Get more pleasure when giving (to charity)
Let’s be honest, we’ve all felt pressured into it at some time or another. Maybe by a stranger, or by a naïve but well-intentioned close friend. And maybe you’ve felt the pang of guilt when you’ve given in, despite knowing it wasn’t the right choice, and regretted it later.
It hurts to make bad charitable donations.
Effective Altruism is all about doing the most good with your time, money and resources. But what about doing the most good for you? Giving to charity is often fraught with preconceptions, guilt, and social pressures, and if you care about doing the most good with your dollar, the pressures can be even more complicated (analysis paralysis, anyone?). And sometimes the most effective causes aren’t intrinsically the sexiest (I’m talking to you, deworming). Make giving easier and more fun with these five tips in mind:
Do it with someone else
Altruism is contagious, and more fun with other people. Not only is social giving a great way to make you feel like you and your significant other/friend/Facebook acquaintance are on the same team (a badass, world-saving team), peer effects (like peer pressure, but without the guilt and smoking) will make you enjoy giving so much more, and be much more likely to give again.
Make sure it’s what you really want
Have you ever dropped money in a fundraiser’s tin just to make them go away? Or because refusing to give money to a 10-year old Girl Guide collecting for the Red Cross feels about as criminal as first-degree murder? (Having previously been that Girl Guide, I apologise on behalf of cute kids everywhere). Giving doesn’t feel as good when we feel forced into it. And as with certain other important activities, consent is sexy. We enjoy giving when we feel like it was a choice we made, not an obligation or chore.
Do your research. Read the research by Givewell, and work out where you agree and disagree. There is never going to be one program/charity/cause that everyone agrees is the best because there are some things that humans just generally flat out disagree on — how important animals are compared to humans, whether to care if future humans are born or not, and how worried to be about risks. Building your own DIY ethical system is a common side-effect of getting involved in philanthropy, so embrace it! And if you feel pressured into giving, or guilted into it, even by your own brain, don’t do it. We feel better about giving when we do it freely.
Get up close and personal
When it comes down to it, we homo sapiens connect with people and stories, not numbers. So even if you’ve done the number crunching and determined that a given organisation is the optimal recipient of your finite resources, make sure you learn who you’re helping, and how. A lot of great charities will help you with this (how can you not help the Humane League when their beneficiaries look like this guy? If you need to, imagine it. Visualise the happy kid who doesn’t have malaria or worms coming up and hugging you. Regale your friends and loved ones with tales of your life-saving escapades (and you have permission to exaggerate, maybe a little). Helping from a distance makes it easy to forget how awesome it is that you are literally saving lives. This is where TV, movies, books and video games come in handy. The more you emotionally connect with the cause you are supporting, the more strongly you will want to continue supporting it in the future, and the stronger the dopamine reward hit every time you click that sleek ‘Donate’ button. (Mmm, dopamine…)
Do it regularly
‘We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.’ (Aristotle)
The size of the donation doesn’t matter as much as how often we donate.
Rather than donating once a year, try breaking up the same size donation into 12 chunks and setting up a repeat donation once a month. Not only do you get cool emails thanking you for being an excellent human and saving babies’ lives literally TWELVE TIMES AS OFTEN, it’s also a subtle but frequent reminder of why donating to charity is important to you. When you do it once a year, you feel like a superhero for like a week, but then the other 51 weeks of the year you spend money on rent, pizza and icecream, which reminds you how important rent, pizza and icecream are. Our brains are exceptionally good at caring and making decisions about things that are predictable and frequent, and much less good at making decisions that are infrequent, about things that are unpredictable. (In other words, train those altruism muscles!)
Commit — but only when you’re ready
So maybe you’ve dabbled in donating. Flirted with fundraising. And now the honeymoon period is over, and you don’t get the same rush of the warm-fuzzies every time you fling a few bucks towards your favourite charity anymore. Relax, this doesn’t mean the romance is dying — saving the world is still as excellent an endeavour as ever. It may just mean that it’s time to step up and show how much you really care. Time to commit.
If you’re serious about taking the next step in your giving, the best way to do that is to make a public, potentially long-term commitment to a cause. This may mean revisiting your career plans and changing them based on where you can do the most good, taking the pledge to commit 10% of your income to charity, or taking on a position of responsibility within an organisation or charitable giving group. We are social animals, and how others see us helps us shape our identities.
~
Thinking of ourselves as generous, giving people makes us happier and more likely to keep giving. So once you’ve decided to do the deed, make the best/optimal/most effective choice you can, but then don’t forget to enjoy yourself!
