The GiveWell Blog

Encouraging friends and family to give to AMF for the holidays

People often ask us how they can help spread the word about effective charities. One way is to ask friends and family members to donate to effective charities in lieu of giving presents during the holiday season.

If you’re interested in asking friends and family to donate to effective charities rather than buy you presents for the holidays, our top-ranked charity — the Against Malaria Foundation — allows you to create a fundraising page.

Giving to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) is our number-one recommendation for donors interested in maximizing their impact in 2015. AMF distributes insecticide-treated bed nets to prevent malaria, a leading cause of child deaths in Africa. Filling AMF’s remaining ~$27.5 million funding gap is our #1 ranked giving opportunity for donors because we feel its funding need is the most pressing of our top-rated organizations and that additional donations to AMF will enable the organization to continue distributing bed nets without being bottlenecked due to lack of funding. (More on what this means and our process for making this recommendation here.)

Charity Science, a foundation which aims to educate the public about the “science of doing good” (and which recommends giving to GiveWell’s top charities), brought this to our attention as a way of spreading the word about the organizations we recommend, and has written about the benefits of this approach on its website.

If you’re interested in encouraging your friends and family to give to AMF this holiday season, you can set up a fundraising page directly through AMF’s website: https://www.againstmalaria.com/Register.aspx. If you’d like to see a finished page, AMF lists their fundraisers here. And if you’d like tips for running a fundraising campaign, Charity Science has you covered.

Comments

  • Stephen Weinstein on January 29, 2016 at 12:14 am said:

    This is somewhat off-topic, but I was wondering if the bednets that AMF uses would also work as protection against spread of the zika virus. Even if it isn’t practical or cost-effective to provide them to everyone in the zika-affected area, could they at least be supplied to all pregnant women in the affected region?

  • Colin Rust on February 2, 2016 at 8:02 pm said:

    I think bed nets are unfortunately not that effective against Zika since the mosquito that spreads it is mostly active during the day. However, bed nets are effective against some mosquito borne diseases other than malaria, for instance elephantiasis (lymphatic filariasis).

  • Luke Smith on March 30, 2016 at 7:20 pm said:

    Donating can be very helpful, and many people benefit from it. I think it is a great idea to donate, and invite others to do so during the holiday season. I can see that doing a lot of good, and bring happiness to many people.

Comments are closed.