Instruction Manual for Giving Games
This instruction manual will tell you everything you need to know in order to run a successful Giving Game. It captures lessons we’ve collected from hundreds of Giving Games and feedback from facilitators all over the world. This is a living document- as we learn more we’ll add more- so check back from time to time for updates.
We’ve designed the Instruction Manual so you can use it in a way that fits your needs. You can just read the Summary for a quick overview of the key takeaways, use the Table of Contents to find an answer to a specific question, or read the manual start to finish to understand each step in the Giving Game process and how they relate to each other.
Sponsorship from The Life You Can Save
Sponsoring your own Giving Game
Can I sponsor Giving Games that other people run?
How much money should the participants donate?
Sample Timeline for 75 Minute GG:
How to find participants for your Giving Game
Advice for groups or individuals promoting effective giving
Advice for school administrators
Finding participants for Speed Giving Games
Creating an Introduction for your Giving Game
Picking the featured charities
Deciding how many charities to feature
Deciding which charities to feature
A framework for thinking about the charity choice set
Choosing or Designing Your Charity Presentations
Preparing for your Giving Game
Tips for moderating the discussion
Concerns that may be raised during the Giving Game
Participants feel like they don't have enough information to make a decision.
Participants feel like they don't have enough time to make a decision.
Someone has a principled objection to participating
Participants don't want to choose
Participants want more (or different) charities to be eligible
1. Know what you’re trying to accomplish. You’ll definitely want to teach the participants core concepts and resources they can use to give more effectively. But you’re likely to also have other goals related to your specific circumstances. The more explicit you can be in defining the outcomes you want to see, the more likely your Giving Game will be to produce those outcomes.
2. Your Giving Game, and the charities it features, should be appropriate for the audience. If the participants are members of a church group, you’ll want to explain effective giving in terms of that religion’s values. If the participants are members of a student entrepreneurship club, it would be a good idea to include a charity promoting economic empowerment. For ideas on how to do this, see our tips on customizing your Giving Game and selecting appropriate charities.
3. The Life You Can Save can sponsor your Giving Game if you don’t want to fund it yourself. TLYCS is eager to sponsor Giving Games in a variety of contexts, subject to a few minor restrictions. Learn more here.
4. Prepare ahead of time. Practice what you plan on saying to the participants, and try to anticipate concerns they might raise. A natural communication style will make your presentation much more engaging.
5. Don’t forget to make an “End Game Ask!” The easiest (and most overlooked) way to make your Giving Game more effective is to ask people to take actions that will encourage better giving (e.g. signing up for a mailing list, taking a paper or online survey, or attending an upcoming talk). You should generally be asking people to do things related to the goals you’ve laid out.
6. Treat participants with respect. You’re responsible for making sure the participants are treated with respect, both by you and by other participants. Encouraging people to challenge their own thinking is fine, but it should be done in a way that isn’t hostile or overly confrontational.
7. Structure the voting strategically. Adding a preliminary vote at the beginning of the Giving Game, when participants have very little knowledge about the charities, can help you learn whether people changed their minds in the course of thinking about the question more deeply. Be sure to find out how many people changed their choice between the preliminary vote and the final vote. Note: “before and after voting” is not applicable for “Speed Giving Games” (also known as “Mini”, “Booth”, or “Table” Games). For these games, it’s important to structure the voting so people can’t see have previous participants have voted. Otherwise, they are likely to vote for the least popular charity “to be fair”. So if people vote by putting a chip in a jar, make sure the jars aren’t clear.
8. Give the participants helpful handouts. Pass out copies of our one-page collection of good giving tips. It can also be helpful to have some printed copies of the information you present about the charities available for reference.
9. Take advantage of ready-made Giving Game materials. Our Giving Game resource library has an introductory presentation you can use to start your Game, as well as numerous presentations about specific charities. We’ve got all the materials you need to run a Giving Game, or you can adapt what we have to fit your own needs. If you make your own materials, be sure to spend roughly the same amount of time presenting each charity so that one doesn’t appear to be the “favorite”.
10. During group discussions, break into smaller groups if possible. During group discussions, we recommend breaking up into smaller discussion groups if there are more than ~10 participants. Groups of ~5 people work very well. Smaller groups will allow each person to be more engaged in the discussion. If you want, you can have people switch groups to hear new perspectives midway through the discussion. Note: this advice is not applicable for “Speed Giving Games” (also known as “Mini”, “Booth”, or “Table” Giving Games)
11. After your Giving Game, fill out a post-game report. These reports help us collect data and feedback in a standardized way. This is really important to us and we appreciate your help! If TLYCS sponsors your Game, this report is also how you tell us which donation to make.
12. Be a good brand ambassador for The Life You Can Save. By facilitating a Giving Game, you commit to representing The Life You Can Save’s brand accurately and respectfully. This includes being respectful and tasteful in how you depict people and regions affected by poverty- these guidelines provide good advice on how to do this.
We often get inquiries from people who want to run a Giving Game but aren’t sure how to pay for the donation. Fortunately, The Life You Can Save can provide sponsorship for Giving Games, as long as they meet the following requirements:
1. At least one of the featured charities must be from TLYCS’s recommended list
2. All featured charities must be tax-deductible in the US.[1] We can occasionally make exceptions for this requirement- to see if that’s possible in your case please send a brief description of what you’d like to do to givinggames[at]thelifeyoucansave[dot]org.
3. After the Game, you should circulate a sign-up sheet for our newsletter and/or make another “end-game ask”.
4. You must fill out a post-game report afterwards to provide the feedback that helps us improve future Giving Games
5. You are required to be respectful to the participants and be a good ambassador for The Life You Can Save and its values.
6. You are required to review the summary of this document which provides a quick overview of best practices
For information on the amount of money TLYCS provides, see here.
Of course, you can also sponsor your own Giving Games. You can fund a Giving Game with money you already planned to donate, so it doesn’t have to cost you anything! Your money will still be donated to your favorite charities, but by sponsoring a Giving Game you’ll gain the chance to teach each player about effective giving. Even if you weren’t already planning to give, sponsoring a Giving Game offers great reasons to do so: not only will your money go to help effective charities, you’ll also be teaching people about better giving!
If neither of these options is viable for you, contact givinggames[at]thelifeyoucansave[dot]org to see if other sponsorship opportunities are available.
Yes! You can let other people re-grant your gift and learn about effective giving in the process by making a donation to The Giving Game Fund. Donations to this donor advised fund are tax-deductible in the US, and will be used to sponsor Giving Games around the world.
You can donate to The Giving Game Fund here. If you have any questions, please contact givinggames[at]thelifeyoucansave[dot]org.
The Life You Can Save generally provides ~$10/person if the participants are college students, and ~$20 or more per person for older or professional audiences. This assumes a ~60+ minute Game, for a ~30 minute Game we’d cut these levels in half.
These are just rough guidelines that you can adjust to your particular circumstances. Note that The Life You Can Save is willing to provide larger amounts for particularly high value Games, and we strongly encourage other sponsors to do the same.
Designing your Giving Game can be an iterative process. As you get more specifics about who your audience will be and how much time you have, you may need to revisit your ideas about which charities to use or other elements of the design. This section walks you through each aspect of the process.
The first step in designing your Giving Game is defining what you’re trying to accomplish. The specific takeaways you’ll want participants to get from the experience will depend on your particular audience and circumstances. The goals you define will help guide the rest of the design process.
Your goals may include things like:
As you plan your Giving Game, you'll want to develop a timeline to help you allocate your time budget. You can use the sample timeline below as a template. Remember to allow some buffer throughout the process to account for things like people filtering in late
You need people to participate in your Giving Game, but where can you find them? Different sorts of facilitators have access to different audiences, so we’ve organized our advice accordingly.
You can run a Giving Game with friends or family, groups you’re a part of, or reach out to local groups who would by sympathetic to the idea. You can also use a Giving Game as a way to find members for a new group you’re starting (see How to Run a Giving Game and Start a Local Chapter and Launching a Campus Group with a Giving Game at the University of Pennsylvania for more information)
Campuses offer numerous opportunities to find Giving Game participants. You can use the groups below as the sole audience for your Giving Game, or you can use them to help promote a Giving Game that’s open to the public. You can also use a Giving Game as a way to find members for a new group you’re starting (see How to Run a Giving Game and Start a Local Chapter and Launching a Campus Group with a Giving Game at the University of Pennsylvania for more information).
Giving Games can be incorporated into classes in numerous subject areas including Philosophy, Psychology, Economics, and Health (and we’re always open to creative ideas to apply Giving Games in new areas).
Some of the concepts Giving Games can be used to explore:
A workplace Giving Game is a great way to provide your employees with a fun experience with a positive social impact.
Workplace applications include:
Options for using Giving Games in school programming outside of the classroom include:
To find participants for a Speed Giving Game, set up a table in a high-traffic area and ask passerby “do you want to donate someone else’s money to charity?” This has proven to be the most successful “opening line”.
Examples of high traffic areas you can use:
You’ll want to start your Giving Game by welcoming the participants and giving a brief introduction to the session. Basically, you’ll want to explain what they’ll be doing (choosing which charity to give to) and why (individuals and society can accomplish more social impact by donating more effectively.) You can use this presentation which provides basic information about effective giving. This presentation can be adapted to suit your needs or you can create your own.
In general, you’ll want your introduction to accomplish the following things:
The specifics of your introduction should depend on the particulars of your Giving Game. If the Players are hearing about effective giving for the first time, you’ll want to provide some basic background on the topic. If you’re a professor running a Giving Game to culminate a three-week section on Effective Altruism, this won’t be necessary.
Similarly, it’s best if you can frame your introduction in language likely to resonate with your specific audience. If the Players are finance students, try framing effective giving as “maximizing the return on investment from your giving”. If they’re ethics students, it will probably be more effective to talk about “doing the most good”.
If you want to create your own introduction, there are a number of materials you may find helpful:
You can incorporate videos into your Introduction in a variety of ways. You can have a longer video serve as the bulk of your introduction, or use a shorter video to elaborate a specific point in your own presentation. We’ve collected a library of video resources covering numerous topics related to effective giving.
We suggest using 2-4 charities as a rule of thumb for a Giving Game lasting 60-90 minutes. If you have 50 minutes or less, you should probably only feature two charities to conserve time. If your Game is particularly long or will stretch over multiple sessions, more than four charities is fine (though by no means necessary).
If you expect Players to quickly dismiss one or more options, you should be sure to have enough viable options available to produce a compelling discussion.
You’re free to feature whichever charities you like in your Giving Game, though as a reminder, there are some restrictions if TLYCS is sponsoring your Giving Game. If you’re unsure which charities to use and want to use a choice set that’s worked well in a lot of different circumstances, we suggest featuring Against Malaria Foundation vs. Give Directly (presentation materials for AMF, Give Directly, and the rest of TLYCS’s recommended charities are available in our Giving Game resource library).
Many of the topics the discussion will cover are driven by which charities are featured. So facilitators who want to highlight certain issues should think carefully about which charities would best do so. When Give Directly (which offers unrestricted cash grants to people in extreme poverty) is a featured charity, discussions typically touch what role paternalism should play in giving, as Give Directly's programs invariably offer beneficiaries more discretion on how to improve their lives than other charities. Similarly, if Innovations for Poverty Action (which conducts research into which interventions actually help the poor) is involved, expect to discuss the trade-offs between short vs. long-term help and direct vs. indirect aid.
We generally find it helpful to think about classifying different types of charity choice sets into three broad categories: Great vs. Great, Great vs. Good, and Great vs. Default. Each of these is described below. Note that this framework simplistically assumes only two charities per Game, so Games with more featured charities may have characteristics of multiple categories.
These Games feature only highly effective charities, so the money will go to a great cause no matter how the participants vote. Since many highly effective charities work in a narrow set of cause areas (e.g. global health, global poverty, animal rights), these Games can either feature a selection of charities from within one of those causes or offer a sampling of charities from across causes. Within-cause Games should typically feature charities doing different types of work (rather two charities that both distribute bednets to fight malaria), unless the explicit purpose of the Game is to practice making comparative assessments of the implementation of a given program.
This sort of Game features a highly effective charity and another charity that’s significantly less effective, but still much more effective than where most people give. If a player decided to support either of these charities in the future rather than a default charity, we’d expect them to achieve more impact than they otherwise would.
To illustrate the benefits of a Great vs. Good charity pairing, let’s use an example: AMF and Nurse Family Partnership. These charities both have an extremely strong body of rigorous evidence suggesting that their work provides significant benefits to the people they serve. Both serve similar populations (primarily young children and their mothers). Both are highly cost-effective relative to other charities doing similar work. The difference is that AMF provides more “bang for the buck”: each dollar they spend helps more people, and helps them more significantly, than a dollar spent by NFP, which operates exclusively in the US.
Pairing AMF vs. NFP forces players to confront an uncomfortable reality: Conventional wisdom and most people’s intuition is that “giving starts at home” but higher impact opportunities are available overseas. By highlighting this sort of tradeoff, Great vs. Good Games encourage Players to make explicit decisions about issues that will significantly shape their future giving impact.
Even if Players choose the Good charity over the Great one, they can still learn important lessons about good giving. In embracing the Good charity, it’s natural for them to also embrace the criteria that make it good- evidence of impact, cost-effectiveness relative to its peers, a focus on producing improved outcomes, etc.
These Games involve a risk that the money is donated to a good but not great charity. But that risk is more than offset by the advantages of Great vs Good Games.
These Games feature a highly effective charity paired with the sort of charity you might expect the Players to give to normally (now or in the future). For instance, if the Players are college students, their school would make be a good choice for a “default” charity. Local food banks or homeless shelters, heartwarming but low bang for the buck charities like Make a Wish Foundation, or very well known charities can all be good default charities.
Like Great vs. Good Games, Great vs. Default Games force Players to prioritize maximizing their impact against other priorities that commonly motivate donors (e.g. repaying an organization they’ve benefited from, as in the college student example).
One advantage of Great vs. Default Games is that they introduce the opportunity for donors to explicitly reject specific default giving options in favor of maximizing impact. To continue the example of the college Game, a Player may decide that while they want so support their school (as many alumni do), they’d rather achieve more social impact by giving elsewhere. Subsequent fundraising efforts from the default charity may even serve as reminders to give to a more effective charity!
Before the participants can start thinking about which charity to choose, they first need to learn something about each organization. This information is typically presented right after the introduction, though in some cases it’s feasible to have people review it beforehand (e.g. teachers assigning the material as preparatory reading before a class discussion).
Our resource library has powerpoint presentations and accompanying scripts for each of our recommended charities. These can be shortened or supplemented to fit your time and needs. The resource library also contains 1 page “Charity at a Glance” sheets, for use in Speed Giving Games. You can use these materials as a template if you need to create a presentation for another charity. Try to present a similar amount of information about each charity: if you talk for 10 minutes about one organization and 1 minute talking about another, participants won’t view it as a “fair fight”.
When giving overviews of the charities, you're trying to strike a balance between providing the information people will want to make their decision and not overwhelming people with too much to think about. Providing handouts of the information makes things easier, since people don't have to focus on keeping notes. It can also be helpful to pause and answer questions during or after the overview. If you don't know the answer to someone's question that's okay- just say so.
We’ve had success using a variety of voting structures: winner take all, proportional, preferential, and tiered. The pros and cons of these structures are outlined in the table below.
Adding a preliminary vote at the outset is a great way to tell if people change their minds over the course of the Giving Game (note that this does not apply to Speed Giving Games). We especially recommend this practice if there is a clear quality gap between two or more of the charities (i.e. for Great vs. Good and Great vs. Default charity pairings). Be sure to note the results of any preliminary votes in the comments of your post-game report.
However you structure the voting, be sure that you require participants to decide which charity is their top choice. If you give people the option to split their vote evenly, many will take that option without fully reflecting on their priorities.
Voting can be conducted either privately via paper ballot or publicly via a show of hands. If you're unsure which to use, we suggest using private voting to respect those who may want anonymity.
If you're using a runoff voting system and/or have a large number of votes, this step might take a bit longer and you may want to enlist a helper in tabulating the votes.
Important note: if there’s a particular donation outcome you hope to produce, think carefully about what voting structure is likely to produce that outcome. As an example, you might run a Game featuring a highly effective charity against a heartwarming but ineffective charity. If you want the effective charity to receive the entire donation and expect most but not all participants will vote for this charity, a winner-take-all system would be better than a preferential or tiered structure.
Structure | Pros | Cons |
Winner take all | -Drives home point about maximizing impact -Result feels like group decision
| -Supporters of losing charities can feel disempowered
|
Proportional | -Maximizes people’s agency -Any charity with support can get $ | -No collective decision -Discussion can be less vigorous |
Preferential (e.g. instant run-off) | -More accurate reflection preferences w/ >2 choices -Encourages deeper thought about preferences | -Adds complication to the vote counting process |
Tiered (e.g. 70%/20%/10% split for 1st, 2nd, 3rd place) | -Participants get to support all or most charities -Flexibility in dividing donation | -Impossible for best charity to receive entire donation -Split might not accurately reflect preferences |
Once the votes have been counted and the winner has been announced, a Giving Game isn’t over. Arguably, the most important part will still lie ahead: the “End-game Ask”. The idea is simple: you don’t want to let the Giving Game end without asking Players to do one or more things that’ll encourage them to be better givers!
There’s no better time to ask. The Players will likely be in a positive state of mind- after all, they’ll have just given to charity at no personal cost. And they’ll hopefully have a heightened awareness of the importance of effective giving. Indeed, we conducted a randomly controlled laboratory experiment that strongly suggests the Giving Game model dramatically increases people’s willingness to accept pro-social requests.
There are two asks we suggest making as part of every Giving Game:
We also recommend making other requests which could include:
Incorporating these End-game Asks (and/or your own ideas) is one of the best ways to improve the efficacy of your Giving Game. You’ll be giving the Players the opportunity and the tools they need to form a long-term interest in better giving.
Once you’ve offered people the chance to engage more deeply, you’ll want to conclude the Giving Game by thanking people for their participation and providing a synthesis of the key issues discussed by the group.
To get ready for your Giving Game, be sure to follow these simple steps.
1. Make sure you have a time and place scheduled to hold the Giving Game, and that the Players are aware. Be prepared to show up early to setup.
2. Plan out how you want to spend the time you have allocated for your Giving Game. You can use the Sample Timeline as a guide.
3. Practice what you intend to say to the participants (e.g. an introduction on effective giving or charity descriptions). If there are multiple facilitators, make sure you’re in agreement on who is doing what. A little bit of preparation goes a long way- you’ll be much more engaging if you sound natural when presenting the information instead of reading directly from a script or making it up as you go along.
4. Check to be sure the logistics are all in order. If you need a projector and/or Wifi, make sure those will be available. If you’re planning on having the players break into small discussion groups, make sure the seating will accommodate that.
5. Read through our list of concerns that could get raised during your Giving Game and our suggested responses. Think about whether the structure of your Game is likely to elicit any of these concerns and plan accordingly.
We've put together a list of tips to help you facilitate the discussion. Like most aspects of Giving Games, you can tailor your role as moderator to suit your particular needs.
It's helpful to be prepared for concerns participants might voice during the Giving Game. So we've compiled a list of the most common issues that come up along with tips for addressing them. You can even try to pre-empt some of these concerns in your introduction.
Don't worry if someone raises this concern- it's a good sign if people are actively seeking more information to guide their giving decisions! You definitely want to encourage this mindset.
Suggested solutions:
Again, it's a good thing if people want to put more time and thought into their giving. Acknowledge that the time constraint in the Giving Game is a practical necessity, and encourage them to take plenty of time in researching and reflecting on their personal giving decisions.
This doesn't happen often, but it can happen. If for whatever reason someone doesn't want to give to either charity, don't force them- just let them abstain (if relevant, reduce the amount that goes to charity by their share).
When we surveyed Giving Game participants about what they liked least about the experience, the most common response has been that people didn't like "having to choose". This is totally understandable- people like all the charities want to help each of them. Acknowledge this, but hold firm and make people choose a favorite. Remind people that nobody can give as much as they want to as many causes as they want- it's important to prioritize. If you feel it's appropriate, you can also encourage people to donate some of their own money to one or all of the charities.
If donating all the money to one charity feels harsh, you can mitigate this issue by using proportional or tiered voting.
Remind people that in countries (like the US) where giving is tax-deductible charitable donations aren't just a matter of personal choice, they're also a matter of public policy. If someone makes a gift to charity, they pay a lower tax bill even if that gift has little or no social impact. Our laws incentive certain behaviors, and it's up for debate whether those are the behaviors we want our society to incentivize.
This could be anything from "I really like Charity X. Why can't we give to them?" to "Why are all the charities doing direct economic empowerment interventions? Why not include an organization working on systemic change to benefit to same populations?"
You can explain that the Giving Game this artificial constraint built in to allow for a deeper and focused discussion; there are around a million charities in the US and an open discussion wouldn't be very productive. Emphasize that people are obviously free to consider any charity they want in their own giving, and that the Giving Game structure is not meant to suggest that there are only a handful of good charities out there.
When relevant, you can direct people who show interest in other areas you want to encourage toward additional resources (e.g. referring someone who voices concerns about charitable giving being a narrow form of doing good to 80,000 hours, an organization that promotes ethical career choice).
After the Giving Game is over, there are still a few things left to do.
Please, please, please fill out a post-game report! The Life You Can Save requires this for Games we sponsor (it lets us know what donations to make), but we implore you to submit a form even if someone else provided sponsorship. Post-game reports allow us to systematically collect standardized data about different Giving Games. This information is our best source of ideas for improving our process and methodology.
Once the players have decided where the Prize will go, whoever sponsored the Game needs to make the appropriate donation(s).
When The Life You Can Save sponsors Games, we make the donations once we receive instructions via the Post-Game report. We typically make the donations through a Donor Advised Fund, which provides a source of independent record keeping. We will forward you a confirmation of the donation once we receive it and you are free to share it with the participants so they know the donation was made. You’ll typically receive a copy of the confirmation about a week after filling out a post-game report.
Address any follow-ups associated with your post-game ask. If you collected emails for The Life You Can Save’s newsletter, please send them to givinggames@thelifeyoucansave.org. Reach out to anyone who expressed interest in a subsequent chat and schedule a time to get together.
Join the Giving Game Discussion Group on Facebook to share questions and ideas with over a hundred experienced Giving Game facilitators.
If you’d like to get advice from someone on our team you can email givinggames[at]thelifeyoucansave[dot]org or book a time here for a phone or Skype conversation.
[1] We’d rather not have this limitation in place, i is just the result of the structure we use to disperse donations to the winning charities. All of The Life You Can Save’s recommended charities are tax-deductible in the US except for the Fred Hollows Foundation. You can check whether an organization meets this requirement by searching for it here; if you can find the charity, it’s okay. We can also accommodate charities that are tax-deductible in the US through fiscal sponsorship arrangements (e.g. GiveWell regranting to SCI).