This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?
Summary
Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions.
Public Opinion...
I think right now EAs might be making a significant mistake by paying insufficient attention to the political realm. As EAs we tend to figure out what’s most impactful for us to work on and focus hard. That’s great! But there are various actions that are ‘non-delegatable’ - the extent to which an individual can do the action is limited (like voting, going to a protest, making hard money contributions to particular campaigns). It might be useful if we were all more in the habit of doing variou...
This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
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I was looking to start some type of donation drive for the march 8th holiday. I'm pretty sold on Population Services International as the most effective choice for this initiative but I'm of course open to suggestions.
Most importantly, I was looking for help with how exactly to format such a drive through reddit. The plan is to wrangle any number of women-oriented subreddits into stickying something about the drive. The sticky would include a donation link, some info about the charity, and maybe if this is wise, an elevator pitch about EA.
Does a donation matching drive even work without some big org doing the matching? I guess people could comment that they're willing to donate $X if someone matches, and then others can reply to accept such a match?
Should users be required or encouraged to post "proof" of their donations?
Is there some convenient way to track all of the total donations? I could just do it in a spreadsheet I guess?
I have no experience with any of this, so if this seems doomed to fail, that's also something I need to hear.
Thanks for your time!
Donation matching would just create confusion and reduce the total amount of donations if you had to first coordinate with someone else in the comments section. So if you want "matching", you definitely need a big donor promising to match all the money raised from small donors. But I wouldn't try to do "matching" anyways -- EAs aren't big fans of donation matching since the "doubled" funds are rarely a "true counterfactual match".
I think a more promising idea would be to have a multi-subreddit competition, like how r/neoliberal participates in a yearly giving competition with some other subreddits to fundraise for Against Malaria Foundation. You should ask people to donate through a special link so that everyone can see how much money has been donated so far by different subreddits -- hopefully the r/neoliberal AMF drive is easy to replicate with other charities: https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/k2cacg/rneoliberal_fights_malaria_fall_2020_edition/
I think your idea of expanding subreddit donation drives to feminist groups on International Women's Day is a great one! I agree that including a quick pitch about EA (to explain the logic behind choosing the particular organizations) would be helpful to people.
If you're interested in EA-endorsed charities with a feminist / women's health side, I would definitely recommend you check out Family Empowerment Media: https://www.familyempowermentmedia.org/
Per their site, FEM "uses radio to provide women [in Nigeria where FEM operates] with important information about modern forms of contraception. In many countries, radio is the most widely trusted and consumed form of media. Studies indicate that in areas where contraceptives are available, intensive radio campaigns can be one of the most cost-effective ways to help families realize their family planning intentions."
This is all fantastic info, Jackson. Thank you very much! I have a lot to think about now and might add more to this response later.
I expanded on these ideas a bit more in the comments to another recent post about leveraging International Women's Day. You and gogreatergood might want to work together to create some posts promoting EA-endorsed, women-empowering charities!
Hey! Jackson alerted me to this post, cause I just posted something similar: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LRcy4cSmgmXxhy8ym/power-of-int-l-women-s-day-march-8
(Aside from the post itself, Jackson made some helpful comments there as well, which I would recommend looking at!)
This is my 4th year in a row donating to Fistula Foundation on IWD, and trying to get others to donate as well. I usually do something a little extra to get some attention (one time I slept outside for a week in the winter; now a days I do a personal donation match up). I have had great uptake among family and friends (and even some strangers), to donate to FF, and on top of that... to know the important work that FF does... and to also be more educated about effective giving in general. (Hearing people put this in their own words at a later date... who learned about it through me... is an awesome experience.)
As far as posting to feminist-themed reddits and facebook groups etc, I have tried, with little attention gained, and no donations that I know of. I think this can be good still though; sometimes you just need to phrase it the right way, post at the right time, get it to the right person, etc.
Anyway, let me know over there, or over here, if you have any thoughts. It's last minute, but curious if you have any thoughts about this year; and also if you might be interested to possibly team up for next year.
-- Thomas