Some of you may be interested in taking part in or donating to a new fundraiser that we're running at Charity Science. As well as deworming hundreds of children, it's an unusually good opportunity to find people who are interested in cost-effective charity and start conversations with them - something it's rare to find an excuse to do. Dozens of people from countries around the world are going to take part. Here are the details:

What: Spend only $2.50 a day on food for three days. Get sponsored to raise money to fight poverty. (You'll find different figures for different currencies.)
Why: Half of the world spends $2.50 or less on food each day. This reflects income levels at which people often can’t afford basic health care. All money raised goes to buy medicines that cost only 50 cents. As readers of this forum will know, this is an exceptional opportunity to do good.
Who: People who want to do something to help the global poor and get a sense of what poverty's like.
When: April 22-24, 2015. If those dates don’t work for you you can set your own. For example, if you're at a US university you can choose to do it on April 6-8, when some American college groups are doing it.
What you can vary: Any of this: the amount you spend, the number of days and the date. For example, see below for the ‘challenge mode’ of spending only $1.50.
How: Sign up via these links for the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, Switzerland, Sweden and the Eurozone. Then ask friends and family to sponsor you. We’ll send you guides, pointers, and we can even do a one-on-one Skype to help you help the most people possible. Just contact us at info@charityscience.com with “Running a fundraiser” as the subject line.


Left: What a typical American family eats in a week. Right: What a typical family in Chad (an African country) eats in a week.

How do you join? - Click Here

Where does the money go? Deworm the World

All funds raised goes to Deworm the World, which gives out medicine that cures children who have parasitic worms. These parasites live inside your body and suck your blood. The effects include fatigue, bloody diarrhoea, fever, chills, and other such lovely symptoms. Rather understandably, being so ill leads to many sick days from school and work. In fact, this is why deworming is arguably one of the most cost-effective ways to give children an education, among other things (Miguel and Kremer 2004 found that it led to a 25% reduction in school absenteeism, although this is a difficult effect to pin down; for more details, see this from GiveWell).

Effective altruists will be familiar with the case for fundraising for Deworm the World, as one of the charities that GiveWell recommends as the most effective in the world. Deworming drugs themselves cost around 50 cents, a figure we find works well for marketing, and they can cure someone for a year. For more information see GiveWell's detailed review, or Charity Science's simpler summary. 

What could you possibly eat for only $2.50 a day?

Not much. But that’s kind of the point. It’s to get a sense of how limiting $2.50 is. It’s like running a marathon for charity, but a lot more related.

However, it’s not all abstinence. (That’s reserved for the people taking the challenge mode who will spend only $1.50 a day.) Here’s a few cheap meals people have tried in the past:

• Rice, beans, and spices or soy sauce
• Butternut squash pasta
• Ramen noodles (always a guilty pleasure anyway)
• Oatmeal with chopped banana

Things you’ll have to give up:

• Starbucks or buying coffee out
• Restaurants
• Alcoholic drinks

What are the rules?

The spirit of the event involves getting a (very rough) experience of poverty, and to ultimately make it so that fewer people have to have similar experiences. As long as it is done in this spirit, do what works for you. If you need to spend a bit more money, you can set your own amount. If you can’t do it on April 22-24, do a different time. If you lapse during your three days, it’s OK. You might even want to mention it on Facebook, talking about how difficult it was. It will help people understand how hard poverty is.

Why $2.50?

Half of the world lives on less than $1,368 a year. Around 65% of that is spent on food, which means $2.43 a day. We rounded to $2.50 a day because round numbers are nicer, but you can spend only $2.43 if you’d like.

You might have traveled to a poor country and know that you can buy more for $2.50 overseas. This is a good point, which is why the $2.43 figure is adjusted to how much $2.43 could buy in the USA in 2005. That’s not much. Now imagine that you have to use the remaining $1.75 per day on shelter, transport, healthcare, and entertainment. That’s why we’re running this campaign. Because that’s just too little and we want to change it.

Challenge Mode: live on $1.50

Yawn. $2.50? You already did that in college. Well worry not my frugal friend, there is a challenge mode! $1.50 a day is roughly the international poverty line, so why not try to live on only that for 3 days?

Why do the challenge mode?

• People raise more when they suffer more. Yes, they did a study on this, and yes, people are strange creatures.
• You’ll get a better sense of what extreme poverty is like.
• You’ll get an e-high five from the Experience Poverty team.
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What if I live outside the US?

We have separate pages with different currencies for the following countries:

• The US
• Canada
• The UK
• Australia
• Switzerland
• Sweden
• The Eurozone

If you don’t live in any of those countries then you can either join the US page which will let your friends donate in dollars or you can email us to see if we can add your country. Donations are tax-deductible in the US and Canada.

When a charity is created most people think about the altruistic intentions behind its creation. They think that the founder wanted to improve the world or wanted to further a specific cause. While I think that this is true in nearly every case, there are also other strong motivations and sometimes these can interfere with or even supersede the organisation’s stated mission.

I recently became aware of an expensive student volunteer exchange program, giving first world college students a chance to help people in the developing world. When I complained to a fellow effective altruist that I thought the program was ineffective compared to top GiveWell recommendations, he observed that the charity seemed fairly effective – only at a different goal.  Once I’d considered that the charity might be aiming to provide an enjoyable experience for college students, things started to make sense.  Their website shows how many students they have helped, and writes largely about the positive experiences these students had.  Very little focus was placed on the outcome of the work in the developing world.

We have written before about how many charities measure intermediate metrics and gave a few reasons why this happens. Yet another reasons is that some charities do not have ‘improving the world’ as their primary focus.

Some examples that come to mind of other goals that charities have include:

• Making donors happy or personally fulfilled (as discussed here)
• Keeping their employees’ jobs.
• Staying stable or growing in size.
• Making employees happy or personally fulfilled.
• Making the board members happy or personally fulfilled.
• Having personal or organizational prestige.
• Making those involved feel important, rich, powerful, or intelligent.

Now of course all charities have many goals aside from their primary mission and often these other goals can improve a charity’s performance. For example growing a charity that is doing great work can be a very positive thing, even if done partly due to raw ambition. But the goal of growth could also push an ineffective charity to expand, taking away donations from effective ones. These side-goals become very worrying when an organization starts prioritizing them over the “bottom line” of the amount of good being done.

How to tell if an organization is over-prioritizing side-goals?

One simple way is to look at where the organization puts its time, skills and money. Does the charity seem to be strong in some areas but not those most connected to its impact? Does it seem that they are more focused on increasing donations than on evaluating their impact? These might be signs that other goals are being prioritized, possible unintentionally, over the goal that really matters.

Two recent Charity Science birthday fundraisers have raised thousands of dollars each. As well as simply being inspiring and nice stories to share, they’re interesting examples of how anyone can raise a lot of money and spread awareness of effective charity, and of the reactions that friends and family have to this.

The fundraisers in question were run by Theron Pummer and Peter Hurford. Theron is a philosophy post-doc associated with Oxford’s Population Ethics Project who previously ran the San Diego EA group; Peter is a Chicago-based data scientist who co-founded .impact. They both raised over $5,000 including Charity Science's matching funds, massively overshooting their original goals.

How did they do it? It wasn’t magic. They simply emailed a particularly large cross-section of their personal networks - Peter, for instance, emailed 145 people. Naturally, the majority of these people weren’t in the habit of giving them birthday presents, but this didn’t matter in the way it would have had Theron and Peter been asking for accessories for their private yachts (which I gather are already well furnished). We’ve consistently found that friends and family react very positively when asked if they want to contribute to fundraisers. Many of Theron’s donations came from philosophers who he only knew passingly from conferences and the like, and hadn’t spoken to in a long time.

One useful lesson from this is that many people don’t need much prompting to give to effective charities. Plausibly they were ready to give to charity anyway, and a friend (even a loose one) making an ask prompted them to do so and determined their charity choice. It’s worth noting that Theron and Peter judged that the vast majority of their donations wouldn’t have been made otherwise, basing this partly on what those responsible for those donations said.

If you’d like to see if you can emulate Theron and Peter’s success - and help a great many people in the process - then you can sign up to run a birthday or Christmas fundraiser. If you do, be sure to follow their lead and send out emails far and wide. You may be pleasantly surprised by who gives, and how much.