glad to hear you like it! :)

This one is nice as well! 

Personally I like the method of embedding the link in the story, but since a many in my test audience considered it off-putting and too advertisement-like I thought it it better to trust their feedback, since I obviously personally already agree with the thought I'm trying to convey with my text. But like I said I'm not certain what the best solution is, probably there is no perfect one.

I tried out a couple of different ones and iterated based on feedback. 

One ending I considered would have been just leaving out the last paragraph and linking to GiveWell like this:

“Besides,” his best friend said. “If you actually want to save a life for 5000 dollars, you can do it in a way where you can verify how they are doing it and what they need your money for.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, now more confused than ever.

I also considered embedding the link explicitly in the story like this:
 

“Besides,” his best friend said. “If you actually want to save a life for 500 dollars, you can do it in a way where you can verify how they are doing it and what they need your money for.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, now more confused than ever.

"I'll send you a link", she said.

And the link she send him was this: https://www.givewell.org/ 

However, some of my testers found that this also broke the flow and that moving the link "outside" the story gave a less advertisement-like feeling.

And I also tried an ending that would wrap up the story more nicely (at this point the whole story was around 40% longer and not that well-edited in general):

“You know there are organizations that save people from dying of preventable illness and poverty,” she said. “The best ones can actually save a life for around that much, maybe even less.”

“But how do I know what those organizations are and how much they actually need to save somebody from dying?” he asked. “That sounds even more complicated than coming up with questions about side effects to the fey.”

“You don’t have to do that all by yourself,” she said. “There are people who are working on this stuff. You can see if you agree with their reasoning and conclusions, and then make your own decisions.”

This could be something. For a split second, he wished she wouldn’t have told him that. If what she said was true, he would have to make a choice, again. But it was better to know than to not know. And suddenly the thought of actually being able to save a person who would otherwise die was so overwhelming he had a hard time wrapping his head around it.

“I guess I don’t really like making decisions,” he said.

“I feel you,” she said. “But if you don’t make a choice, that’s actually a decision, too. It just means you chose to do nothing.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve noticed.” 

The fey were still in the woods, and would be in the woods, maybe forever. It didn’t matter. Anyway, he had to choose. But at least he could find out what his options were.

This longer ending was most liked by readers that were already quite familiar with EA, so I decided to not go for it, since I wanted to write for people who have not thought and discussed about EA that much yet. But of course, my pool of proof-readers was not that big and everyone was at least somewhat familiar with EA, even if not involved in the movement. It would be interesting to get feedback from total newbies.

Don't be sorry! Feedback on language and grammar is very useful to me, since I usually write in Finnish. (This is probably the first time since middle school that I've written a piece of fiction in English.) 

Apparently the punctuation slightly depends on whether you are using British or American English and whether the work is fiction or non-fiction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_marks_in_English#Order_of_punctuation ). Since this is fiction, you are in any case totally right about the commas going inside the quotes, and I will edit accordingly. Thanks for pointing this out!

Thanks for the feedback! Deciding how to end the story was definitely the hardest part in writing this. Pulling the reader out of the fantasy was a deliberate choice, but that does not mean it was necessarily the best one – I did some A/B testing on my proof reading audience but I have to admit my sample size was not that big.  Glad you liked it in general anyway :)