We're halfway through Giving What We Can's spring fundraising period, but so far we've only raised 25% of our 2015 target, let alone our stretch goal (which would mean that we could focus on our core activities rather than on fundraising for a whole year).
Thank you so much to everyone who has supported us so far! It means a lot to us, and it will mean a lot to the charities that we support.
If you've considered giving to Giving What We Can, now is a great time to do it. Fundraising takes a considerable amount of time and energy. The longer it takes for us to reach our fundraising targets, the more time we have to spend on fundraising activities, and the less time we can devote to inspiring donations to our recommended charities. With our members contributing an average of over $60,000 in lifetime donations to top charities (time discounted and counter-factually adjusted), every member that we don't convince to join up is around 11,000 bednets that won't be distributed, nearly 80,000 people that won't be treated for Schistosomiasis, or 20 lives that won't be saved.
If we fall short of our fundraising goal, we will not be able to offer a long-term position to our current Director of Communications. He has invaluable experience as a Communications Director for several high-profile Australian politicians, which has given him skills in web-development, public relations, graphic design, public speaking and social media. Amongst the things he has already achieved in his three months with us are: he has automated the book-keeping on our Trust (saving huge amounts of time and minimising errors), very much improved our published materials, written a press release and planned a media push to capitalise on our getting to 1000 members and Peter Singer’s book release in the UK. His wide variety of skills mean that there are a large number of projects he would be capable of doing which would increase our member growth, and we are keen for him to test a number of these. But his first, if we can keep him on, is to optimise our website to make the most of the increased attention effective altruism will be generating over the summer and turn that into people actually donating 10% of their incomes to the most effective causes. In the past we have had trouble finding someone with such a broad set of crucial skills. Combined with how swiftly and well he has integrated into our team, it would be a massive loss to have to let him go and later down the line need to try to recruit a replacement.
We believe that Giving What We Can is one of the most effective places you can donate - we calculate that for every dollar we spend on our operations, around $60 is donated to effective charities. This is a truly amazing return on investment.
You can donate at our CauseVox page or the CEA website.
If you'd like to ask any questions about any of this, please feel free to get in touch with us!
Best wishes from Michelle and the Giving What We Can team
Sorry, I was just responding to Ryan's comment, not addressing your overall point.
You're correct that some people we coach are already EAs, but the majority of coachees and especially the 25k monthly website readers either (i) know about EA but aren't actively involved or especially well linked into the community (ii) don't know much about EA. But many people we coach end up active in the community. There's a clear mechanism for this: we make introductions, talk about EA with them, persuade them of the key ideas, and help them figure out how they can be more EA in their career. I'd recommend reading through some of our last evaluation to see the types of career changes people made, many of which involve becoming "more EA". https://80000hours.org/2014/05/plan-change-analysis-and-cost-effectiveness/
Since hardly any recent graduates making career decisions already know about effective altruism, there's huge room of expansion. And talking about career decisions is a great platform for discussing EA ideas, because it's a very big decision but existing advice is so bad.
There's also many people involved with effective altruism but who only donate income and don't know how to apply effective altruism to their career. 80k provides motivation and information to people in this category, making the EA community more effective. Many of our past plan changers are in this category e.g. Peter Hurford. https://80000hours.org/career-guide/member-stories/peter-hurford/
One reflection of this is that we've catalysed the development of 8 new EA non-profits (5 of which have full-time staff) which likely wouldn't have been created if 80k hadn't existed. https://80000hours.org/2015/04/10-new-organisations-founded-due-to-80000-hours/
I think there's a lot more that could be done to improve the career choices of existing EAs. Although our general frameworks are good, the next stage of our research is to investigate all the specific neglected paths EAs could follow e.g. policy careers, what to do within international development, various types of academic research and so on. This is becoming more and more pressing as earning to give looks less important on the margin.
Major arguments against:
Disclosure: I work at 80,000 Hours.