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
Yes, there’s definitely a quasi-experimental format, and we hope to use meta-analysis to draw lessons from all the different Giving Games we run in the field (which include a lot of natural variation). Separately, we’re also working with a number of academic researchers on experimental collaborations. Some of these involve studying the efficacy of the GG model, while others use the GG format as an experimental design to study other topics. You can find more about experimentation with GG here