The Desired Behavioral Change
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The Desired Behavioral Change
As explained in the previous section, The Life You Can Save has a twofold mission: “introduce the ideas from Peter Singer’s book to new audiences,” and “inspiring … and empowering them to make the greatest impact possible.”5 These goals are fundamentally behavioral: by reframing a person’s role in ending extreme poverty, The Life You Can Save changes the way people act toward the issue and their own altruistic responsibilities. Most people who internalize The Life You Can Save’s message will give more to effective charities, likely donate more as a share of their income, and also act to spread effective altruism on their own. The Life You Can Save’s branding, “Smart Giving, Simplified,” also acknowledges the behavioral component of simplifying effective altruism that the organization sees as core to its mission.
Targeted Behaviors Keeping with The Life You Can Save’s two-part mission, our study evaluates and provides recommendations along the same two dimensions: Increase engagement with effective altruism messages. One of Singer’s goals in writing The Life You Can Save, and in founding the charity, is to spread the effective altruism philosophy to new audiences. Doing so might require creating new messages that resonate with different audiences, presenting the same message in innovative ways or on new platforms, or some combination of the two.
Engagement can take many different forms. It includes sharing a post on social media, talking to a friend about effective altruism, thinking about the ideas and how they relate to one’s own life, and many other actions in between. This report focuses on engagement with effective altruism messages on social media, using the options available within each respective platform. These typically include liking a post, sharing a post on their personal account, and following links provided in posts. Tracking engagement using these behaviors is a good starting point for several reasons. First, the social media content is amenable to rapid, easy, and essentially costless change. Second, they can be easily tracked over time and quantified, allowing simple analysis of what works. Finally, they are indicative of other actions that The Life You Can Save wants to change (such as talking to others about effective altruism offline) that are not as easy to measure. Increase donations to effective charities and to The Life You Can Save itself. The goal of promoting effective altruism is to increase donations to effective charities. This is the fundamental action that will contribute to ending extreme poverty globally. The Life You Can Save also accepts donations to fund their own operations. Given that The Life You Can Save’s goal is to end extreme poverty, there is
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