FarmKind’s new tool to encourage effective donations from your non-EA circle

By ThomNorman, Aidan Alexander @ 2024-10-04T13:32 (+44)

TL;DR

• We still don’t want you to donate through FarmKind, but we have a new way to get involved in our mission of solving the funding bottleneck for animal welfare: A build-your-own fundraiser tool
• With very little effort, you can raise thousands of counterfactual dollars for effective animal charities by sharing your fundraiser with colleagues, friends and family. In the process you can introduce them to the cause of fixing factory farming and the practice of effective giving
• Our ‘split and boost’ donation model makes it easier for people who don’t have a strong emotional motivation to support effective animal welfare charities to dip their toes into new waters

Introduction

Since launching FarmKind about two months ago, we've been really grateful for the excitement and support that the EA community has given our mission of raising new donations for some of the most impactful animal charities out there.

But... we still don't want you to donate to us... sorry.

If you already donate to impactful causes, we don't want you to switch to donating through FarmKind. Our mission is to reach new donors and grow the pie of donations to effective charities, not cannibalize the existing high-impact donation movement.

However, we want effectiveness-minded people to be able to support our work and contribute to our mission. So, we've recently launched a new tool that lets you do just that.

Our 'build your own' fundraiser tool lets you set up a personal fundraiser page that you can share with friends and family who are new to donating effectively and/or new to donating to fix factory farming. Whether it's a birthday, wedding, personal challenge, or just because, this is a great way to encourage people you know to help tackle factory farming in one of the most effective ways possible.

Why set up a fundraiser

Factory farming is one of the most neglected cause areas relative to the amount of suffering it causes. Farmed Animal Funders has estimated that globally, just $200 million is channeled specifically to this issue^[1], while ~10 billion land animals (excluding insects) are suffering on factory farms right now in the US alone^[2].

While factory farming remains one of the greatest sources of suffering on the planet today, most people are not ready to try to help end it. Even amongst those who do donate to animal charities, the vast majority of donations go towards companion animal charities, not those supporting farmed animals^[3]. Within the effective giving community, factory farming is a minority within a minority. We estimate that less than 10% of the funds raised by effective giving organizations go to factory farming^[4].

We think that one powerful way to increase support for charities working on this cause is simply to have more people encourage their friends and family to make donations. Put simply: they might not donate for the animals, but they might donate for you.

We built this tool after we helped a friend of ours build a 'MVP' fundraiser for their birthday that raised over $5,000. This indicated to us that this 'word of mouth' model for spreading awareness and support for FarmKind recommended charities could be highly impactful and was worth testing out.

What makes this fundraiser different?

FarmKind supports effective farmed animal charities through a 'split and boost' donation mechanism inspired by the work of the team at Giving Multiplier. What this means is, when someone gives with FarmKind, they get the option to split their donation between one of our Animal Charity Evaluators recommended charities and their own favorite charity (which can be any 501c3). When they do this, both charities receive a bonus, which is higher the more of their donation they choose to allocate to the effective charity.

In a randomized control trial, giving people the option to split donations between a favorite and effective charity increased donations to the effective charity by 76% relative to asking them to make a binary choice between favorite and effective. Providing a 'bonus' (similar to ours) increased donations to the effective charity by a further 55%.^[5]

Our build your own fundraiser enables you to set up a fundraiser using our split and boost system. When you build your page, you can either lock in the favorite charity or you can let each person who gives via your page choose their own favorite charity. We'd recommend the later approach as it gives your friends and family that are new to effective donations that little bit more incentive to give, as they get to send some of their donation to their own favorite cause.

Why this fundraiser tool may be a particularly good fit for animal welfare:

We expect that most people will contribute to your fundraiser as a way of supporting you, without being too concerned about what the fundraiser is for. However, donating to fix factory farming will be ‘out of character’ for most of our friends and family, particularly given that, if they’re representative of the broader population, they’ll mostly be meat eaters. We think our ‘split and boost’ function could make this first step easier for your loved ones to take, as they can ‘dip their toes in’ by supporting a scary foreign cause (fixing factory farming) while still supporting a comfortable, familiar cause with which they already feel an emotional connection.

How It Works

If you'd like to set up a fundraiser through FarmKind, it is very easy and can be done in a few minutes. Try it here.

All you have to do is choose your donation goal, how long you want the fundraiser to last and which charities you want to receive the donations.

We recommend putting some persuasive text on your page that describes to people why they should donate through your fundraiser. A link to a cute animal video can’t hurt! If you want help with this, reach out to us by email and we’ll be happy to give you a hand.

Once you're happy with your page, it'll be generated automatically by our system and is ready to share. You can track donation progress over time and, once it is done, we'll send you an impact report detailing how many animals your campaign has, in expectation, helped.

To see an example of what a fundraiser looks like, here is one our co-founder, Aidan, set up for his birthday.^[6]

1. ^{^}

    FAF estimate: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/645be31efb5e013b9c6f4751/t/64cb9a7bb5b56917db63457a/1691064968896/FAF+State+of+the+Movement+Report+2021.pdf

2. ^{^}

    Number of farmed animals in the US: https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-are-factory-farmed

3. ^{^}

    The funding going to farmed animal organizations amounts to around 3.5% of the funding to companion animal organizations, according to Animal Charity Evaluators: https://animalcharityevaluators.org/charity-reviews/causes-we-consider/why-farmed-animals/ 

4. ^{^}

    10% is a conservative estimate based on internal figures we’ve seen from a number of organisations. Giving What We Can's 2020-22 Impact Evaluation reported 9.15%, on average across pledge and non-pledge donations.

5. ^{^}

    Caviola and Greene (2023) “Boosting the impact of charitable giving with donation bundling and micromatching” 

6. ^{^}

    Our tool doesn’t currently have rich text formatting set up, but you can use this tool as a workaround to achieve bolded text like in Aidan’s example