GiveDirectly's awkward collaboration with Mr Beast
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Photo illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios. Photo: Steve Granitz/FilmMagic
Earlier this month, a pairing of strange charity bedfellows was unveiled. It might have been worth a try, but it's not clear that it worked well for anybody.
Why it matters: YouTuber Mr Beast (nee Jimmy Donaldson) embodies, in many ways, exactly the kind of charity that GiveDirectly was founded in opposition to. This is why it's so weird that the two have now teamed up — and is probably also why GiveDirectly has felt the need to defend the collaboration.
- Mr Beast is the face of "stunt philanthropy" — high-profile and ostentatious giveaways designed to go viral on YouTube.
- GiveDirectly, by contrast, founded by four Harvard and MIT graduate students in economics, is the epitome of a cerebral, low-drama charity, focused only on results for those being helped.
Driving the news: Beast Philanthropy's video titled "We Gave Every Family in a Village a Full Year's Salary" has already garnered 6 million views on YouTube — off the scale by GiveDirectly standards, if a bit subpar for Mr Beast.
- The video is advertised with a thumbnail of Mr Beast (who never went to the village in question, Karamoja, Uganda) next to a villager who's grinning while standing in front of a pair of traditional mud huts and holding an armful of dollar bills.
- As part of the deal, Beast Philanthropy donated $200,000 to GiveDirectly, thereby funding more than half of the cost of giving each of the village's 300 families $1,000.
- Beast Philanthropy also paid its video production costs, which are substantial, given that his company reportedly employs six people just to work on thumbnails.
Zoom out: Mr Beast specializes in giving away stuff that people need — clothes for the cold, food for the hungry, cataract surgeries for the blind, wells for the thirsty, shoes for the unshod.
- GiveDirectly, by contrast, sees those kind of operations as being paternalistic and inefficient. It's dedicated instead to the power of unconditional cash transfers — trusting and empowering the needy to use donated cash where it's needed most.
- There's abundant research showing that direct giving is much more effective — which is one of the reasons GiveDirectly has received millions of dollars from nerdy types like Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and Facebook co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.
State of play: GiveDirectly is worried that it's not popular among the non-nerdy majority. In a recent poll of 750 potential donors, direct cash assistance was ranked 9th out of 9 options in terms of helpfulness for the extreme poor.
- "Working with the most watched person on Earth will help us reach more people in need," writes GiveDirectly in a blog post about the video.
- "More people need to learn about the impact of our work. While we're good at our main job of delivering cash to the most vulnerable families in the world, we're not as good at reaching large audiences."
Between the lines: The tone of the post is defensive because the overarching tone of Mr Beast's video is definitely not the kind of thing that appeals to GiveDirectly's core donor base.
- 20 seconds in, we see a skinny, impoverished Ugandan woman using a tin cup to pour muddy water from a puddle into a broken bucket.
- From there it's straight into the bare feet and mud huts familiar from countless aid campaigns.
- Even the title of the video is a bit weird — almost no one in the village is on any kind of salary, so it's hard to say their salary was matched.
How it works: Less than a minute into the video, Mr Beast says that "giving thousands of dollars to people who have never experienced that kind of money before is extremely irresponsible."
- The leader of his philanthropy, Darren Margolias, similarly describes the concept as "a terrible idea" and "a recipe for disaster" before, inevitably, being converted by the stunning success of the $300,000 giveaway in terms of increasing school enrollment, creating new businesses, and broadly improving the quality of life and self-determination in the village.
- The aim is to set up a narrative arc of skepticism to conversion, that would ideally be mirrored in the attitudes of a typical viewer. But it's far from clear that Mr Beast, popular as he is, is particularly good at changing people's minds.
Follow the money: Beast Philanthropy is trying to raise another $150,000 to help a neighboring village.
- So far, viewers of the video haven't been particularly generous on that front — they've donated just over $17,000, or less than a third of a cent per video view.
The bottom line: This was always a bit of an awkward collaboration. By partnering with Mr Beast, GiveDirectly hoped to be able to reach a huge audience of potential donors and convert them to the idea of direct cash transfers.
- In practice, however, Mr Beast's viewers seem to be more interested in watching philanthropy than in practicing it themselves. And Mr Beast's production team clearly had a very hard time trying to turn a simple transfer of cash to 300 mobile phones into compelling video content.
