I self publish Pride and Prejudice fan fiction a living, and at the back of my books I always include a request to people that they donate to charity. I decided to experiment and ask the forum to find out if anyone can tell me a way what I've written way better/ more powerful/ effective.
The modal member of my audience is a retired woman who likes historical romances, so my goal is to write something that might get your mother or grandmother to take action.
I have always told the readers to donate to Doctors Without Borders -- I pick that organization because while it is not on the frontier of cost effectiveness (and the work it does is probably more replaceable than that done by, for example Give Directly), it is an effective and transparent organization which also has a huge amount of brand recognition already, and it is not very weird. I am very open to figuring out ways to also / instead mention speficially EA organizations, if that feels to me like it would be likely to be effective.
Anyways, this is what I currently have in the back of the next novel I'm going to publish:
I also want to remind everyone that we can make the world a better place by helping those who are in desperate need get medicine, food, and medical attention. There are of course lots of other important ways to help, but donating to Doctors Without Borders every month is one of the ways I’ve chosen to help create a world that is just a little more like the one I would like to see.
Doctors Without Borders is literally stopping people from dying, and it makes me very happy to know that part of my money (which started as your money, my dear readers, thank you!) helps make the surgeries, examinations, immunizations, and provision of antibiotics happen. And it makes me very happy when I receive emails from my readers who want to tell me that they are also choosing to be part of making this world a better, safer and healthier place for everyone.
So join me, pick some amount of money that you feel comfortable giving up, whether it is five or ten dollars a month, one hundred dollars a month, or one percent of your income, or two percent, or whatever you can afford joyfully, and help others.
The current note is well-written! I'd shrink the last bit to: "whether it ten dollars a month, one percent of your income, or whatever you can afford joyfully, and help others." $100/month is already going to be more than 1% of most incomes, and $5 seems very close to $10.
If you're a member of GWWC or Try Giving, you may want to include a link to this or OFTW (on "one percent of your income") in case someone is curious enough to explore. I'd prefer GWWC, since their website is more informative and signing up might put someone on pace to join the full pledge eventually (whereas OFTW doesn't try too hard to get people past 1% that I know of — though I might be wrong).
The nice thing here is that you don't need to worry about driving people away with a big pitch (as long as you're nice about it), since they've already bought and finished your book.
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As for the charity, it seems like you should advertise whichever one you personally support, as long as that's an easily understood option. (If you support something really obscure, makes sense to pitch something more appropriate for people without as much EA context.)
GiveDirectly is growing as a brand and is easy to explain, but AMF is probably more cost-effective and also easy to explain (with a nice, descriptive name), so I'd go with that in your position (though again, only if you actually support the org!). AMF is also literally stopping people from dying, and their work on net provision and malaria research can be subbed in for your description of DWB.
I think I'll add a line with a link to both OFTW and GWWC, and also I've removed the $100 and the $5.
"The nice thing here is that you don't need to worry about driving people away with a big pitch (as long as you're nice about it), since they've already bought and finished your book."
I actually got negative reviews on my first two books about the donation appeal which had more guilt based / 'let me describe the suffering' arguments, and since then I've systematically tried to make them very positive.