The idea:

I’m not sure if this is common sense/already been done actively by other groups, but I had an idea of another way Uni groups could increase their impact. In sum: Find charity-associated clubs on campus (who donate money to charities), approach them and, with care, explain EA and your purposes of involvement, and offer to support them in their charity donating efforts by creating a proposal for what charities they may consider donating their money to. When the time comes, write a proposal, directing them to high-impact efforts (and potentially offering to take on the work of the money transfer process).

The idea is that, you can try to position yourself as some sort of “philanthropic advisor” (using this term in an unserious way), so as to take on the work of determining which charities they may send money to. This conversation, if done properly, should be framed as a mutually beneficial proposition, since they can be assured that the money is being spent in effective ways and that you can take on the burden of some work they may otherwise not enjoy doing, and we (EAs) can practice our rationally-weighing-different-charity options (something which I imagine EA’s would enjoy doing).

You can also offer to work with them to collaboratively take into consideration which causes/charities they especially want to donate money to, and take that into consideration in your proposal (I’m imagining this resembling the giving multiplier idea, where you can present some split between the money going to more targeted/emotionally driven causes and high impact causes).

This seems like a low-effort, high-reward activity! Many campus clubs are oriented around charity in some way, in the way the club I mentioned in the example below is. Through this effort, I imagine we could redirect a significant portion of proceeds to high impact charity, which seems like it could potentially do a lot of good!

Caveat:

If a charity club is focused on a specific cause or charity, it’s probably best not to approach them with alternative suggestions, as this could undermine their core mission. Be mindful and sensitive to those who are deeply committed to causes that might not align with EA's high-impact criteria. I’m more so talking about clubs who, like in the example below, give a certain portion of funds to charities as a downstream effort they do, rather than as their main "thing." Trust your emotional intelligence and play it by ear!

The situation which inspired me to write this post/Idea for how to pitch EA to non-EAs:

I have a friend who runs his own clothing/design club on campus, where he essentially designs school merchandise, and donates all (or most…I forget) of the proceeds to charity. We were discussing this the other day, and I had a moment of inspiration, where I felt compelled to ask him more about these donating efforts: I asked him which charities they donate to, to which he replied that they (him and the other 8 executive members of the club) usually take a vote on which charity they would prefer the money to go to. I then explained the club I run (Queen’s Effective Altruism), what it is, and how it relates to his club. We had to cut that conversation short, so I followed up with a text message, which I am going to share now, in case someone finds the framing helpful:

...The club that I help run is one that’s surrounds this idea of cost-effectiveness in philanthropy. Essentially, Effective Altruism (EA, the name of the worldwide group/research org which my club is based on at Queen's) was realized when two philosophy Oxford professors noticed that “best” charities (on the metric being lives saved/people helped per dollar) were much, much more effective than the least effective. This eventually evolved into the idea of Effective Altruism, a group-oriented toward bringing light to this massive difference, and wanting to take this idea of cost-effectiveness in charities more seriously/rationally/using rigorous methods of analysis to consider how we can go about allocating our resources in more effective ways. I think it's a really cool idea. Brings together scientific method and altruism. EA also branches off in a tonnn of other domains but for the purposes of this conversation this aspect of charity cost-effectiveness it is all I care about.

What I essentially want to propose is some collaboration around the time when you guys are deciding which charities to choose. I’m not entirely sure what this would look like and would be open to discussing w you, but maybe you allow me and a few other people from my club to engage in an exercise of trying to navigate the best way to spend the money and provide a proposal to you guys? You wouldn’t have to do any work unless you wanted to. And the reason why it benefits us both is that the money collected gets spent effectively/in a way that serves more people. And, to clarify, I'm not married to this idea: I just had it pop up today and thought I would bring it up with you :) 

He responded quite well to the idea, and now we’re on track to discussing more in-depth how we can bring together the charities that he feels pulled to and high-impact charities, so as to donate the raised funds in a way that respects both. And now we may have a good chance of redirecting more money to high-impact charities, with no additional cost.