Imma🔸
Bio
I work as Software Tester in the Railway Industry and donate a part of my income.
I got into EA in 2012, took the 10 Percent pledge in 2015.
As of autumn 2024, I am also mentor at Giving For Animals. Feel free to reach out if you'd like to chat about donating or a giving pledge.
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FWIW: definitely not a world vision, but Ozy's blog is the most heart-warming thing I've read after the recent US elections.
Some thoughts on what would help. Some of them are already happening.
- funding circles. Note that most official funding circles I know require a large budget and are therefore inaccessible for mid-sized donors.
- Related: a small group of like-minded donors evaluating a specific organization. Donors could reach out to each other and organize themselves.
- Give each other recommendations. If you have expertise of specific cause area and you can recommend organizations (especially when you don't have a conflict of interest with them), do talk about it to potential donors during networking events. Or, if you are a donor, do ask.
- EA funds can publish a more detailed public write-up of their grants, so that interested donors can follow up. Especially interesting when they can't give as much as they want due to funding constraints.
- Donor lotteries
- Impact markets, if implemented well.
- The two local effective giving organizations I know best (Effektiv Spenden and Doneer Effectief) offer donor advising. However, they might be limited to the cause areas they are working in themselves.
As earn to giver, I found contributing to funding diversification challenging
Jeff Kaufmann posted a different version of the same argument earlier than me.
Some have argued that earning to give can contribute to funding diversification. Having a few dozen mid-sized donors, rather than one or two very large donors, would make the financial position of an organization more secure. It allows them to plan for the future and not worry about fundraising all the time.
As earn to giver, I can be one of those mid-sized donors. I have tried. However, it is challenging.
First of all, I don't have expertise, and don't have much time to build the expertise. I spend most of my time on my day job, which has nothing to do with any cause I care about. Any research must be done in my free time. This is fine, but it has some cost. This is time I could have spent on career development, talking to others about effective giving, or living more frugally.
Motivation is not the issue, at least for me. I've found the research extremely rewarding and intellectually stimulating to do. Yet, fun doesn't necessarily translate to effectiveness.
I've seen peer earn to givers just defer to GiveWell or other charity evaluators without putting much thought into it. This is great, but isn't there more? Others said that they talked to an individual organization, thought "sounds reasonable", and transferred the money. I fell for that trap too!
There is a lot at stake. It's about hard-earned money that has the potential to help large numbers of people and animals in dire need. Unfortunately, I don't trust my own non-expert judgment to do this.
So I find myself donating to funds, and then the funding is centralized again. If others do the same, charities will have to rely on one grantmaker again, rather than a diverse pool of donors.
Ideas
What would help to address this issue? Here are a few ideas, some of them are already happening.
- funding circles. Note that most funding circles I know require a large budget and are therefore inaccessible for most earn to givers.
- Related: a small group of like-minded donors evaluating a specific organization.
- Give each other recommendations. If you have expertise of specific cause area and you can recommend organizations (especially when you don't have a conflict of interest with them), do talk about it to potential donors during networking events. Or, if you are a donor, do ask.
- EA funds can publish a more detailed public write-up of their grants, so that interested donors can follow up. Especially interesting when they can't give as much as they want due to funding constraints.
- Donor lotteries
- Impact markets, if implemented well.
Thank you for updating the article with 2023 numbers!
(Commenting this as a signal boost for potential readers.)
Question: Don't Founder's Pledge and Longview also direct funding to AI safety? There might be more. ECF is small but Longview might advise donors who don't use the fund.
One element in 80k's definition of ETG that I like a lot is:
Work a job that’s higher earning than they would have otherwise
In my view, ETG is a career choice. If you choose to ETG, you choose to spend your time on acquiring money to donate and you choose not to do something else with that time.
You may choose to:
- not volunteer or become politically active and spend your time on paid work instead
- not take lower paid direct impact job
... and you donate (roughly) the difference in income. This can be a high amount or a low amount, depending on your circumstances.
I am looking forward to pick a charity once I received an allocation and weigh in the opinion of others and myself. It may not be to my preferred cause, but I still have the freedom to pick a charity within the cause.
That's a great way to learn.
I can see myself recommending EH to beginner donors, donors who haven't thought through their cause prioritization yet, and donors who are very thoughtful relative to their budget.
Yes, but at a different margin.
I live in a culture where working part-time (even among people who are healthy and are not parents, and have comfortable office jobs) is quite common. I sometimes feel that I need to justify myself that I choose to work full time. People talk about their vacations and hobbies all the time. That can trigger FOMO, but I do a lot of fun things myself too. My bar for unpaid leave is high (twice in my career a month in between jobs to find a new place and move).
Reducing my work hours from 40 to 32 would increase my happiness slightly but reduce my donation budget by a lot. I DO feel obliged to maintain my ability to work 40 hours. It is sustainable for me. Sometimes I struggle to work 40 hours and I feel bad about myself. As long as this recovers quickly, it's fine.
I DO NOT feel obligated to work more than 40 hours on my day job. Why:
- cultural reasons
- overworking is discouraged by my colleagues
- longer presence at work does not make pay rises and promotions more likely
- I tried and failed: experienced productivity loss and other issues when I worked more.
Note: for me "being the change I want to see" is actually working 40 hours rather than 32, given the circumstances I am in. YMMV.
2 small donations through Effektiv Spenden.
Unfortunately I will not move a lot of money this year, nor will I spend a lot of time thinking about my donations. But I am happy that I can do at least this little bit.
* I thought that, if everyone with an income similar to mine would do this, the climate would be in a better state, but I was wrong. I quickly fact-checked this. This article on nature.com says "The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that an annual investment of $2.4 trillion is needed in the energy system alone until 2035 to limit temperature rise to below 1.5 °C from pre-industrial levels.". I understand from the article this includes funding from governments and companies. I am not going to disclose my income and my donation budget here, but I can say that my donation is much less than a fair share of this 2.4 trillion. (It may be, if my donation is unusually cost-effective). - apparently it's damn hard to fix climate change.
** there may be difference between funding gap that the org believes they have themselves, and the funding gap that ACE thinks the org has. I mean the latter.