on their plans to give; and

Following through can help bring meaning and purpose to the lives of these committed effective givers.

Please let me know in the comments what you think about this research, anything that resonated with you, or anything we might have missed.

To give you a bit of motivation I'll leave you with two open text responses written by Mike from the UK and Patrick from Germany, both of which resonated with me personally:

"We did not choose to be who we are, so if we are lucky, then we should be sharing that luck with others where we can." - Mike, UK

"It's motivating to know that you can help many humans and animals and being part of a group of people that also value this. Being an effective giver gives me purpose and has become an important part of my identity." - Patrick, Germany

July 2021 Newsletter

Thanks to those of you who participated in our member motivations research! 

why people pledge to give a meaningful portion of their incomes to effective charities

We have further research to do, but at this stage, a few things seem pretty clear as motivators:

 who recently shared her effective giving story on our blog.

 is a great way to inspire others to also give effectively.

We hope you enjoy the rest of this newsletter, which covers our upcoming online events, the latest from the effective altruism community, and news and updates about relevant cause areas.

Come along and meet other people who are committed to effectively using their resources to improve the world:

:
Ask anything, discuss donations, meet effective givers


If you have any questions or want to discuss your donation decisions with other members or our team, we recommend registering for an Open Forum event. 

'The most successful EA podcast of all time'

 by Aaron Gertler, Centre for Effective Altruism

 three full-time fellows for a one-year fellowship to cover topics of global importance

'What would you do if you had half a million dollars?'

 asks Patrick, winner of the $500k donor lottery

'Key Lessons From Social Movement History'

hiring two roles in global health & wellbeing

Animal Charity Evaluators have provided 

updates for their 2020 ACE Movement Grants recipients

'Cultivated meat was once a vision, now it's becoming a reality'

'France bans killing day-old chicks, sparing 50 million chicks annually'

'Bezos, Gates back fungus-based meat as next big alt-protein'

8.1 million nets for distribution in Nigeria

How to improve global health and wellbeing in clear and direct ways

 according to Alexander Berger from Open Philanthropy on the 80,000 Hours Podcast

'The world is making progress on clean water and sanitation, but is far behind its target to ensure universal access by 2030'

Blog

Giving Multiplier Interview with Joshua Greene

Member Motivations: Why people pledged to give 10% of their income to effective charities

July 2021 Newsletter

Member Profile: Rickey Fukazawa

June 2021 Newsletter

Why should we donate to the most effective charities?

Does aid make low-income countries dependent on handouts?

Do effective animal advocates only care about farmed animals?

Donating anonymously: Should we be private or public about giving to charity?

How much money should we donate to charity?