Humanitix hosts the biggest-ever Giving Game!

Back in 2023, Humanitix tried something it’s never done before - it decided to give $100,000 each to its longest-serving employees, who could donate the funds to a charity of their choice. Each person took a different approach in making their decision, and many interesting conversations ensued.

Jenny, the Chief of Staff at Humanitix, decided to take a unique approach that would help her with her choice, and involve the entire Humanitix team as well. She decided to host a Giving Game - a workshop format inspired by the Effective Altruism movement.

What is a Giving Game?

Giving Games are educational activities designed to introduce participants to effective giving. During a typical Giving Game, each participant is given $10, introduced to a panel of pre-selected highly researched and effective charities, and asked to make an initial choice based on educational pitches on each charity. The facilitator then goes into more detail about the work of each charity, and how to maximise the potential impact of charitable giving.

In particular, the facilitator explains core concepts like cost-effectiveness, evidence, and how the overhead myth is incorrectly used to assess the performance of non-profits. At the end of the Giving Game, participants decide where to donate.

The Giving Game @ Humanitix

Luke Freeman, the Head of Giving What We Can, facilitated the workshop along with Jenny. Prior to the event, Jenny researched and narrowed down the featured charities to three choices:

GiveDirectly

GiveDirectly provides unconditional cash transfers to some of the world’s poorest people, as well as refugees, urban youth, and disaster victims. It bypasses the traditional (and often inefficient) methods of international giving, and provides straightforward cash transfers to those in need so they can buy the essentials they need to set themselves up for future success.

Cash transfers are relatively well-studied compared to other forms of charitable aid. Numerous studies have shown that cash transfers improve child health and schooling, while savings and investment rates are typically high.

Malaria Consortium

Malaria is characterised by the CDC as “one of the most severe public health problems worldwide” and takes a toll not just on the person’s health but their family. As it is pervasive in low-income countries, those affected are usually already poverty-stricken and the logistics and expense of seeking treatment, the loss of education and wages from missing school or work, and burial expenses for deaths mean they fall into further destitution.

Malaria Consortium works on preventing, controlling, treating, and eliminating malaria and other communicable diseases in Africa and Southeast Asia. Their Seasonal Malaria Chemoprevention (SMC) project is an extremely cost-effective and evidence-based approach to protect children under 5 from malaria.

Effective Ventures Foundation

Effective Ventures is a federation of organisations and projects working to have a large positive impact in the world. They provide world-class operational support and infrastructure to enable unusually impactful organisations to achieve their goals and thrive.

Their activities include fiscal sponsorship, work in governance, risk, and compliance, finance including accounting and budgeting, HR including hiring, visas, and payroll, grantmaking, fundraising, office management and data protection and cybersecurity support for impactful organisations in the effective altruism and longtermism communities.

How did the Giving Game work?

Jenny introduced the three charities with a quick pitch for each, followed by a preliminary show-of-hands on which charity the participants would support.

Luke then delved into some games and exercises that demonstrate how our intuition and myths surrounding giving can cloud our judgement when assessing the effectiveness of charities. There were some case studies presented as examples of when a project appears to be benevolent and impactful on the surface, but end up resulting in little impact, or even negative impact. Luke also shared useful criteria to guide our decisions when selecting an impactful charity.

We then dove into the three selected charities in more detail, and broke out into small groups to analyse the charities alongside the criteria and guiding questions. After some lively discussions, the participants came together to share the points raised and do a final pitch for each charity.

After the final pitches were complete, the 18 participants were given monopoly money which represented the $5,555 they were each entrusted with to “vote” for the charity or charities they wanted to support. They were able to dedicate all their funding towards one charity, or split it across multiple charities however they liked. There were jars put in the front of the room labelled with each charity, and the physical act of distributing money into these symbolic vessels was a magic moment for many of the participants.

“It’s not often that we get to feel connected to the end impact of our day-to-day work. Having the physical monopoly money in my hands to donate to this panel of projects made me feel more connected to how the work we are all doing at Humanitix is resulting in tangible impact and making an actual difference in the end beneficiaries’ lives.”

The Results

Surprisingly, the donations were pretty evenly split between the three charities, with each charity receiving roughly a third of the monopoly money votes. In the group discussions, many people aligned with GiveDirectly’s values of empowering individuals with choice and freedom to spend the cash transfers on whatever they needed to improve their lives. Many also resonated with the cost-effectiveness and evidence-based approach of Malaria Consortium, while others were impressed by the support and infrastructure provided by Effective Ventures for high-impact organisations.

It was also interesting to observe that some people initially went in thinking they would vote for a particular charity, only to have their minds changed completely at the end of the Giving Game following the presentations and group discussions. Not only did the Giving Game make effective donations to worthwhile causes, it initiated deeply intriguing and interesting discussions within the team about how we think and feel about giving, changed perspectives, and opened up further ethical and philosophical rabbit holes to delve into.

Thank you to Jenny, Luke and the Humanitix team for enabling the biggest-ever Giving Game to take place!

Interested in running your own Giving Game? Giving What We Can provides amazing resources and guidance here.