Grounded Giving: Maximizing the ROI of Your Charitable Dollars

Speaker 1

Our next speaker will be Brad Carmack. Brad graduated from the JD MPA program at Brigham Young University in April of 2011 and became a licensed California attorney that same year. Currently, he works for Yahoo in California. A religious activist and member of the LDS Church, Brad loves to write about transhumanism, bioethics, and religion. Please welcome Brad.

Brad Carmack

Thank you, Lincoln. I’m glad to be here, excited this morning. My speech today is a call to action more than it is a presentation of information. The title is about grounded giving. I’m going to talk to you about charitable giving I’m going to have a few specific invitations that I’m going to ask you to change your behavior going forward. The subtitle is How to Maximize the ROI of Your Charitable Dollars. how to maximize the ROI of your charitable dollars. I’m going to discuss that in some detail.

Brad Carmack

I’m going to do so in four steps. I only have a few minutes So I will be concise. First, I’m going to state my purpose. Second, I’m going to talk about why we should give, why we should engage in charitable giving. Second, why we suck at giving, generally speaking. And then fourth, how to give smarter. going forward. Okay?

Brad Carmack

So we’ll start with stating my purpose. What I want you to do as a result of this presentation, two things. I want you to donate your charitable dollars more efficiently going forward. And second, I will invite you to donate more charitable dollars.

Brad Carmack

So I’m going to do a quick poll. These three gentlemen here with the middle with the glasses, I don’t know you. Hopefully, we’ll become friends afterwards. I try to pick on strangers, they become my friends later. But raise your hands if you are, relative to when you walked in this morning, if you will donate more your charitable dollars more efficiently going forward. That’s fine if you don’t raise your hand. And if you’re committed to donating more charitable dollars moving forward. So their hands aren’t raised, so I should keep talking. This is good. Okay, so let me try to persuade you.

Brad Carmack

Why should you give? I’m going to give a few reasons. One, charitable giving makes life more meaningful. I think that As we reflect on our own experiences giving charitably, we would come to that conclusion. We’d also remark that some of those instances where we’ve given charitably have been very pleasurable. Personally, I can definitely attest to that.

Brad Carmack

But I do want to offer some specific statistics. A lot of them come from the research of Arthur Brooks. His book here is called Who Really Cares? And it’s a lot of research about who gives, why they give, and what the effects and results are of charitable giving. So I’m going to quote some stats from his book. One thing he notes is that in two thousand four, there was a big increase in charitable giving. And you notice that that two billion dollar increase in the U. S. led to thirty six billion dollars of a boost to the GDP of the economy of the United States. So charitable giving does have a lot of spillover effects in the economy. I think it’s about a one to nineteen ratio for every dollar of charitable giving. It has a multiplier effect in the economy of about nineteen. So it’s good for the economy.

Brad Carmack

More reasons why you should give. How about some personal ones that have an effect that accrues to you? On average, charitable givers earn fourteen thousand dollars more than those who don’t charitably give. In a typical year. And second, this is the most interesting piece. So this guy came to the Master of Public Administration program at BYU that I graduated from, and he gave this presentation that kind of rocked my world. But he talked about how there is a not only a correlation, but it seems the data suggests that there’s this pushing effect of charitable giving on increased income. And he said for every dollar you give, and of course there are some constraints here and diminishing returns, but generally every dollar you give drives $3. 75 of extra income to you personally. So you think that doesn’t really make sense, right? You give your money away, you’re making yourself poor, but there does seem to be a relationship, a positive one, between charitable giving and extra income and the ratio that he found there in his research.

Brad Carmack

Also, if you’re public about your giving, other people that see that you’re giving are more likely to give as well. So for about every dollar you give, if you’re public, there’ll be about fourteen cents more. for every dollar that you give that are given by other people, which again has some of those spillover effects into the economy and helps benefit those that give. So I’m hoping that you guys are considering maybe raising your hand a little bit more on the second one at least.

Brad Carmack

I do want to make a quick note. Judas did talk about charitable giving and donating alms and suggests that we should do it in private. I think that’s some terrible advice. I think you should give publicly because it helps other people to give more and helps to benefit them as well as the recipients of the charitable dollars. Okay?

Brad Carmack

Last three reasons. Folks that give are forty three percent more likely to say that they’re very happy. So giving charitably can increase your health. Your wealth and your happiness. That goes to my second point here. 25% are more likely to say that their health is excellent. And this is again comparing those that give charitably compared to those that don’t.

Brad Carmack

And then, third, this is an important thing. I love coming to these conferences, but sometimes, as intellectually stimulating as it is, I want to do something different to really change the world. And I’m not super good at some of these health technologies and life extension and some of the hard brass tacks of advancing technology. But one thing I can do is donate some money to people that can. And so it’s, I think, a way that all of us can get involved in these transhumanist projects that we care about is being very smart about how we donate our limited funds. So these are all reasons for giving. I hope I’m helping to persuade there.

Brad Carmack

Now I want to talk briefly, this is one of my less important points, about why we suck at giving, because I really want to focus on how to give smarter. But generally, I think if you consider maybe the last, say, ten times that you made a charitable donation about the motivating factors and the analysis that you did before you gave, I think you’d probably come to the same conclusions. A lot of times the reasons we give aren’t terribly good. Oftentimes, it’s because we’re feeling guilt or compassion. We do it because somebody else did, because you did the same sort of donation the year before. So it’s a habit.

Brad Carmack

And you can imagine putting yourself in the investor’s shoes. Imagine if you invested and you were hoping to get a return on your investment. And you made decisions the same way. So rather than looking at their balance sheet, rather than going to the market to find out how well their revenues are going to do, what kind of impact they’re going to have in the economy, if you just sort of made decisions about investments for these reasons of emotion and because you did last year and things like that, you probably wouldn’t get a very good return.

Brad Carmack

And when it comes to charitable giving, I’m going to assume that most of you have pretty similar interests as I think as I would, and you want to help people to be able to have more happiness and less suffering. That’s kind of the the bottom line equation. It’s a pretty typical preference utilitarianism view. And I’m going to say and claim that the utility of any donation is equal to how likely a group of folks is to experience a benefit multiplied by the size of that benefit.

Brad Carmack

And I think in this transhumanism community, we see some really interesting ways that that’s manifest. Things like reducing the suffering associated with aging. enabling people to have enhancements if they want them, to be able to run faster, defeat disease, live longer if they want. These are things that can really affect that bottom line equation. And your charitable dollars can make those things come to pass if we’re smart about it. Okay.

Brad Carmack

So we bottom line here, we don’t give very smartly as a general rule. There are some ways that we can give smarter. I’m going to explain them. Oh, by the way, I guess I should take a quick poll for my three guys there. Relative to when you walked in this morning, are you likely to give more over the next twelve months? Raise your hand if the answer is yes. Okay, I’ll keep talking. And if you’re going to donate more efficiently, raise your hand. Okay, so a third of the way there. Good.

Brad Carmack

So a couple of tips. And these are hard. I realize I’m asking you to do some tough things. Again, I was going to if I had more time, I’d have you go through this exercise of really thinking through the last twelve months and what charitable donations you’ve made. think through the reasons why you gave them, think through whether or not they’re going to have a big impact, how you quantify that impact, how do you measure the return on your investment of charitable dollars, and kind of go through the exercise of evaluating your giving. I don’t have quite that luxury, so I’m going to make some summary tips here.

Brad Carmack

One of the most important things that I think you can do is to say no. It’s tough. A lot of the times, the pitches that we get to donate our charitable dollars aren’t always going to be the highest ROI ones. Some of them are sort of the low hanging fruit. I think of some of the runs that I’ve done for good causes. breast cancer awareness or things like that. These all have good effects, right? They’re all good causes. They’re not always the most efficient ones. They don’t always have the biggest bang for the buck. We’ve got to be hard headed about these decisions. And that’s sort of the uncomfortable piece I’m going to invite you to do, is to be more hardheaded about your charitable giving, which is sort of counterintuitive because it’s sort of the soft compassion thing. But we really should be more hardheaded about how we give. So the first one is to say no, at least at first, and insist on some research.

Brad Carmack

And since all of us have limited amounts of time to research how the charitable things are done, I’m going to suggest that you trust the experts. I’m going to list them all those experts on this next slide, but I want to tell you why I’m suggesting to trust the experts. It’s not necessarily because they know the best charities or they know the best ROI or because they’re right. but because they’re more likely to be right than you or I am. Because we’re just not very good about evaluating charities. We don’t have a lot of time to invest to see how are the dollars spent How do you measure and quantify the social impact? But there are folks that are pretty good at this. Arthur Brooks, folks at some of these institutes that I’m going to show you. When I was in the MPA program, I kind of became exposed to folks that are in this space about measuring social impacts and being able to kind of measure along the baseline of the utility equation. There are folks that are pretty good at it.

Brad Carmack

So these are four that I’m going to recommend. They’re kind of I rate them by how many organizations that they rate. And what these organizations generally do is to give you some usually kind of two different indicators. One is what percentage of your donation ends up going to the target audience, kind of the overhead, which is a valuable indicator, but not always the most important one. The most important indicator is what’s the impact that people feel of the dollars, right? So they can give you some insight on that. And so the one that I use often is GiveWell. There’s a few others here that do a good job of rating charities. So I encourage you to use those.

Brad Carmack

So I’m running low on time. I’m going to kind of recap what we’ve done. So I stated my purpose, which is a call to action, to invite you to give more charitably. It makes you healthier, wealthier and happier. It helps the economy. And it can also help you to advance the transhumanist objectives and projects you care about. Talked about why you should give, so I had some research from Arthur Brooks. briefly discuss why we generally suck at giving, and gave a couple tips for how to give smarter.

Brad Carmack

And with that, I will I guess I won’t I won’t poll you, but I do want you to consider relative to your last twelve months of decisions where you gave, to really think about how you could give more smart more intelligently, more efficiently and have a greater impact with your charitable dollars over the next twelve months. And with that, I close. Thank you.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Brad. On that note, I want to share with you some information, some thoughts about the Mormon Transhumanist Association as an organization and this conference in particular. Our donors to this association highly subsidize this conference. The gathering of people from all over the world, we help pay for travel costs. In the case of our keynote speakers, of course, we pay their way completely. or other speakers that might be traveling long distances, we pay half of their travel costs to get here generally. We also purchase food. We also run a website. There’s a lot of things that we do that cost money. None of our leaders are paid for any of this work that we do. So, if you feel after your study, as Brad pointed out, after you study the Mormon Transhumanist Association, if you feel that we’ve been creating value for you, and if you have the means to do so. please do consider donating generously to the association. That’s the only reason why conferences like this are possible for us to do.

Speaker 1

And if you are interested in donating, where’s Carl? Hale. At the front table outside, Carl Hale can assist you with making a donation, and I encourage you to meet with him if you have the means and interest in doing so.