In a comment on GWWC's recent fundraising appeal, I asked whether prospective donors were holding off on donating until the end of the fundraiser, out of the worry that it would hit its goal early and thus their donation would not have any counterfactual impact. About 50% of people who answered the poll said that they were influenced "at least in part" by this reasoning.
So it sounds like we might have a coordination problem on our hands that causes everyone to wait until the last minute to donate to large fundraisers. Unfortunately, as Rob Wiblin notes, this
comes at the cost that we have to put in more time - perhaps a month of staff time - in order to eventually reach our goal. In addition, there's the stress and uncertainty it creates for us.
So it seems like it might be useful to figure out a more efficient way of allocating EA donations that didn't waste so much org time by donors waiting until the last minute. What are people's thoughts on how we could accomplish this?
One possibility is to assign social kudos for having made significant donations to impactful charities. This could be done implicitly, or explicitly by charities issuing equity in the good they achieve (similar to certificates of impact, but assigned before-the-fact rather than after).
This would encourage a culture of donating to what appear to be the best opportunities early, lest they disappear.
Certificates can be assigned whenever. Just like you can purchase an object that has already been made, or you can pay someone to make it for you. The impact purchase is buying things that have already been made, mostly because that is more novel and potentially neglected.
There is also a distinction between purchasing equity and purchasing outputs. For example, an entrepreneur might give GWWC seed capital in exchange for 10% of all of their future profits (which might be unsold certificates). A donor might instead pay GWWC for 1% of GWWC's outputs over the last year, or for 1% of GWWC's outputs over the next year, or for some particular output that the donor particularly likes.