In the future I'll probably want to donate to a UK charity (Humane Slaughter Association). Some people in the UK probably want to donate to a US charity like GiveWell or MIRI. Rather than both donating to foreign charities, we should trade donations so that we can both get tax deductibility / Gift Aid for our donations.
Trading doesn't have to occur only between matched countries. There's a benefit to trading so long as just one side gets tax deductibility / Gift Aid where it didn't exist before. For example, if a UK donor was going to give to a Spanish charity, and if a US donor was going to give to a UK charity, the UK donor should give to the UK charity to get Gift Aid, while the US donor gives to the Spanish charity (without tax deductibility). Trading like what I just described even works for those in the US who have already donated 50% of their income and so can no longer get tax deductions in the current year from further US donations.
We should set up a marketplace for trading donations. According to Tom Ash, trading donations is completely legal.
I created an extremely low-tech platform for donation trading in this Google spreadsheet. Feel free to add your info there, keeping in mind that it's shared publicly on the web.
If something like this gets traction, perhaps we can create a website for the service, not just for EAs but for all donors around the world. I haven't been able to find any existing website for this. I'm not sure if that's because large-scale coordination of donation trading is frowned upon or whether it's just because no one has scooped up this opportunity yet. I'm normally skeptical of startup ideas, but this one seems promising to me.
(See also an earlier post by Robert Wiblin about donation trading. Giles recommended a system like I'm proposing here.)
EA orgs don't have Australian tax deductibility, but I think we could probably give through this system too. Aussies could give to an EA expense which can't be claimed on tax such as;
In exchange, a partner could give to an EA org which they can get tax deducibility on of the Aussie's choice.
Without allocating them specifically, the gains from trade in this instance will only go to the person who gives to the org and gets a tax deduction; splitting this up would incentivise Aussies to get involved in trading. Brian Tomasik suggests a 50/50 split.
Most of the concerns raised above hold in this example, but can anyone think of a reason specific to this trade which is problematic? The main one I can see is that this would require some publicising for people to put EA expenses on the spreadsheet as well as EA donations. Another which might be stronger in this instance is the difficulty of Aussies trying to select the partner with the best tax deduction.
I've put my name and contact details on the spreadsheet and pending no-one thinking of a good reason this is a bad idea, I'm happy for people to contact me to get in touch with Aussie donors initially. There will be more than $10 000 available at the Australian end for these trades.
That should work in theory. It may be hard to find large enough non-deductible spending - I'd recommend contacting Paul and Katja directly. The unusually large gap in the size of tax-deductibility (e.g. 0% in Oz, 25% in the UK) may also put off traders who value what you want to give to much less.