I believe we need a charity app! I know what you’re thinking: “Not another app!”. But hear me out...
Short introduction: Brief thoughts and background
I think that a lot of people find it “too difficult” or “too much of a hassle" to access reliable data on charities; to donate to these charities; and to keep track of donations.
I believe that it would be (much) more motivating for people to donate, if there were better ways to keep track of your donations. I know this to be the case for myself (and friends I have talked to): I donate a fixed amount to charity each month, but I have no idea how much money I have given so far (this year, let alone life-time) and I don’t know how much good these donations have done. In particular, I have no way to access the historical data (barring an extraordinary amount of detective work, which I am not prepared to put in).
What is more, a side effect of a way to make easy and “on-the-go” donations could be that people would simply give more often than now (where — I think — most people simply set up a monthly donation scheme). I imagine friends making a bet, where the loser donates X to charity Y on the spot; I imagine the young and altruistically motivated person buying a $100 pair of jeans, but at the same time donates $20 to DeWorm the World; I imagine a lot of stuff like this...
Another side effect of the following project might simply be increased awareness of EA to the general public. Having a popular and widely used app, seems like a good way to “get the word out” (this point is assuming that EA wants to participate in something like this -- see below under "EA involvement").
The idea
I think that an app for a mobile phone(/tablet) would be able to fix most of the above problems. It would also add a more “modern feel" to charity donations. I believe that the EA community is perfectly, and uniquely, set up to create such an app.
I imagine an app in which you have a profile, so you log-in with your username and password. You also connect a credit card to your profile (similar to other apps, e.g. banking apps) to allow for speedy and easy donations. Donations can be one-time or on a regular basis (e.g., monthly).
Key to the app should be charity recommendations; the recommendations from GiveWell seems obvious to use. Then people can look at these, read about them, maybe compare them, and donate in-app. (Ideally, many charities should be present, e.g. UNICEF etc., so that people can choose for themselves and so that (almost) everything is contained in one platform. But the GiveWell charities would likely make up the backbone of the charities)
Another key feature of the app should be the personal profile of each member. If donations are done in-app, they should be added automatically to the profile. In this way, each user can see when and how much he/she has donated. What is more, it is possible to keep track on how much one has donated to each charity and in total. In particular, one can see the “year-to-date” donations and the “life-time” donations. I think it would be incredibly motivating to be able to see this. (It might almost become like a game — imagine people treating charity with the same enthusiasm as Pokemon Go!) One could even have a counter of “Lives saved”, or even “QALYs saved”, although this is more controversial, due to the difficulties involved in measuring these.
It might also be possible to create some “social media hype”, creating positive feedbacks and fostering a mindset and environment of giving, although this might also be controversial. See “Other stuff” below.
NOTE: What comes below some of the more nitty-gritty details of the project/the app. I’d love feedback on the idea itself, as outlined above! If you want to know more about the details I have thought about, please read on. Comments on the following — in particular from people with app-making experience or just general interest in the project — would be very nice indeed!
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Overall goals
(1) Easy access to top donations and informations on them. Easy and fast donation.
(2) Good overview of past donations; e.g. total life-time donations.
Making money
When pitching the idea to friends and family, they often ask me how the app is going to make money. Of course, the app will be totally free and will be non-profit (see below under “The funding”).
The funding
After asking around, I actually think that an app such as this might be quite expensive to develop. In particular, if the money transfer part should be maximally safe (and of course it should!), it might become expensive, since the best/most well-known developers seem to charge high fees.
There are several factors that make me believe that funding will not be a (big) problem. (i) The developers might offer to make such an app at lower rates to gain some goodwill; (ii) Maybe the EA community and its connections will make it possible to raise some money for such a project; (iii) the charities themselves might sponsor some amount of money; and (iv) one could use a (charity) crowdfunding approach, such as chuffed.org.
Continual funding
Although the one-time expenses from developing the app (see above) might turn out to be large, there would also be some continuous expenses for maintenance of the app and for keeping the material on the app up to date. This could be funded by the methods above and/or (v) one of the charities of the app could be the app itself (similar to wikipedia's approach).
EA involvement
I am unsure if this is something that EA wants to be officially associated with. But I feel like it would be a nice addition to the EA portfolio! Involvement from EA would ease a lot of the work; it would give easier access to GiveWell informations, easier access to the best charities, easier access to valuable contacts, and, not least, easier access to a large platform of altruistic people which might be first-movers and help promote the app.
I considered writing some of the EA people an e-mail with the idea, but thought that I might as well put the idea directly on the forum, and then hopefully get EA’s attention in this way.
This being said, I still think there is a case for making the app, even though EA might not want to participate officially. Comments on this points (and others, see below) are very welcome!
The challenges
There are many challenges for this project. I have tried thinking through the things that could possibly cause problems, but I am certain that I have not thought of even a tiny fraction of these. A very partial list include:
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Tax benefits. People expect that their charity donations are tax deductible. At least in Denmark, this is done automatically when one donates to the larger charities (e.g. UNICEF), which I am sure is a great boon for many “casual/sofa altruists”. It would be nice if the app automatically reports donations to the (local equivalent of) IRS, but it seems like this requires a lot of (tedious/bureaucratic) work.
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Heterogeneities in countries. In extension to the above, different countries (I would guess — I have no idea) have a lot of differences between them when it comes to the law and policies concerning charity. For instance, the tax rules and the way you report donations to the IRS, but also how you handle credit card information and so on. It seems to me, that it might be impossible to have one app for all countries. In particular, one might have to develop (and maintain!) an app for each country.
Getting charities on board. I don’t know whether charities would be willing to participate in a project like this. I see no difficulties if the app were just to direct people to the webpage of the charity in question, but it might be more difficult if one allows for direct in-app donations. [when donating directly through GiveWell, they also mention that the charities prefer that people go to the actual charity webpage and donate, rather than through the GiveWell system. However, it is encouraging that GiveWell seems to have overcome this hurdle and have made their own donation system]
Other stuff
One could consider making the platform more “social media”-like, i.e. having the app include a social network. This could be through an existing platform — Facebook comes to mind — or a separate platform, where you have “EA friends” and you can “share” and “like” donations of you and your friends. This inclusion is controversial, though, but could possibly boost donations in a huge way (by a kind of positive feedback; when your friends donate, you might want to donate too).
If the charities are willing, people can also get feedback through the app. Maybe one has an “inbox”, where you get updates from the charities. Either broad overviews (in this month/year/whatever, charity X achieved this and this) or more specific (your donation X went into buying Y, helping Z).
The work
Creating a thing like this would take a lot of work (see also “The challenges” above). I‘d be willing to take on a significant amount of the footwork needed; it would be nice to get some EA people on the team as well! I have no experience with designing and building an app; my plan is to outsource some of the work, but I would very much like to hear ideas and critiques from the EA people here!
Conclusion
I hope that you all will contribute to these ideas. In particular, I very much welcome critiques and comments. For instance, I'd like to hear your opinions on (1) feasibility of the whole thing and (2) whether or not I over-estimate the (likelihood of the) positive outcomes from the project.
I have been thinking fairly hard about (1) and (2) and so far I still feel like the app is a great idea that needs to see the light of day, and that, despite the many challenges and hard work involved, is quite feasible to do. Talking to friends have not changed this (yet). But I encourage people to argue against me (there is very likely some simple arguments/scenarios/problems I simply haven’t thought about!).
IF people think it is a good idea, constructive comments and critiques are the next step — so please add whatever comes to your mind. Let’s make the idea and the app much better! If this also goes well, the next step will then be to start design and development. If some people are hooked and want to help out, let me know!
Cheers and thanks for reading,
Mikkel,
Denmark
Hey Mikkel,
Thanks for the post. This looks really interesting. I'm going to be making something similar in the next few weeks (an Angular2 web app with a simple RESTful API that tracks personal donation history), just as a personal project, so there could a bit of overlap and I'd love to contribute to the project if there's support for it. If you'd like, just flick me a message and we can talk some more.
Andy.
Dear Andy,
Thank you very much for your comment. That sounds like a pretty cool project! I will definitely be in touch (when I get a look at the above suggestions and get my own head sorted out).
Cheers!