Thoughts on the Double Impact Project
How it works
You donate to the Republican or Democratic pool. The pool with the highest amount donates what it has more at the margin to their political party. Everything else goes to other charities. For a better and more complete explanation, check out: https://doubleimpact.charity/
Should it work?
Assuming the platform is legibly reliable, I would expect the following people to donate to Double Impact instead of a political party:
Are homo economicus
Prefers to donate to their political party lacking coordination mechanisms
Thinks the value of donating the same amount to both political parties is less than the value of donating to another charity
And this would create a lot of value assuming it’s true that political donations are near zero-sum. (You could argue that they aren’t–ex.: maybe they are a good way to educate the public about political issues.)
Even people who think donating to another charity is more valuable than donating to a political party might donate through that process if it seemed sufficiently likely that their preferred party will have less donations anyway as they would have a >50% chance of doubling their donation. That part seems like it would just be adding a transaction cost to get to the same outcome and so is actually a downside of the platform. Although maybe the transaction cost can be made extremely small and maybe there are still positive externalities like the information value of having money vote in that way. Also, that would require finding someone that would agree about donating to the same (or a comparable) charity as part of their matching (not just any charity), which might be quite hard for some people—possibly most people. If people did donate to Double Impact just to cancel the other side’s donation but wouldn’t have donated otherwise to a political party anyway, then that would also be a reason for the other side not to donate through that platform.
At some point this incentive mechanism would stop working because a party receiving 0 vs a party receiving non-zero would benefit more from having money at the margin.
But why hasn’t this taken off nowhere near this level as far as I can tell? Any of the above assumptions might be wrong to some extent.
Maybe it will take-off once the platform gains a reputation. (I know one of the founders and they definitely seem trustworthy to me.)
Or maybe most political donors think donating money to their party goes further than removing money from the other party.
Or maybe the value for saying “I donated to party X” is worth much more than “I donated to party X through the Double Impact mechanism” because it’s more than 5 words. And more than 10 really: it requires reading–and understanding–a paragraph to an article worth of text.
See here and here for my attempts to do this a few years ago! Our project (which we called Pact) ultimately died, mostly because it was no one’s first priority to make it happen. About once a year I get contacted by some person or group who’s trying to do the same thing, asking about the lessons we learned.
I think it’s a great idea—at least in theory—and I wish them the best of luck!
(For anyone who’s inclined toward mechanism design and is interested in some of my thoughts around incentives for donors on such a platform, I wrote about that on my blog five years ago.)
Amazing, thank you! I’ll share with the founder I know
A very similar project called “Repledge” launched in 2012, but then fizzled. I don’t know why. But you might try to track down their story and learn from their fail if you want to make this project succeed.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120415055024/http://www.repledge.com/
Thank you! I’ll share with the founder I know
seems like an interesting idea. I had never heard of it before, and I’m generally decently aware of weird stuff like this, so they probably need to put more effort into publicity. I don’t know if truly broad public appeal will ever happen but I could imagine this being pretty popular among the kinds of people who would e.g use manifold.
one perverse incentive this scheme creates is that if you think other charity is better than political donations, you are incentivized to donate to the party with less in its pool, and you get a 1:1 match for free, at the expense of people who wanted to support a candidate.
also, in the grand scheme of things, the amount of money in politics isn’t that big, but it’s still a solid chunk. but the TAM is inherently quite limited.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in-almonds/
One downside of this is that charitable donations are typically tax deductable, but political donations aren’t. Whether this matters depends on tax brackets and whether the donater is going to itemize, but I imagine it would make it harder to convince people.
should make it easier to convince, no? this system is more likely to mean the donation is tax deductible which is good
I doubt this organization could get 501(c) status since it’s only purpose is to make political donations (and it only matters if the organization you donate to is 501(c), it doesn’t matter if they then re-grant it to another charitable organization). I’m not an expert on this though.
Maybe you would need a trust in between?
But yeah, good point, it might explain (more) why it didn’t blow up.
One issue is that $10m of ads for one party and $8m in ads for the other is not equivalent to $2m in just one, as most ads aren’t for getting people to switch sides, but to just attend at all.
I’m not sure I’m seeing how “most ads aren’t for getting people to switch sides” means “$10m of ads for one party and $8m in ads for the other is not equivalent to $2m in just one”
As ads are made to encourage people to vote, and some people are more or less concerned about voting, each addition ad dollar has a lower effect.
A hypothetical $10m in ads could get 85% of x voters, and $8m could get 70%, but $2m would get 50% and $0m would get 25%, so the 8:10m in funding would be preferential to the 0:2m.
ah, yeah, that’s what I was referring to with:
This doesn’t work as advertised.
If I care about the election more than other charities, I won’t give to such a fund. My dollars will do more towards the campaign on average if I give directly to my side. This effect is trivial if the double impact group is small but very large if it is most donations.
In an extreme case, suppose that most people give to double impact and the two campaigns are tied $1b - $1b. One donor gives their $1m directly to their side. It is the only money actually spent on advertising; that side has a large advantage in ratio of funds spent.
More realistic scenarios yield smaller average ratios, but always less expected return for your preferred campaign if you give to it vs, double impact.