Hi everyone,

I’d like to ask for some ideas about promoting effective giving in the workplace. This was inspired by a great breakout session at EA Reconnect a couple of weeks ago. I work in a medium-sized biotech company (<1000 employees) and we have a small annual budget for charitable donations. The management’s choice of charities to support doesn’t seem at all EA-aligned, and in general very few people in the company have heard of EA, so I’m interested in doing some workplace outreach to change this. 

There’s some great advice in the posts How we promoted EA at a large tech company and Learnings from scaling the Effective Altruism and Consulting Network/ an EA group for one profession as umbrella for different workplace groups, and I wonder how much of it would be applicable to smaller companies. The main challenges I see are: 

• A much smaller budget for donations than would be available in big companies
• Lack of a strong corporate social responsibility model
• As a result of the first two points, potential reluctance of senior management to engage with EA ideas.

I’ve got a few questions and would love to hear some input:

• Has anyone had experience successfully promoting effective giving in a medium-sized company? If so, how did you do it?
• Is it better to focus on influencing official company donations, or changing individual employees’ giving behaviour?
• Is it worth campaigning to increase the company’s annual donation budget, or to better allocate existing funds?

Thank you to all who contribute.