We’re excited to announce that EffectiveAltruism.org is hosting the 2017 effective altruism donor lottery!
A donation lottery is a different way to donate. Rather than making a donation to a charitable organization directly, you can make a donation to a donor lottery. You then get a shot at being able to recommend where the entire pool of money goes, in proportion to the size of your donation.
The concept was described by Carl Shulman in 2016, and in late 2016, Carl and Paul Christiano successfully ran the first donor lottery.
Carl and Paul have asked the Centre for Effective Altruism (the organization that runs EffectiveAltruism.org) to take on the responsibility of running this year’s lottery. As with the original lottery, Paul is acting as lottery guarantor, backstopping the lottery pot size of $100,000.
As this is the first time we’ve run the lottery on EffectiveAltruism.org, we’re considering this section of the site to be in open beta. If you notice anything that looks out of place, if anything in the explanation is unclear, or anything doesn’t work as expected, we’d really appreciate your feedback, either via the chat bubble at the bottom right of the screen, via lottery [at] effectivealtruism [dot] org, or in the comments below.
Sam Deere
Tech lead, Centre for Effective Altruism
The point of a donor lottery is to help donors move to an efficient scale to research their donations or cut transaction costs. But there are important diminishing returns to donations if those donations are large relative to total funding for a cause or organization. So it is possible to have a pot that is inefficiently large, so that small donors risk not plucking low-hanging fruit. If the odds and payouts were determined by the unknown level of participation, then a surge of interest could result in an inefficiently large pot (worse, one that is set after people have entered).
$100,000 is small enough relative to total EA giving, and most particular causes in EA, not to worry much about that, but large enough to support increased research while reducing the expected costs thereof. If a lottery winner, after some further consideration, wants to try to lottery up to a still larger scale they can request that. However, overly large pots cannot be retroactively shrunk after winning them.
One of the most common mistakes people have on hearing about donor lotteries is worrying about donors with different priorities. So making it crystal clear that you don't affect the likelihood of payouts for donors to other causes (and thus the benefits of additional research and reduced transaction costs for others) is important.