When I donate to a charity, I am concerned whether or not the charity will raise enough money to make my donation worthwhile.
Parents:
- Why waiting to donate harms charities
A blog post explaining the potential reasons why someone would choose to wait to donate and how that leads to suboptimal outcomes for the charity.
I don’t usually have this concern because I assume that the utility from extra money for an organization grows smoothly as the amount of money increases, and that there are not sharp cutoffs or thresholds (even if the fundraiser declares “milestone” amounts).
You should make a claim, because I think I disagree. For example, there is a threshold at which they can afford to keep everyone at the same salary. Getting less money than that would mean firing someone or cutting salaries, which makes for an irregular utility function.
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I think this is a factor in whether I feel motivated to donate, but because of unconscious associations and aliefs, not because of a rational thought-through ‘I am concerned that…’ thingie. I’m less inclined to give to fundraisers that look like they’re failing because (a) failure is icky and I want to quickly click away from pages that seem failure-ish and direct my attention to something more happy and cheerful, and (b) it feels better to move a fundraiser from 90% completion to 92% completion than from 10% completion to 12% completion, because in the former case it feels like I’ve made a big difference by reducing a 10% gap to an 8% one, and in the latter case it feels like I’ve made a smaller difference by reducing a 90% gap to an 88% gap. Fundraisers that are closer to victory feel like ones I can make a more meaningful difference in (even when the opposite is the case in reality).
This makes me think that perhaps more, smaller milestones would be good.
Yes. In particular, the first milestone or two should probably be small (assuming there are no associated costs), so that donors are more encouraged to get involved early in the fundraiser. Larger and more ambitious goal can then be saved for later in the fundraiser, when larger and more serious donors get more involved (because they’re more likely to want to wait and think about their decisions).
Does anyone have any ideas for how best to frame this? One reason MIRI’s recent fundraiser didn’t have a small ‘Target 1’ was that a smaller target really wouldn’t have been ‘good enough’ and wouldn’t have been an exciting accomplishment. There’s a worry that there are costs associated with consistently having a ‘toy’ target 1: (a) it devalues the very concept of ‘targets’ if hitting the first target is generally not super meaningful or natural-kind-ish in its own right, but is primarily just a carrot organizations dangle; and (b) having a ‘cheap’ Target 1 (e.g., at the 150k level) might reduce the probability that you hit Target 2 (e.g., at the 600k level) by encouraging complacency. Whether or not donors succeed in hitting Target 1, the fact that a low target exists might be perceived as a signal that the organization’s funding needs aren’t very large, and are likely to be met.
Is there a good way to frame a ‘Target 1’ that helps with this? Maybe replace the numbering system with ‘Basic Target’, ‘Stretch Target 1’, ‘Stretch Target 2’, etc., and have a new name for something that’s smaller than the ‘Basic Target’ and is meaningful in a different way?
May be there are two or more target tracks. One for small donations(who donate $1k or less) and other for big donations ($1k and more).
There are a lot of potential issues. I think coming up with a few framings and ideas and then running them by people is the best way to do it. Arbital claims can also be used as voting polls. :)