GiveDirectly: "A website visitor was 34% more likely to donate if they saw the new design with embedded donation form instead of the old one"
By defun 🔸 @ 2024-05-25T20:41 (+17)
This is a linkpost to https://www.givedirectly.org/fundraising-experiments/
Habryka @ 2024-05-25T21:39 (+28)
I am disappointed to hear GiveDirectly is using matching fundraisers, especially without discussions of the associated moral hazards (there is a small footnote acknowledging that the matching is probably illusory, but like, that's not shown to the donor showing up on the frontpage and also ultimately doesn't really talk about the deceptive aspects).
I think matching fundraisers tend to generally be dishonest by overstating the counterfactualness of a matching fund. See this old post for a lot of the standard arguments for that: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/a2gYyTnAP36TxqdQp/matching-donation-fundraisers-can-be-harmfully-dishonest
My response made some general points that I wish were more widely understood:
- Pitching matching donations as leverage (e.g. "double your impact") misrepresents the situation by overassigning credit for funds raised.
- This sort of dishonesty isn't just bad for your soul, but can actually harm the larger world - not just by eroding trust, but by causing people to misallocate their charity budgets.
- "Best practices" for a charity tend to promote this kind of dishonesty, because they're precisely those practices that work no matter what your charity is doing.
- If your charity is impact-oriented - if you care about outcomes rather than institutional success - then you should be able to do substantially better than "best practices".
See also this Jeff Kauffman post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hQtayqi3r6bo3EPoh/the-counterfactual-validity-of-donation-matching
Or this old GiveWell post: https://blog.givewell.org/2011/12/15/why-you-shouldnt-let-donation-matching-affect-your-giving/
Richard Y Chappell @ 2024-05-26T16:30 (+17)
Sophisticated donors hopefully know to ignore "matching" pitches (but if not, it's certainly helpful to spread awareness that it's basically just a marketing gimmick).
But my sense is that relatively few people are sophisticated donors who could accurately be described as "allocating their charity budget". Rather, I model most people's philanthropic motivations as unstable impulses that come and go as emotions hit them. Marketing gimmicks can be very helpful for exciting such donors, and motivating them to do something good rather than nothing.
If anything like my model is accurate, then asking effective charities to forego marketing gimmicks seems like a bad idea. It just means that the unstable impulses of the hoi polloi will be exclusively activated by less-effective charities that have no such anti-marketing scruples.
(If we could secure a world where no-one engaged in marketing gimmicks, that would indeed be preferable. But I take it that we can't secure such an outcome. All we could achieve is unilateral disarmament, which makes things overall worse, not better.)
Habryka @ 2024-05-26T17:21 (+7)
But my sense is that relatively few people are sophisticated donors who could accurately be described as "allocating their charity budget". Rather, I model most people's philanthropic motivations as unstable impulses that come and go as emotions hit them. Marketing gimmicks can be very helpful for exciting such donors, and motivating them to do something good rather than nothing.
I agree that many people aren't very smart about their donation choices, though I would be surprised if it's worth the tradeoff to alienate and engage in a more deceptive relationship with the people who are being smarter about their donation choices, and an article on donation matching that doesn't go into that at the very least seems incomplete.
In as much as the EA community has norms or standards by which it evaluates the behavior of people, I think "deceptiveness about the cost-effectiveness of donations" seems like one standard that makes sense for us to apply. Maybe it makes sense for GiveDirectly to do this (though I am skeptical), but that shouldn't deflate me being disappointed, and it of course makes it less likely that I recommend people donate to GiveDirectly, especially people who aren't as careful about donation decisions.
yanni kyriacos @ 2024-05-26T04:49 (+5)
Relatedly, when I worked in ad agencies I'd always tell my clients to avoid putting their products on discount. The research I've read shows they:
1. don't impact long term sales
2. tend to just attract people who would've bought anyway (but at a lower price)
3. get people used to buying at a lower price
"a brand's normal-price buyers are a major source of its volume from price promotions" https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321247500_Buying_Brands_at_Both_Regular_Price_and_on_Promotion_over_Time
I think matching could be like discounts / price promotions (i'd guess at ~ 50% this is happening); you're just moving money around different timelines and having other negative effectives on your brand.
qwertyops900 @ 2024-05-26T23:03 (+2)
How do you square this with the experience of J.C. Penney, who, after eliminating sales and instead choosing to offer "everyday low prices", experienced a 20% drop in sales? It's certainly tempting to believe that discounts and other such unnecessary promotions don't work, but it seems that sales do to some extent stimulate, well, sales.