Wouldn’t it be nice if our educational system taught students about good giving? The good news is that over $8 million has been spent teaching university students about philanthropy. The bad news is that the prevailing model of student philanthropy hasn’t grown for the better part of a decade and at best reaches a few thousand people a year.
EAs will probably find a some irony in my analysis of the history of the philanthropy education sector: the organizations responsible for teaching students about effective giving do so using an intervention that provides very little bang for the buck. But I also show how Giving Games and other models that deploy resources where they’ll provide the highest marginal return offer the potential to teach philanthropy at mass scale.
Full article here, originally published in Alliance Magazine:
https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/Blog/ID/1355/Are-Giving-Games-a-Better-Way-to-Teach-Philanthropy
Giving Games are workshops where participants hear a brief introduction to effective giving, learn about a few pre-selected charities, discuss their relative merits, and then make a real money donation (with money typically provided by an outside source) to their favorite. More details here.
Thank you. It sounds somewhat similar to some economics experiments involving charity that I have seen, but of course with a different goal in mind. I will look into this -- I am curious also about the evidence one might collect from such games, especially about which arguments people have found convincing, and which approaches have convinced people to choose the more effective charities.