As many of you will know, Charity Science, the EA organisation that I work for, focuses on fundraising for GiveWell-recommended charities. We’d love to hear suggestions for this, so this is an open call for any and all ways to move money! They’re welcome and encouraged no matter how far-fetched or uncertain - there’s no harm in throwing them out there, and value in sharing. If you’d rather not publicly describe a hare-brained scheme, you can email it to us at team@charityscience.com and say if you wouldn’t like us to share it anonymously.
To provide some food for thought, here are some major areas in fundraising within which you may be able to think up ideas:
- Peer-to-peer fundraising (like our Christmas and birthday fundraisers)
- Events (like the Charity Science walk)
- General fundraising from individuals
- Applying for grants (which we tried and failed at in our Effective Fundraising experiment)
- Corporate fundraising (which we’ve done some initial research into)
- Legacy fundraising (on which see our guide to writing a will)
- Sales (such as our Shop for Charity Amazon portal)
- Unique opportunities (ways to redirect money that already goes to charity, such as several software sales that we have talked to)
Please take some time to come up with any money-moving methods that fall under these or other categories, then share them in the comments below or with us at team@charityscience.com!
Out of this lot I am particularly keen to see someone try legacy fundraising. There's a lot of money there that anecdotally is given away without a lot of research at the moment.
It requires a particular skill set though - in particular great social skills with people over 70. I expect I wouldn't be a good fit for this!
My understanding is that legacy fundraising usually requires strong pre-existing relationships. Do you know if that's true?
Don't know much about how it's done - someone should look into it to see if that's true. :)
Have you considered emulating this, but for effective charities?
http://www.changeheroes.com/
You could try to take the birthday fundraisers in this direction, turning them into a scalable process.
One value adding activity which Charity Science feels well placed to carry out would be putting together the sort of promotional packs which charities with larger fundraising budgets do to support sponsored events, but which most charities favoured within the Effective Altruism movement don't.
I found it difficult to find a simple introduction to SCI and the work they did when I was pitching it as a charity for my work's annual charity auction. (NB: Materials seem to have improved since I did this - http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/schisto/whatwedo Opportunity may well remain, within and beyond SCI)
Thanks Chris, that's an excellent idea and there's a good chance that we'll do this. It fits quite well with other things we do, such as learning a lot about the GiveWell charities and practicing pitching them in a persuasive way. It's not exactly the same thing, but I recently made this infographic showing SCI's impact for our donors.
Register the business on fundraising platforms and inspire employees to donate for charity.
Thanks, I'll get the current CS team to look into this!
Also, does anyone know anyone with experience in fundraising? If so we'd love to be put in touch with them.