On this board we've had many very interesting discussions about outreach, and promoting EA and EA causes to a mainstream/broader audience (examples linked below). I'm trying to help pull together our evidence on what we have tried and what works.
Background: I'm an academic economist at the University of Exeter, working on a project called Innovations in Fundraising, in partnership with the Centre for Effective Altruism. We're looking into the questions of why people donate to effective charities, and the ways in which they do this. We're building a wiki, in which we're collating useful resources for charities, fundraisers, donors, researchers, employers, effective altruists and the third sector to use to make their fundraising and giving more effective.
A major goal is to collect and organise stories and evidence:
- from people who have (attempted) to organise a fundraiser in their workplace, voluntary group, or other organisation for an effective charity,
- or who have tried to convince their organisation (or important decisionmakers) to support or endorse an effective charity.
If you think you've a relevant anecdote or two to add, I'd be grateful if you could take a few minutes to fill in our survey about your experiences (link to Google form HERE).
You can give your identifying info or remain anonymous, whichever is more convenient for you. We will organise and share all this information via the wiki, so we can all build an evidence base and learn from others’ experiences. You could also add to aforementioned wiki directly, if you prefer (relevant page here). At the moment, we are looking for a broad range of information. As we collect this, we will move towards a more systematic approach, and possibly aim to add a few questions to Rethink Charity's EA Survey.
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And, as promised, some example links to interesting past discussions:
"Making EA more emotionally appealing" and Be A Superdonor!: Promoting Effective Altruism by Appealing to the Heart" (Gleb_T)
"How can people be persuaded to give more (and more effectively)?" (cites interesting scientific evidence) (Denise_Melchin)
Cause neutrality limits the movement's growth (IanDavidMoss)
Fact checking ... importance of presenting accurate numbers (saulius)
EA's image problem (Tom Davidson)
Some EAs (including me) put together a bunch of research on the effectiveness of different fundraising methods.
This is a great resource, thanks Peter
Thank you; I had not seen this before. It is very helpful and I will strive to incorporate this.