Let's Read A Paper: What Works to Increase Charitable Donations?
Let's Read A Paper: What Works to Increase Charitable Donations?
Talk about your donations!
What Works to Increase Charitable Donations? A Meta-Review with Meta-Meta-Analysis is a meta-analysis of meta-analyses. Now we need to get someone to do a meta-meta-meta-analysis of this paper and some other meta-meta-analyses. It is the only way.
So what are the take-home lessons of this meta-meta-analysis for those of us who aren’t fundraisers?
Talk about your donations.
Seeing other people donate tends to increase how much people donate. Interestingly, the effect works both for directly seeing someone else donate and watching someone donate on TV. (On the other hand, generic prosocial media doesn’t seem to have much of an effect.) At the same time, knowing that other people are watching increases how much people donate. In general, the effect is larger when you’re going to talk to the person again, when you care about what the person thinks about you, and when people are paying closer attention—that is, when you know that it matters for your reputation. (However, artificial cues of people watching, such as a picture of an eye, don’t do anything.)
When you talk about your donations, you don’t have to be preachy or try to convince people. In fact, it might be better if you don’t. Instead, when charity naturally comes up in conversation, talk about donating. You might mention that you’re cutting back on something in order to save money to donate, or that you’re really happy today because you donated and that makes you feel good. A lot of people post on social media about why they donated where they donated, which I think is great. You’re modeling donating behavior, sharing information with others, and making sure that you’ve thought through your donation target.
You also shouldn’t be afraid to talk about other good things you do. If you’re reducing your meat consumption and you choose a vegetarian meal while your friends are eating meat, you might say “I don’t eat chicken because they’re mistreated in factory farms.” If someone asks why you chose your job and you chose it for altruistic reasons, you can say “I wanted to earn money and donate to charity” or “I want to help prevent pandemics like Covid-19.” Modeling is also a good reason to behave well, even in low-stakes situations: if other people see you admitting when you don’t know something, trying to accurately represent the viewpoints of people you disagree with, or being kind to someone in pain, they’re more likely to do those things themselves.
It’s not just about the effect on other people. Being public about good things you do can also make you more likely to keep doing them! Of course, that depends on your group of friends: some people don’t like it when other people try to be morally good, especially if it makes them feel like a bad person. But if you find friends who encourage you to live up to your ideals, then when you’re tempted, you can think of that sweet, sweet social approval and resist. Humans are social animals. We’re never going to stop wanting other people to think well of us. Make it work for you.
I find that the most powerful effect of being public about your good behavior is something it’s quite hard to do a randomized controlled tiral of: the formation of social norms. I have friends who are unexceptional people—not especially altruistic, sometimes quite selfish—who donate ten percent of their income, far more than the average American.1 Why? Because it’s normal among people I know to donate ten percent. “Of course I donate ten percent,” they think, “I’m a pretty selfish person, but I’m not a jerk.”
And similarly, because the norm among people I know is to be altruistic, it’s easier for me to be altruistic. I know people will be proud of me if I donate or write a blog post about effective altruism; I know they will be disappointed with me if I eat meat or go for a cheap shot at the expense of accuracy.
There are some other useful techniques to know about for increasing charitable donations. People tend to donate more if the charity is tax-deductible. People tend to donate more if the need is greater—that is, if the problem seems certain and very bad.
People also tend to donate more if they’re told about “identifiable victim” than if they read statistics or are told about many victims. If there are many victims, people tend to feel like they’ll have a smaller imapct and to feel less good about donating. While people show somewhat less empathy to a large group of people, that wasn’t the primary driver of the effect.
In many cases, you won’t be able to use those techniques. In a casual conversation about donations, it would be weird to mention that the Against Malaria Foundation is tax-deductible or to tell a story about a single representative child with malaria. But, if it is natural, you can emphasize the importance of the charity you’re donating to and how much suffering it prevents.
If you write a social media post about your donations, you can use all three of the techniques. I wouldn’t advise completely avoiding statistics: while people dislike statistics, statistics are also the only way to know which charities are more or less effective. But you can talk about a hypothetical specific individual that your donation helps (or non-hypothetical, if you donate to GiveDirectly).2 You can mention that donations are tax-deductible. And, of course, you should always talk about the importance of the issue your chosen charity addresses.
My friends tend to be fairly wealthy tech people. I don’t think any social norms are going to get normal retail workers to donate ten percent. However, random Google employees don’t usually donate ten percent of their salaries to alleviate global poverty, so this is a noticeable effect.
You probably can’t do this if you’re donating to existential risk charities, as much as it amuses me to think about describing a representative human and then saying “and my donation helps make sure that they aren’t turned into grey goo by an unfriendly AI.”
The identifiable victim thing is interestingly alien. My impression is that I work the opposite of that: when people talk about identifiable victims, my instinct is to go "ah, I'm being manipulated" and discount whatever they're saying until I can look at underlying statistics (which I won't necessarily ever get around to); whereas, when people lead with statistics, it's much easier to go "alright, here's how much good I can do per dollar, this is useful information!" about it. If people-in-aggregate work in a manner opposite from me in that regard, that's good to know; it'll stop me from typical-minding in an anti-helpful direction, if I ever want to try to convince people-not-selected-for-psychological-similarity-to-me to do more charity-donations.
This is a useful thing to know for me. I'm reluctant to talk about donations because it feels like bragging or virtue signaling. But it's also important to me that other people learn about EA, so knowing this is motivation to push past my discomfort.