In a Giving Game, participants learn about a few pre-selected charities, think about and discuss their relative merits, and choose which charity will get a real donation (which is typically sponsored by an outside party).
A couple of examples will help illustrate what Giving Games look like in practice.
A university professor organizes a Giving Game for an hour-long session of an ethics course with 15 students. The Life You Can Save sponsors this Giving Game, providing $200 for the students to give to the charity the students deem best at the end of the session. The professor spends ten minutes introducing the three eligible charities: Give Directly (cash grants to families living in extreme poverty), Innovations for Poverty Action (research to identify and implement effective anti-poverty programs), and a local food bank.
The students then engage in a vigorous discussion about which charity they should donate to, and why. The conversation covers topics such as cost-effectiveness, evidence of impact, addressing root causes or merely symptoms, and prioritization of means and ends (or just "goals").
The students vote at the end of the hour, and the winning charity is awarded the $200 donation. The Giving Game concludes with a brief recap discussion and the circulation of a signup sheet for a mailing list providing updates about effective giving opportunities.
A campus group that promotes effective giving facilitates a Giving Game to spread awareness of their message and find new members. The group sets up a table in a busy area and invites passersby to come over. They explain that anyone can give $1 (provided by The Life You Can Save) to their choice of Seva (which fights preventable blindness in the developing world) or the Against Malaria Foundation.
The organizers provide a few key bullet points describing each charity’s work, and most interactions last only a minute or two. Some interactions last longer, however, when participants ask for more information about the charities or the group itself. Rather than simply trying to cycle through as many participants as possible, the group focuses on giving an “elevator pitch” about their work to those who seem interested, collecting email addresses for their mailing list, and publicizing an upcoming event.
As these examples show, the Giving Game model is quite flexible.
While both are set on college campuses (where the majority of Giving Games take place), the model has also been applied in high schools, businesses, book clubs, church groups, and online. In some Giving Games, the participants or organizers fund some or all of the donation. Sometimes the charities objectively have widely differing “bang for the buck”; other times it may be difficult for even a sophisticated donor to decide which charity will do more good. We encourage everyone to test their own variations of the Giving Game model, and to share what they learn in the process.
The Life You Can Save is a movement of people fighting extreme poverty. We hold that an ethical life involves using some of our wealth and resources to save and improve the lives of those less fortunate than us.
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