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Using Giving Games to Study and Improve Charitable Giving

Using Giving Games to Study and Improve Charitable Giving. Brown Bag Presentation at ICES by Jon Behar of APathThatsClear.com April 4, 2013. Introduction. Agenda My Background Questions: Why don’t people donate better? Is there a program that could get them to?.

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Using Giving Games to Study and Improve Charitable Giving

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  1. Using Giving Games to Study and Improve Charitable Giving Brown Bag Presentation at ICES by Jon Behar of APathThatsClear.com April 4, 2013

  2. Introduction • Agenda • My Background • Questions: Why don’t people donate better? Is there a program that could get them to?

  3. The basics of Giving Games • Donation decision is delegated to players • Players select from a restricted set of charities • Opportunity set is structured to provoke thought • Designed with an intent to improve giving behavior

  4. The potential benefits from better giving • $300b annual US donations, $200b from individuals • Aggregate impact a function of both dollars and “good” per dollar • Huge variations in impact across charities equates to enormous opportunity

  5. Why don’t donors “give well”? • Scope Insensitivity: Donors don’t respond to the scale of the problem • Identifiable victim effect: • Tangiblevictims are more evocative • than statistical victims. • Psychic numbing: thinking about suffering, particularly large scale suffering, desensitizes people. • Immediacy biases: recently received information carries more emotional weight

  6. Making people aware of these biases can crowd out generosity Cryder: “It seems almost as if any method of priming a deliberative mindset… leads to less generosity.”

  7. How donors allocations deviate from utilitarian standards • The waste heuristic: preoccupation on “efficiency” rather than impact • Focus on Average, not Marginal, impact • Diversification heuristic: give to many orgs instead of just the best • Parochialism: favoring in-groups (e.g. co-nationals) • Tax vs. Charity framing: preference for voluntary giving

  8. What actually motivates donors?

  9. How donors “research” charities

  10. How to teach giving • Making donors mindful of their own giving criteria makes them use those criteria more • Experiential philanthropy courses • Learning by Giving Foundation ($10k/class) • Once Upon a Time Foundation ($100k/class)

  11. The Cast of Characters • Funder: “an anonymous sponsor” • Players: College students (future donors) with group identity • Organizers: “Effective Altruism” chapters, experiential philanthropy students, faculty

  12. Breakdown of Giving Games

  13. Results: Group discussions

  14. Survey results from Group Discussions

  15. Survey results: Follow-up activities

  16. Extrapolating to other Group Discussion GGs • Organizer feedback suggests other games had impact similar to Princeton GGs • Vanderbilt games likely understate expected impact • Princeton campus has atypical exposure to effective giving message

  17. Results: Giving Stalls GWWC: Cambridge’s Giving Stall

  18. Results: Online Games • Selection bias makes interpretation difficult • Consistent with Giving Stalls, players seem willing to submit comments • Some players will share games over social media • Transition to Facebook platform in the works

  19. Observations from cross-game analysis • It’s plausible that GGs teach many players give better • GGs can have a significant impact on behavior • Players don’t see the money as theirs • Money matters, but mostly in a threshold sense • Organizer capability matters • Social ties between players facilitate good discussions • With Win/Wingames, you can’t lose • GGs provide a great window into how donors think

  20. GGs “jump to the solution”

  21. Next Steps: More donors running games • Sources of funding • My giving • Individual donors • Foundations • Organizers • Advantages • Free to run • Leveraged impact • Emotional leverage

  22. Next Steps: Researchers using GGs • GGs add an intention to teach better giving to existing research frameworks • Field experiments through collaboration with A Path That’s Clear or other funders • Giving Stalls” or Online GGs most promising models • Data sharing will facilitate meta-analysis

  23. Key questions to pursue • What long-term impact do GGs have? • What are the best ways to mitigate the impact of “bad heuristics” and propagate “good heuristics”? • How sensitive are outcomes to the artificial constraints of the GG model? • How do the process inputs (players, prize, charities, activity) translate to the process outputs (votes, discussion, follow-ups)? • What are the key drivers of “viral variables”? • What strategies should a GG sponsor use?

  24. In conclusion… • Let’s collaborate on a field experiment! • Look for opportunities to research using GGs • If your network includes anyone who’d be interested in GGs, please put us in touch • If you give, please give well • Any and all feedback is welcome

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