Give yourself the gift of doing things

Taking action and helping others is good and feels good.

We’re thrilled to report that our big Substackers GiveDirectly fundraiser this year raised $1,161,625!

And equally thrilled that once again, Slow Boring readers led the way with donations from 1,288 of you, roughly half of whom were new donors to the organization. Before matching, you gave $581,760; with match dollars added, you guys brought in $793,964.

Every year we do this, I worry that we won’t be able to live up to the year before. But not only did you guys donate even more than last year, you absolutely blew the competition out of the water in terms of both number of donors and money raised. I was glad The Bulwark joined the team, but I was hopeful (for GiveDirectly’s sake) and also mildly concerned (for my own ego’s) that their larger readership would outpace ours in donations. They did not.

That’s in part because you guys are generally speaking the best — thank you! But I also think that convincing people to actually do things, even give money, is harder than people tend to think, and that we’ve learned some useful lessons about this over the last few years.

I didn’t start this newsletter just to run Giving Tuesday fundraisers. But I did start it, in part, because I thought it would be an effective tool for driving actual change in the world. And I think one reason this fundraiser has always been pretty successful is that we’ve cultivated a readership that also values actually doing things.

To say that you accomplish more if you try is perhaps not the most sophisticated insight in the world.

But sometimes simple insights are powerful and important.

And having had some success with the fundraiser in the first two years, we realized that we could probably do even better if we put a bit more work into it.

We wanted to know how we could get people to give more, so we tried hard to actually answer that question. We brought in our friend Emily, who is good at figuring these things out, to help and we asked you guys to tell us more about what might motivate you. Some of you who’ve been around for a while probably remember filling out that survey — special shout out to the reader who scolded us for trying: “Don’t really know. However, charitable giving should not be reliant on or aimed at getting some material reward in return.”

And we learned that, despite this cranky response, rewards for giving are often effective at increasing giving. We learned that recurring contributions are especially valuable [Editor’s note: I was a bit skeptical about skewing our incentives toward recurring donations last year — what if the donor just canceled after a month? — but I was wrong. We had a retention rate of more than 85 percent, which is one reason we increased the recurring donation threshold this year]. And this helped us build out an incentive system that actually increased donations massively.

We also found that we can drive even more attention to the whole endeavor by doing a wrap-up post along with the initial ask — we want people who contributed to feel seen and those who did not but might be able to next time to feel encouraged — which brings us to today.

And so, in an effort to give you something that will actually check both of those boxes, I want to talk a bit more about doing things and how I think that creates meaning in life.

Solving problems versus showing that you care

In your interpersonal life, oftentimes what other people want from you is not concrete assistance but a demonstration of your emotional concern.

Sometimes, though, they really need help.