Contextual Inquiry

Context and Background

The Effective Altruism at Williams student organization is similarly interested in the subject of partaking in charitable activity in an efficient manner. This contextual inquiry was intended to understand the extent to and situations under which effective altruists engage in charitable activity, as well as the processes by which they determine what activities to involve themselves in.

The goal of the Effective Altruism club at Williams is to provide a forum for students to discuss how to maximize their impact in the world through charitable giving, ethical career paths, and self-improvement. The group also aims to raise and donate money to effective charities. Vincent Gudenus, a current sophomore, leads the student group, and numbers of club members and students frequently attend Sunday meetings.

Methods

We attended the Effective Altruism general and board meetings on Sunday, 25 February. Both meetings were held in Paresky 112, one of the Paresky conference rooms, with the board meeting held directly following the general meeting held at 6-7 pm. Both meetings were in roughly round-table format. The general meeting was open and announced to subscribers of the Effective Altruism mailing list, while attendance at the board meeting was restricted to officers of the EA student group.

During the general meeting, we took notes without substantially interfering or participating in the meeting. We were able to attend the subsequent board meeting at 7 pm, whereupon we raised questions brought up by our observations in the general meeting.

Due to scheduling constraints, we had different project group members attend the general and board meetings, to ensure that the inquiry proper was not carried out by someone already familiar with the targeted participants.

Results and Themes

Some themes we found among the observations we recorded for this inquiry:

• It is difficult for EAs to assess success for non-profit organizations. In particular, since non-profits often have abstract goals, effectiveness is difficult to quantify.

• EAs gather information about charity effectiveness largely from publications.

• Similar to investments, charities are regarded as having a level of risk which encourages diversification among charities
• A key goal is to diversify the donor base by increasing the accessibility of charity, so as to “get the ball rolling” with attendant benefits to marketing (i.e. due to peer effects)

• Most donors donate to single or very few causes

• Potential donors need to feel good about their contribution
• Unease arises when charities donated to have no immediate, practical impact
• Donors are better satisfied by giving directly than to meta-causes
• Some friction in the donation process may trigger feelings of accomplishment which might be lost were the process made easy

• EAs believe that typical donors don’t want to think about their donations, and are uninterested in optimizing their donations vs. just giving one

We notice that there’s a lot of complexity involved in the process of deciding how and to what causes to donate to, especially arising from the difficulty of finding accurate information evaluating non-profit organizations.

We find that a key motivating factor in making donations is a resultant sense of satisfaction for having performed a charitable act, without necessarily wanting to put much thought into the process.