J

jayrbolton

0 karmaJoined Dec 2016

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I'd like to propose a web application targeted specifically to donors that captures recurring payments for an EA meta-charity and helps them manage the donation:

  1. Easily capture monthly, automatic donations based on some simple donor budgeting with a very streamlined, elegant onboarding process
  2. Funnel these payments to something like the GiveWell fund
  3. Let the donor easily view sum total donations over time, view some simple budgeting, tweak their commitment, manage their payment method, and do tax accounting/reporting.

  4. I think this movement should have a website dedicated solely to onboarding new donors to commit to recurring donations to an EA fund with a user experience that could be comparable to something like Slack. I like the idea of removing the need for the irrational and sporadic decision-making process involved in traditional online giving, and instead deferring to experts and reducing the decision to a single, enlightened commitment. I think the more neutral branding of something like GiveWell should be used.

  5. I am certainly not qualified to create a fund or pick and choose what to give to, so would want to use something like GiveWell (I am also aware of Giving What We Can). My only concern is that GiveWell is relatively narrow in scope so far. I understand this is for good reasons, but opening up to a wider range of causes could lead to massively greater donation volume. The question is whether this increased volume could have a much greater altruistic impact over time, if only because it would warm people up to the idea of committed altruism at a much larger scale. But I am definitely willing to suspend this concern in favor of getting the site implemented.

  6. Abstracting the donation process could be very convenient. I think it is a barrier to ask people to click through and allot funds to multiple orgs via multiple sites and donation processes, and have to gather and organize receipts themselves. I simply think that streamlining all this into a single UX could be a big selling point.

I am myself a web developer, and I think I could build this out fairly quickly, depending on how payments get processed. I want it to be a purely altruistic venture and would need no compensation. I've built up a fairly large fundraising infrastructure startup already and have a fair amount of direct experience in these types of apps (I don't want to list that company here as I don't want to distract the discussion, and I want this project to be purely altruistic, totally disconnected to any startup ventures).

If there is another project already with these explicit goals, let me know. Otherwise, I'd love to hear any feature requests or concerns around the idea from fellow donors. After some validation, I will go ahead and build an 'MVP' of the website sans payment processing and design, and then will try to get in touch with GiveWell or another metacharity for actually processing the funds and working the branding and copy.