Want your donation to go even further? Become a bonus supporter.

One of the main ways FarmKind adds value is by topping up ‘split and boost’ donations with our bonus system.

The more of the donation one allocates to our recommended charities, the larger the bonus they receive. This is good for donors, who get their donation boosted. But it’s also good for the world, as it motivates more people to donate and for those donations to be bigger and more impactful.

But we can't add this value without bonus supporters who donate to the bonus fund.

You can have even more impact by contributing to our bonus fund. 100% of your donation will still go to charity, but it will motivate others to donate to super-effective charities along the way. You’ll generate more support for the charities working to fix factory farming than if you donated to them directly, because on average each dollar donated to our bonus fund will indirectly cause more than a dollar to be donated to highly effective charities.

  • Our bonus system creates a virtuous cycle of giving.

    • Some donors are encouraged to give more impactfully by our supply of bonus funds (through a combination of being encouraged to give at all, to give more, or to give to super-effective charities). This creates "demand" for bonus funds.

    • Other donors are encouraged by this demand to contribute to the bonus fund and encourage others to give more impactfully. This creates "supply" of bonus funds.

    Through this symbiotic relationship, standard donors and bonus supporters collectively have a greater impact than either group could alone. Meanwhile, both types of donor are essential to FarmKind's functioning and continued existence. Without either supply or demand for bonus funds we would not be able to make the contribution we do to fixing factory farming.

    Our mechanism for multiplying impact is different to how people tend to think that donation matching works. In a conventional matching campaign, participants generally assume that by donating through the campaign, before it ends, they cause the matching funder (or in our case 'bonus supporter') to donate money that they wouldn't have otherwise. So a $10 donation can cause $15 to be donated in total. But critics of these kinds of campaigns fairly point out that if the matching funder has already committed the matching funds to the charity, then participants in the matching campaign aren't causing any more money to be donated to the charity than if they made a normal donation.

    There are two senses in which our bonus system is not like this:

    1. Participants get to direct the bonus funds to the charities they care most about. This is the most direct and clear benefit of getting your donation boosted through FarmKind (although we think it's a far less important benefit than contributing to the virtuous cycle of giving): The bonus supporters in our system do not pre-commit their funding to specific charities. The standard donor's decision determines where that money goes, including which favourite charity they choose, which super-effective charity they choose, and how much to allocate to each.

    2. Our bonus system isn't finite or time bound: It's an indefinite cycle of giving. In a conventional matching campaign, the funds are typically provided by a single large matching funder with a limited amount of funding, to be deployed by a certain date. FarmKind democratizes the provision of bonus funds: Many donors, big and small, support the bonus system on an ongoing basis. So long as enough donors are willing to provide bonus funds, and enough donors are willing to use them, the system can run continuously and indefinitely. As we explained earlier, this allows standard donors and bonus supporters to multiply their impact relative to what they could achieve without working together.

    This indirect way of making a difference by participating in the interplay between supply and demand may seem novel in the context of donations. But it's something most of us will be very familiar with in our role as conscientious consumers. You might choose certain products/services and refuse others because of concerns about the environment, labor practices, animal welfare, or something else. These choices make a difference, even if the causal link connecting your individual choice to social impact is indirect and complicated.

    Reminder of some key facts:

    • 100% of donations to the bonus fund go to charity, after any credit card or transaction fees

    • Bonus funds are pre-paid. At any given moment in time, we won't facilitate a bonus for which we haven't already received bonus funds.

    • Any unused funds will go to effective charities. If FarmKind were to shut down suddenly, any unredeemed bonus funding would be automatically donated to super-effective charities (specifically, to our Impact Fund)