Beneficiaries, anti-charities, and precommitment

[Sam Deere]

Hi all,

I'm pretty new to Beeminder (and AA) but am loving the service so far - I've been looking for something that does what Beeminder does for a while now, and though it's early days I'm very positive.

One service I've been looking for, though, is the ability to set beneficiaries. While I know that this has been mooted as a premium feature, there's the obvious disadvantage of a positive outcome (a warm feeling of charitable donation) arising from not meeting your goals.

However, I propose a different approach - that of pre-committing the donation, then divesting it to the charity in proportion to how completely you've met your goal. I can quantify how much of my disposable income I would like to commit to charity (and it's currently debited directly from my account monthly). I would like to put that money at stake - if I achieve my goals, the charity gets the money anyway (so there's no opposing incentive to soften the blow), if not, the money is lost (either to Beeminder, or an anti-charity - noting the commentary that the Beeminder team have made about the negatives associated with anti-charities here: http://blog.beeminder.com/anticharity/).

As a trivial example, if I made a monthly donation to Great Cause X, the amount donated could be instead debited and held in escrow by Beeminder. Let's say I stay on the yellow brick road for 85% of the month, then 85% of the money goes to the charity, and the rest goes somewhere else (obviously, given humans are more sensitive to loss this should be framed to me as 'you have lost 15% of your donation to Great Cause X). I'm sure you could finesse this with different ramping between time on track vs proportion donated etc but that's the general idea.

I think this would be a good way to up the ante and make goals have a more tangible outcome while encouraging altruism. It also means that goal pledges are decoupled from charitable donations - Beeminder can still take my $5 pledge every time I go off track, because I've already committed my donation amount separately.

This would be relatively easy to hack together using the API (and I will attempt to do so) but obviously it'd be cool if you could manage the whole system from the same interface, without duplicating too much infrastructure. I think that others might see this as a preferable option to the regular beneficiaries model too.

Anyway, love to know what people's thoughts are.

(Apologies if this has already been discussed or misses stuff that's commonly accepted within the AA community - I couldn't find anything that specifically countenanced precommitment though)

[Sean Fellows]

That's an interesting idea, although I can say that for myself if the relationship between my performance and the reward/penalty is linear, it's not going to compel me to do much. I mean that if slacking off another 1% always costs me 1% of the donation, I am probably not going to do very well.

Or, put another way, if I were to decrease my pledge on either of my $30 goals I would probably derail them again.

Cheers,

Sean

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[Daniel Reeves]

Good point about linear penalties. As Sam suggests, that part can be tweaked.

But this is a beautiful idea. I always like to see if a new product or
feature idea can be approximated without actually implementing
anything. [1] In this case, could you trial this idea by setting up a
Beeminder-vs-Charity bank account where all your money earmarked for
charity goes, and which you also use as the funding source for your
Beeminder goals? Now derailing on your goals is palpably redirecting
money from children with cancer (for example) to Beeminder!

Does that capture the spirit of this? (Note it solves the linearity problem.)


[1] Related idea: Email-first startups.
http://ryanhoover.me/post/43986871442/email-first-startups

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http://dreev.es -- search://"Daniel Reeves"
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com

[Sam Deere]

Thanks for the responses guys.

Having a 'donations' bank account is a great idea. To be honest I hadn't thought of doing that. Partly that's because I want to precommit the money to a third party in order to no longer be in control of it - I don't want to have the option of knowing that I have a 'safety fund' that I could tap into with no consequence if I inadvertently overspend in some other area of my life. However, it would probably be OK if the account was exclusively for charitable donations (so that psychologically I can treat the money was 'spent' once it's in there). It'd also get around the issue of double handling the money (which - particularly if international transactions are involved - would incur some transaction costs; perhaps there's a PayPal/cryptocurrency solution for that). Anyway, I'll give it a go (I'll have to start in a month or two because I'm currently overseas) and let you know how successful it proves.

I guess that a key attraction of building it into the core app would be that it would reduce barriers for others who wanted to set goals and link them to charities - Beeminder already has my credit card info so it's just a matter of ticking the box and setting an amount to start the recurring debits/donations. You don't have to set up a new bank account, and the mere fact of it being suggested as an option could mean that Beeminder users who wouldn't have otherwise considered doing it might decide to give themselves an extra incentive for their goals while also increasing their donation rate. Obviously I get that the altruistic angle is perhaps outside the remit of Beeminder's core business, but as someone interested in ways to get more people to do good things this seems to me like a really easy way to do some good stuff. 

Thanks again for the suggestion, will keep you updated

Sam

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[David Ernst]

It's a really interesting idea, Sam, and I think in theory Danny's separate bank account would get most of the way there.

Regarding the other points you mention, Sam, especially sharing the idea with other users, this sounds like a great topic for a blog post. Another way to use Beeminder!