Moving money from fashion week to effective causes

By Vincent van der Holst @ 2023-01-26T08:50 (+35)

I apologize in advance for asking the EA forum to help us activate a campaign, but because I believe this to be an effective, new and interesting way to build the community and get more incremental money to effective charities, I have written the post nonetheless. If you feel this is inapproriate, please let us know in the comments. 

Fashion week is next month. The week where hip people wear overpriced clothing persuading normal looking people to buy the same clothing, resulting in lots of profits for shareholders. That got us thinking: can we create a fashion collection that is overpriced, worn by hip people, but where the status comes from the amount of good you do rather than the [insert luxury brand we can't name because we might be sued] logo on your chest? 

And so we created the "This is..." collection, a collection of t-shirts where all profits go to effective causes rather than shareholders of rich luxury fashion brands. We have the "This is malaria prevention" shirt donating to the malaria consortium, the "This is Eyesight" t-shirt, donating all profits to the Fred Hollows foundation and a bunch of other shirts. And we've created the most expensive t-shirt in the world, one that is estimated to save a hundred kids lives through malaria protection. 

With this campaign, we've tried to make effective giving appealing to the masses, by creating something they want (a high quality overpriced t-shirt), with a simple message ("This is a company") and we're trying to get hip people (press and influencers) to write about and wear them, so people will want to buy them instead of the garbage we see on fashion week. 

We think this is effective for several reasons

• The majority of the money for each t-shirt will go to effective causes
• This campaign makes effective causes more appealing with simple messages and activation through influencers and press
• Most buyers, press and influencers who will take part in this campaign are non-EAs, so this can help get people acquainted to EA
• Because most buyers will be non-EAs, this will move money to ECs that would have otherwise gone to something ineffective 
• The success of the campaign will help our company BOAS get more traction, raise funding and become succesful so we can donate all of our profits to effective charities 

How you can help

• You can buy one of the t-shirts, they ship worldwide
• You can send this to 2 or 3 people who will find this interesting and who might buy it
• If you have the t-shirt, wear it a lot so people scan the QR code on the front, driving more traffic and sales
• Show of your t-shirt on social media
• If you have access to PR or influencers who you think might be interested, or you think you can help in another way, reach out to me on vin@boas.co 

Some things to consider 

• We are operating this at a loss, but we still have to account for the cost of the t-shirt, shipping and VAT. You can see a breakdown of how much will go to charity on each shirt's page. The cheapest t-shirts have the lowest % going to charity because the relative cost is higher. 
• We're not sure if you can deduct the donation amount from your taxes. It appears this will differ for each country and we can't say with certainty that you can. 
• Right now the t-shirts have VAT on the total price including the donation, lowering the percentage we can donate. We're still figuring out if its possible to charge VAT on just the cost of the T-Shirt and not on the donation amount. 

If you want more information about the campaign, you can check out this onepager or our blog about it. If you have criticism or you're skeptical about this campaign, please let us know in the comments.