Introducing an EA Donation Registry, covering existential risk donors

post by tog · 2014-10-21T14:10:19.784Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 4 comments

The idea that being public about your giving can help inspire others is widespread, particularly in the effective altruism movement. And it’s also true that sharing your choice of charities can have a positive influence, particularly when that choice takes into account their effectiveness. With this in mind, we’ve created created an EA Donation Registry through which people can share plans to donate (of any form, and to any cause), as well as record past donations that they’ve made. We did so partly in response to requests for a cause neutral venue for donation plans, so if you give or plan to give to organisations which work to alleviate existential risk or aim to improve the far future in other ways then you may be interested in signing up.

You can already see hundreds of people’s past and planned donations on the Registry. There’s some inspiring material there, from the over $40 million that Jim Greenbaum has given over his lifetime, to the many people aiming to donate substantial portions of their income, such as Peter Singer. You can filter people’s donation plans by their cause area so as to see those planning to donate towards existential risk alleviation and other far future causes, as well as to charities working on animal welfare and global poverty.

If you’d like to read more about the reasons to share your giving, Peter Hurford’s post To Inspire People to Give, Be Public About Your Giving provides a good summary. As he discusses, it shows that giving large amounts to effective charities is something that people actually do, providing social proof and normalising and encouraging this, particularly among peer groups. We also hope that the EA Donation Registry can serve as a gentle prompt to action and commitment device, although understanding that plans change we’ve given donors the ability to edit them at any time - it'd be both expected and understood that many will do so. This a registry of plans, not necessarily pledges.

The registry is an open, community-owned project coordinated through .impact, so we’d love to hear of any uses that you might make of it, and you can also send us suggestions or feedback via our contact form. But most of all, we’d encourage you to share your past or planned donations on it for the reasons above. You can share plans of any form and size via a free text field, so take a moment to consider if there are any that you’d like to share - and if you’ve yet to think about where you might donate, we hope that this will provide a great opportunity to do so!

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