I wrote a blog post suggesting the idea of asking for donations for Christmas as a way of pre-empting the waste of money that would otherwise accompany holiday purchases. It's the kind of social practice I would like to see spread. Imagine if, instead of Christmas presents, we had "Christmas donations toward reducing suffering."

I have been doing that, but come to think of it maybe it isn't enough. I probably should publicly announce that I won't accept any gift that isn't a donation.

I think I need to look into good charities first, so perhaps I'll just ask for money, and assure I will donate it when I find the right charity, or just point out that investing it in my education is, in fact, a good charity.

The best way to approach it very much depends on the other people involved. I have acquaintances who would only give a donation but wouldn't give cash, for psychological reasons. I suspect many others might be more generous with a donation than with cash. (Perhaps they would get even more warm fuzzies from a charity gift than an ordinary gift?)

As always, there's possibly the danger that if people donate more in this avenue, they'll feel as though they've met their quota and will donate less otherwise. But there's also a possibility that they'll discover how good it feels to donate (dopamine release and such), causing them to end up giving even more. I also like to know that they'll be donating to a particular, cost-effective charity that I choose, just in case it has any influence over their future charity choices.

Also, if your charity is sufficiently better than theirs, even if they never donate to it again and feel they've met their quota, you'll have got them to do more good than they would have...

Oh, also only give charity donations. That should go without saying.

Personally, I favour getting cash for several reasons. First, money has the advantage of letting me save it until I can be reasonably sure I won't realize in the future that I could've done something far better with them. Second, my relatives are more likely to give a certain amount of money to me compared to how much they could be prepared to donate (this may be partly due to a different cultural view of charity here in Sweden), especially to a very "weird" charity, like something about factory farming, wild animal suffering or existential risk.

Jesper Östman wrote:Second, my relatives are more likely to give a certain amount of money to me compared to how much they could be prepared to donate (this may be partly due to a different cultural view of charity here in Sweden)

How interesting! It's precisely the opposite with my acquaintances, who view charity with a warm glow but see requests for money as cupidity.

This year for my work Christmas party instead of the usual lame Kris Kringle in which pointless crap is exchanged I got everyone to give me $5 and donated it to oxfam. The reason being I could buy those charity unwrapped donation cards and people could pass them around at the Christmas party and have a tanglible sense of ownership and narrative, as in 'our donations helped buy a lamb for someone in africa, and this one is a chicken farm in cambodia', rather than everyone just giving the money to me and it vanish off somewhere. I figured for repeatability the tangible 'feel good' that this sense of ownership has as a factor is important to make it stick in peoples heads, rather than it being a once off.

I'm going to try the same with my family, but organizing them is akin to herding cats so might be a touch trickier...

Great to hear, redcarded! Perhaps other charities can create such cards for the purpose of Christmas presents.

redcarded wrote:This year for my work Christmas party instead of the usual lame Kris Kringle in which pointless crap is exchanged I got everyone to give me $5 and donated it to oxfam. The reason being I could buy those charity unwrapped donation cards and people could pass them around at the Christmas party and have a tanglible sense of ownership and narrative, as in 'our donations helped buy a lamb for someone in africa, and this one is a chicken farm in cambodia', rather than everyone just giving the money to me and it vanish off somewhere. I figured for repeatability the tangible 'feel good' that this sense of ownership has as a factor is important to make it stick in peoples heads, rather than it being a once off.

Hi redcarded. This is one of the problems that I see in Oxfam. Thousand of animals suffer and are killed with the money that people donate them.

A vegan alternative is Vegfam.

I thought it was just factory farming that was a problem. I always got the impression that outside of that, farmed animals lives were worth living.

Whether an animal in a pasture that gets slaughtered fairly quickly does is an open question, but a lot of places that aren't considered factory farms still keep animals in very unpleasant conditions:

http://teddyhilton.com/2010-11-17-free- ... -the-farms

(not a great source, sorry, but if you Google variations of 'free range suffering,' you can find hundreds like it)