Seconding this! I would also be very curious about what the multiplier is if you discount giving in future years, ideally as a chart of multiplier vs annual discount rate.

I didn't respond because of the "we won’t be able to continue engaging in the discussion on this here". FarmKind can decide that they don't want to prioritize this kind of community interaction, but it does make me a lot less interested in figuring out where we disagree and why.

It is also unclear how much FarmKind could change course based on feedback (other than giving up and shutting down)

There are lots of options helping animals (through raising money or otherwise) that don't involve this kind of competition around the impact of donations. It's common for startups to pivot if their first product doesn't work out.

For what it's worth, my first interpretation of "no-kill meat" is that you're harvesting meat from animals in ways that don't kill them. Like amputation of parts that grow back.

But if we agree it is not tenable, then we need a (much?) narrower community norm than 'no donation matching', such as 'no donation matching without communication around counterfactuals', or Open Phil / EAF needs to take significantly more flak than I think they did.

While I think a norm of "no donation matching" is where we should be, I think the best we're likely to get is "no donation matching without donors understanding the counterfactual impact". So while I've tried to argue for the former I've limited my criticism of campaigns to ones that don't meet the latter.

As Michael says, there was discussion of it, but it was in a different thread and I did push back in one small place against what I saw as misleading phrasing by an EA fund manager. I don't fully remember what I was thinking at the time, so anything else I say here is a bit speculative.

Overall, I would have preferred that OP + EA Funds had instead done a fixed-size exit grant. This would have required much less donor reasoning about how to balance OP having more funding available for other priorities vs these two EA funds having more to work with. How I feel about this situation (on which people can choose to put whatever weight they wish -- just illustrating how I think about this) does depend a lot on who was driving the donation matching decision:

• If the EA Funds managers proposed it, I would prefer they hadn't.

• If OP proposed it, I would prefer EA Funds had tried to convince them to give a fixed-size grant instead. If they did and OP was firm in wanting to do a matching approach, then I think it was on balance ok for EA Funds to accept as long as they communicated the situation well. And EA Funds was pretty transparent about key questions like how much money was left and whether they thought they would hit the total. I think their advice EA Funds gave on what would happen to the money otherwise wasn't so good but I'm pretty sure I didn't see it at the time (because I don't remember it and apparently didn't vote on it). The guidance OP gave, however, was quite clear.

One thing that would have made pushing back at the time tricky is not knowing who was driving the decision to do the match.

But I also think this donation matching situation is significantly less of an issue than ones aimed at the general public, like GiveWell's, GivingMultiplier's, and FarmKind's. The EA community is relatively sophisticated about these issues, and looking back I see people asking the right questions and discussing them well, collaborating on trying to figure out what the actual impact was. I think a majority of people whose behavior changed here would still endorse their behavior change if they fully understood how it moved money between organizations. Whereas I think the general public is much more likely to take match claims at face value and assume they're literally having a larger impact by the stated amount, and would not endorse their behavior change if they fully understood the effect.

I haven't encountered any donors complaining that they were misled by donation matching offers

When I was at Google, I participated in an annual donation matching event. Each year, around giving Tuesday, groups of employees would get together to offer matching funds. I was conflicted on this but decided to participate while telling anyone who would listen that my match was a donor illusion. Several people were quite unhappy about this, where they told me that it was fraud for me to be claiming to match donations when my money was going to the same charity regardless of their actions. They were certainly not mollified when I told them that this was very common.

I think the main reasons you don't see complaints about this from the general public is (a) most of the time people do not realize that they are being misled (b) people are used to all kinds of claims from charities that do not pass the smell test ("$43 can save a life!") and do not expect complaining to make anything better.

no strong solid public evidence

In this particular case there is an RCT: Caviola and Greene, 2023.

I do think there are ways of doing donation matching that are more real than others, but at least in the case of EA organizations I would like to see the organization be public about this so donors can make informed tradeoffs. If I think $1 going to X is 70% as valuable as $1 going to Y, but X advertises 100% matching campaign, the details of the campaign matter if I'm going to make an informed decision on giving my dollar to X vs Y. For example, the organization could say what would happen with the money if it was not matched and whether past matches had been fully depleted.

In the case of FarmKind they are public about the details, which is great and I'm glad they do. Except that because all the money in the bonus fund is going to go to effective charities regardless of whether others donate, I think the first two considerations you give (match funders who also support less effective charities; matches sometimes don't run out) don't apply here.

I'm not happy about bringing this to a top-level post, but I also don't really see other good options. I had previously raised issues with this general approach as misleading donors and the creators of FarmKind were aware of these arguments and decided to continue anyway. When Ben and I raised some of these issues in the comments on their announcement, my understanding was that FarmKind was not considering making any changes in response to our objections and considered the matter closed (ex: "That’s all the time I have to spend on this topic.").

without the potential benefits (more money for effective charity) being considered

I'm confused why you'd say this -- I mention this several times in my post as a reason for donation matching?

That's a good question! As I said in the post, this is not my top issue in any objective sense, only what makes me most disappointed. That is, this is a place where the community had come to (what I consider) the right answer, but then backslid in response to external incentives.

I'm confused about what you mean by not being clear which cause area you support? Do you mean individuals not making their donations public? Or not disclosing how they personally prioritize cause areas?

On the question of whether organizations should have external reviews and public budgets, to me this comes down to whether organizations are raising funds from the general public. The general principle is that donors should have the information they need to make informed decisions, and if an organization is raising funds from a small group, it is sufficient to be transparent to that group, which generally has much lower costs than being transparent to the world as a whole. (I also don't see this as a place where the EA community in general has started failing at something it used to be good at)