Here’s a Facebook fundraiser report from EA Estonia. This campaign was directly inspired by similar posts on the EA forum [1] and made possible by my abundance of free time and general boredom at the end of 2019.

I brought together members from the EA Estonia group to help me with strategy, marketing (promotional video) and contacting people for donations. Through personal connections, we got a donor on board to match donations up to 2000€ through and another to match the rest.

In total, we managed to raise 2644€ over 11 days, which was matched to 5288€. However, when taking into account tax deductions and counterfactuals, actual money raised is somewhere around 2000€. This is in large part due to both large donors claiming they probably would have donated the money to effective charities anyway.

The biggest success of the campaign was the choice of platform - Facebook. The fundraiser reports I have seen on the forum so far have used CauseVox as their fundraiser platform and used Facebook to promote it [1] [2]. We used Facebook for everything and it seemed to help us gather more donations than we otherwise would have. In fact, more than half of all our donations came from people who saw the fundraiser through Facebook and not by us contacting them directly.

In the future, I would use Facebook to promote my fundraiser even more: give out books to random people who shared the fundraiser, use Facebook ads and urge influential people to share.

Although the campaign was fun to organize and we were quite successful, I am not completely sure how I feel about the impact of these projects. Doing them is definitely good publicity and creates fuzzy feelings for all parties involved. However, it could be argued that there are more effective ways of gathering donations. For instance influencing rich cities’ policy to give out more money for foreign aid [2] or getting in contact with rich individuals through mutual acquaintances (start-up founders, poker players) and introducing them to EA. Also, it would possibly more effective to campaign for people to take the Giving Pledge instead of doing a one time donations.

If the alternative is that the organizers spend their December aimlessly listening to 80k podcasts or getting upset about yet another Make-A-Wish campaign, then I think organizing something like this is worth their time...

rannilo

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