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by Toby Tremlett🔹
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Effective givingBuilding effective altruismAnnouncements and updatesEffective Altruism ForumGiving Season (2024)
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Giving Season 2024 will be running from November 4th to December 31st. The Forum will look seasonably pretty, and we’ll run several mini-events, including an interactive donation election, a marginal funding week, a donation celebration, and multiple AMAs.

Giving Season will highlight effective giving, and help us donate better

Last year, Giving Season:

  • Raised $30K through our donation election fund.
  • Led to 2800 hours spent reading posts on the topic of effective giving.
  • Led to more celebration of earning to give as a career path.  

This year, we’d like to focus on:

  • Helping people make better donation decisions (via a more discursive donation election, discussed below).
  • Encouraging more effective giving discussion — helping it remain part of EA culture.

The Forum will be seasonally decorated, and effective giving posts will be encouraged

Alongside the Giving Season banner on the homepage, we'll be highlighting effective giving posts with coloured tags. 

Although we will have specific theme weeks, we’d love to see posts at any time throughout the season which discuss effective giving. Below are some (currently imaginary) posts I’d be happy to see:

  • How I convinced my student union to raise money for effective charities
  • Why it’s better to invest your money than to donate now
  • Where to donate this Giving Season if you want to reduce AI X-risk
  • Why early donors matter for small orgs
  • Personal reflections on my relationship to effective giving

Alongside related posts and mini-events, we’ll be hosting a range of AMAs, including a few with people who have been earning-to-give for a long time. Message me if you think you’d be a great candidate for an AMA!

There will be a range of Giving Season activities, with focus on a marginal funding week and a donation election.

Current mock-up of the fancy Giving Season banner

Note that precise details, especially legal details for the donation election event, are subject to change. If you’d like to be made aware of changes, either directly let me know, or subscribe to my quick takes.

November 4 - 10: Funding Strategy Week

Note that this was previously called "Funding Diversification Week" but we have changed the title to better reflect the scope of the event. 

Read more about the event in Will Howard's recent post. 

Before we get into the Donation Election, and discussions of marginal funding, it’d be valuable to have some more meta conversations about funding such as:

  • How valuable is earning to give?
  • How can EA diversify its funding base?
  • (In what way) does it matter for small donors to spend time thinking about donations?
  • What can game + decision theory tell us about donation splitting, donation timing, the value of lotteries etc...?
  • What parts of EA causes should be funded by mainstream donors and foundations? Why don’t they currently appeal?

Funding strategy is important to everyone in EA. Our view on how important it is to get funding from different donors/types of donors affects career plans, and how organisations manage fundraising.

I’ll be organising some posts and an AMA. Let me know if you have takes you’d like to share, and would appreciate some feedback/accountability.

November 11 - 17: Marginal Funding Week

Marginal funding week is a time for organisations to share their funding gaps, and explain what they would do with marginal funding.

Marginal funding week was very successful last year (see the posts here). It got organisations a lot of direct donations, and it seemed to influence many of the votes in the donation election. 

This year, eligible candidates for the Donation Election must have posted a comment or post during marginal funding week.

However, even if your charity or organisation is not interested in being included in the Donation Election, or otherwise isn't eligible, you are very much encouraged to post during marginal funding week.

November 18 - December 3: Donation Election

More details in this post.

Similar to last year, the Donation Election is an event where Forum users can add to a pot of money (the "Donation Election Fund"), and then vote on how we allocate it. CEA will match the first $5000 donated. 

For a charity to be a candidate[1], it must:

  1. Post during marginal funding week.
  2. Be a 501(c)3 in the US, or a registered charity in the UK[2]. 

If you represent a charity which intends to do (1) and qualifies for (2), please contact us via forum [at] centreforeffectivealtruism [dot] org so that we can confirm your candidacy. 

The Donation Election Fund will open soon (we are aiming for November 4th), with rewards (such as bad animal drawings) available for donors. 

"Wolf and chameleon" donor request from last year. If you donate, an image like this could be yours.


Voting will open after Marginal Funding Week, on the 18th of November. Voting will be open until Giving Tuesday (December 3rd).

This year, we’d like the Donation Election to lead to discussions. As a way of encouraging this, we will make the aggregate votes visible on a frontpage banner, so that people can respond to the Forum’s current prioritisation.

When you vote, you will, as last year, be able to explain your vote. However, you will also be given the option to make that explanation public. If you choose to, it will be posted on a donation election discussion thread, where other users can disagree, or nudge you to reconsider your vote.

You can read about last year's winners here. More details on the Donation Election will be posted closer to its launch. 

December 16 - 22: Pledge Highlight

During this week, we’ll be working with Giving What We Can to facilitate some valuable conversations about pledges.

There will be threads on the frontpage for you describe why you have, or haven’t taken a pledge, and we are inviting posts with personal stories about your experience with pledging, or more general arguments for and against the idea of pledging in general.

December 23 - End of Year: Donation Celebration

We’ll have a heart banner- like last year- where you can add a heart if you’ve done your annual donations, and add a comment along with your heart.

Let me know in the comments or dm if you have any questions, thoughts or feedback about our giving season plans.

Also, if you'd like to write a post for any of our theme weeks (especially the upcoming Funding Strategy Week) or for giving season in general, feel free to comment your idea below for feedback and accountability. 

  1. ^

    The Forum team reserves the right to revoke candidacy for any reason. 

  2. ^

    Apologies to the many great non-UK/US charities. Donations to such charities are significantly more complex for our operations team to support, so we have made the decision to focus only on UK and US registered charities for this year’s event.

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John Salter2
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The UK / US requirement seems both damaging and completely arbitrary. What's the reasoning? Lots of strong charities, including many AIM-incubated ones, aren't incorporated and instead work via a fiscal sponsor. Can you clarify if they are eligible?

 

Edit: saw the footnote about UK/US.

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Sarah Cheng26
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Compared to last year's donation election, which was limited to programs that are already listed on GWWC (note that they do not list all AIM-incubated programs), we expect many more programs to be eligible for candidacy this year, and I think that is already a big improvement. 

To accomplish this, we are not using GWWC's platform this year, and are instead hosting the fund directly within EV. There are still legal details we need to confirm with the EV legal team, which is why we mentioned that we plan to publish a separate post about the Donation Election — this will likely be published at the start of our Giving Season event (Nov 4), but may be sooner as well.

As Jason suggested, there is a fair amount of admin overhead for EV ops to handle the legal, financial, and grantmaking work of the donation election fund. We are really appreciative of the time they can provide us, but they also support all the other projects within EV so there is only so much we can ask of them.

For the specific question about fiscal sponsors: my understanding is that, as long as the fiscal sponsor is a registered charity in the US or UK, and the program receiving the donation agrees that we can distribute money to them via that sponsor, then that will allow the program to be eligible for the donation election.

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Jason6
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The Forum team can confirm / disconfirm, but the rationale suggests that having a fiscal sponsor who meets the US 501(c)(3) or UK registered charity requirement would be sufficient.

For a US 501c3, there's a lot of admin overhead to give to a non-501c3. I assume the same is broadly true in the UK. So the US/UK requirement makes sense if there's no 501c3/registered charity on the other end.

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