Awesome Charity Ideas

Effective Altruism

A lot of people haven't heard of effective altruism, Haseeb Qureshi explains it here very eloquently.

Referral bonuses

• Expected impact: High

If you have a friend at a company that offers a referral bonus, do not apply through the website, ask your friend if they would like the opportunity to get thousand(s) of dollars to their favorite charity. If they say no, you can easily find someone else at that same company to agree with this. Make sure to do this before going through any recruiters to find a job as well.

Amazon Smile

• Expected impact: Low

Instead of going to the regular amazon.com URL, go to smile.amazon.com, choose a charity (e.g. GiveWell), and buy things as normal. Amazon will then donate %0.5 percent to your charity (i.e. 5 dollars for every 1000 spent.) Note that you have to remember to do this any time you buy anything on Amazon.

Open questions:

• Can we make a browser extension that redirects all amazon.com requests to smile.amazon.com?
• Can we ask any authors of popular browser extensions to do the same?

README Badges

• Expected impact: Very Low

A lot of repositories have a 'Buy Me a Coffee' badge, you can put an e.g. badge for some effective altruism charity. I have linked this one to a campaign that will show if anyone donates to it, as a means of measuring how effective this is.

Open Questions:

• How can we make a link with a pre-filled form with a default 10 dollar amount? To make it effortless for the highest number of people, can we add a 'Pay with Amazon' button (or something else like that) to the charity website linked to? Could we work with Givewell to develop this?

Software Licenses

• Expected impact: Very Low

Careware has been an idea since the late 80s, the most well-known example being Vim.

We need a modern-day effective altruism version of this. Both a GPL-compatible one (donation optional), and a perpetual license (required one-time donation) that only applies to commercial use.

It turns out that one cannot change the license of an existing project if they haven't had contributors sign a legal agreement. So in most cases, switching the license of software already adopted by companies is not possible.

Open questions:

• Can we email Bram Moolenaar and ask him how much money he thinks this has raised so far?
• Are there unexpected issues with these that explain why almost nobody uses careware licenses?
• Could one switch an existing GPL licensed project to a GPL-compatible license without legal hassle?
• Related: Can we email e.g. the Sublime text author, and one day a year, any purchases go to charity? A lot of tech workers could buy Sublime that day and get reimbursed by their company via productivity budget.

Social Media Campaigns

• Expected impact: Depends

Donating publicly inspires other people to donate as well. Keep in mind that donations made on Facebook will only have 95% of the money go to the charity, you can share links to more efficient methods like https://www.AgainstMalaria.com/OpenSource.

Take the Giving What We Can pledge

• Expected impact: High

Crazy Ideas

These need some subject matter experts to weigh in on.

Another persons charity match

• Expected impact: High

Almost all people do not maximize their charity match, but would be happy to if you gave them the money to donate on your behalf.

We need a grass-roots way of connecting people who want to give their charity match away with effective altruists, preferably in-person. And standardized ways for attestation (proof of donation) to be given, with that said, if 1 out of 5 people are fraudsters, this still works to great effect in turning 5k to 8k.

Unfortunately most charities don't publicly list all of their donations, e.g. Givewell only sends an email by default. Certain charities like the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) have a lot of transparency and people can link to their receipts to prove they made them.

Open questions:

• Is this legally fraud? What kind? What is the statute of limitations on it? Have there been any previous cases of prosecutions for this kind of crime? What was the sentence?
• If I cancel the credit card charge after I make a donation to AMF, does the link become invalid? What are other ways to verify authenticity of e.g. Facebook donations receipt, bank statement, or a "your employer matched" benevity email?
• Could we legally set up a 501c3, such that, we receive money from person A, and then get person B's money to person A? I could be wrong but it seems would probably open the 501c3 up to liability, and that a decentralized grass-roots movement would be more efficient.

Contributing

Please do! :D