I think this largely depends on the area to which you’re donating. Donating money to individual researchers probably is more efficient than donating to research organisations, and the same can be said for certain businesses.
But you mentioned that the scale of outcomes plays a big role in deciding on whether to donate to companies or to individuals. And in some areas, such as health, donating to individuals is almost never as efficient as donating to an organization. Yes, funding a “help Jake battle cancer” GoFundMe page provides stronger feedback, but is it really as useful as helping many starving or ill children?
is it really as useful as helping many starving or ill children?
I think that the proposed alternative to donating to organization that helps starving children is donating to a starving child directly.
If you know a starving child in your neighborhood, and you give them every day $2 and say “go quickly buy some food before someone takes the money from you”, the child will not starve anymore, and it will cost you $60 a month, $730 a year.
If you give $60 monthly to an organization instead, you probably just contributed a tiny fraction to renting an office space.
I guess you’re right. Though the issue here is that it’s hard to directly estimate the “impact per dollar” of a charity organization, and it is even harder to compare it to that of individuals, since organizations are obviously much more complicated. So you can’t really be sure whether an individual donation is more or less efficient.
You can measure “impact” in “starving kids saved” (or whatever the charity is doing), but that doesn’t account for other stuff that the charity spends money on. For example, marketing, while not helping directly, can raise awareness of the issue, so it can also be considered impactful.
Another thing I just considered are those organizations which focus on funding individual campaigns. They show amounts of money (and progress bars, when appropriate) collected for each cause, so that also provides strong feedback, while having the reliability of an organization.
I think this largely depends on the area to which you’re donating. Donating money to individual researchers probably is more efficient than donating to research organisations, and the same can be said for certain businesses.
But you mentioned that the scale of outcomes plays a big role in deciding on whether to donate to companies or to individuals. And in some areas, such as health, donating to individuals is almost never as efficient as donating to an organization. Yes, funding a “help Jake battle cancer” GoFundMe page provides stronger feedback, but is it really as useful as helping many starving or ill children?
I think that the proposed alternative to donating to organization that helps starving children is donating to a starving child directly.
If you know a starving child in your neighborhood, and you give them every day $2 and say “go quickly buy some food before someone takes the money from you”, the child will not starve anymore, and it will cost you $60 a month, $730 a year.
If you give $60 monthly to an organization instead, you probably just contributed a tiny fraction to renting an office space.
I guess you’re right. Though the issue here is that it’s hard to directly estimate the “impact per dollar” of a charity organization, and it is even harder to compare it to that of individuals, since organizations are obviously much more complicated. So you can’t really be sure whether an individual donation is more or less efficient.
You can measure “impact” in “starving kids saved” (or whatever the charity is doing), but that doesn’t account for other stuff that the charity spends money on. For example, marketing, while not helping directly, can raise awareness of the issue, so it can also be considered impactful.
Another thing I just considered are those organizations which focus on funding individual campaigns. They show amounts of money (and progress bars, when appropriate) collected for each cause, so that also provides strong feedback, while having the reliability of an organization.