5 major ways to increase your impact on society with minor time investment

You may be eager to help people that suffer. You may care deeply about the environment or animals. You may want to increase beauty in the world by supporting art.

But then you find that you already have a filled-up life, with most of your time taken by your work, partner, children, hobbies, sports, friends, and/or family. And you don’t have much time to spare.

In this post I want to discuss five ways you can have a major impact while spending a minimal amount of time. It all boils down to making choices.

1. Pick a bank you believe in

When a bank supplies a loan, it does not need to have all that money stored in a safe. In fact, the capital requirement, i.e. roughly the percentage of money the bank needs to have compared to the amount of money it lends, can be as low as 8%. This means that if you put 100 euros in your savings account, the bank can lend out 1250 euros!

Many banks lend money to companies that manufacture weapons, use child labor, do damage to the climate, and more. Some banks have much stricter policies regarding lending.

The question then becomes: do you believe in the companies that your bank lends money to?

If you live in the Netherlands, you can check out how your bank is doing on: eerlijkegeldwijzer.nl/bankwijzer. If you live somewhere else, please let me know of similar sites in the comments below, and I’ll add them here.

In the case that you are fortunate enough to have saved 10,000 euros, this means you move up to 125,000 euros for loans when you switch banks. That’s a lot of money!

And now you may think. “Oh but it’s a lot of hassle to change my account number”. Well, I found that (at least in the Netherlands) it’s a lot easier than I thought. For 13 months, all automatic collection and deposits are forwarded to your new account! That gives you ample time to make sure everything is going okay. And if you don’t want to go through this, you can always only move your savings account (that’s where the biggest impact probably is anyway).

So, spend a couple of hours, pick a bank you believe in, and have an impact of thousands to hundreds of thousands (millions???) of euros.

2. Pick other financial services to match your beliefs

Besides your checking and saving accounts at your bank, there are other financial services that involve a lot of your money.

In the span of decades, you will probably pay more than a hundred thousand euros of interest to your mortgage supplier. If you want to make an impact, don’t only look at the interest rate that is offered, but also look at the policies the supplier has agreed to follow, The UN Principles for Responsible Investment are an example of a set of guidelines that take into account people and planet for investments.

The same goes for your pension. The money that will support you through your retirement is stored and invested by your pension fund. This sum of money amounts to tens or hundreds of thousands of euros. Nowadays, many people have it spread around multiple pension funds. If you do not agree with the policies of one of them, you can find out if you can move the money to another one.

The insurances you have, especially your health insurance, also add up to a significant amount of money over the years.

It takes a bit of time, finding the policies of your mortgage supplier, pension funds, or insurer. You have to go beyond the nice talk on the homepage of most financial service suppliers, and dive deep for the covenants they have actually signed (the organizations that have signed the above-mentioned UNPRI can be found here). If you do this, you can change the impact of hundreds of thousands of euros with a couple of hours of work.

3. Shop smarter

Every time you buy something, you support the production of a product. But you may not agree with the production process of the item you’re purchasing. To make it easier for you to make an assessment, many products show a certificate. You can think of animal welfare, working conditions, and climate impact.

By paying a bit extra and choosing a product with a certificate you support, you erase the impact of your regular choice and replace it with the impact of your new (and hopefully better) choice.

You also financially support an organization that takes more responsibility for its products. This improves the financial viability of financially less efficient products. Each time you buy one of these products, you also improve their economies of scale, slightly of course.

At the same time, the profit margin of your regular choice deteriorates. Many products face heavy competition and have a small profit margin. To keep costs down, they need large economies of scale. Imagine a product with a 5% profit margin and that suddenly 10% of its consumers decides to buy another product because they don’t believe in its production process. It’s likely that the result will be that the product will start making a loss. Even though only 10% of the consumers change their choice, in a competitive market companies cannot afford to let them go.

Actually, products with a high profit margin face the same problem, but it plays out a bit different. To make the consumer believe the high profit margin is warranted, the company needs to build up a brand of how special the product is (think perfume advertisements). If all of a sudden it becomes clear how nasty the production process is, the product’s image will take a hit and people will choose a competitor’s product (or no product at all).

If you’re interested in Dutch certificates for food and drinks, you can visit ‘het Voedingscentrum’. If you have an overview of certificates for different product types in other countries, please let me know in the comments below.

4. Make donations

They say: time = money. So if you have no time to give away, why not give away some money?

According to the Effective Altruism movement, we tend to give money in an emotional way, to causes that are close-by, urgent, or otherwise in-your-face. And after we’ve given the money, we feel good again and don’t think about donating until … well you guess it, there’s the next close-by, urgent, in-our-face event.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Instead of waiting for organizations to ask us for their donations, we can go out of our way to find an organization we believe in. If you want to be a strict effective altruist, this means finding an organization that has measured their impact: this many mosquito nets dispersed equals this many lives saved, this many surgeries performed equals this many lives drastically improved, this many vaccinations … well you get the drift.

Personally, I don’t want to go that far, because there are plenty of organizations whose impact is difficult or impossible to measure. Think for example investigative journalism, activism, climate action, or even lobbying. These activities can achieve a huge leverage on impact if they manage to affect public opinion or policy.

Guidelines I go by are:

• Spend abroad: my buck is worth much more in developing countries than in developed countries. It’s a lot cheaper to plant a tree in Tanzania than it is to plant one in The Netherlands.
• Spend smart: I either choose an organization that reduces the most suffering for my donation (for an overview see e.g. GiveWell), or one that achieves the most impact by leveraging my donation. (But I don’t want be too rational here. If I feel energized by a cause, then I’m going to donate to it. This also helps for the next point, which is:)
• Spend more: this sounds simple, but we all feel pretty good about ourselves whether we donate 10 euros or 100 euros: the feeling is roughly the same. But the impact of course is not. Imagine I manage to donate 100,000 euros in my lifetime. With a median income of 500 euros per month for somebody in Tanzania, my donations could generate almost 17 person-years of benefit to their community. That’s huge!!! Even if I manage “only” 500 euros in my lifetime, that could still mean that I supported one Tanzanian person helping their community for a whole month. In general, more = better, even if I already feel pretty good about myself.

Now there are skeptics around that say that all the money ends up in the pockets of some people high up and nothing goes to those who need it. Well, that may be a fair point I guess. But this cannot be true for every single organization everywhere, right!?! So do your homework and find the ones you are confident about. And even if it were partially true, for me it sounds better to try and help people with some of my money getting “lost” in the process, than not trying at all.

You can give yourself a stretching donation goal, such as giving away 10% of your disposable income or increasing your donations by 1% of your disposable income each year (my personal goal). Doing this, I discovered the following:

• Giving away some percents of income is actually not so difficult. This does not hold for everyone of course, but a goal of 1% of your income can already radically change how you think about yourself and about money.
• I found a reason for spending money that is beyond myself, and items I purchase are now regularly compared to my donations: Do I really need this piece of clothing or furniture, or is this money better spent helping other human beings?
• I found a reason for making money that is beyond myself, and increasing my salary almost completely lost the aspect of selfishness. I should invest in my professional development and earn more money, so I can (besides take care of my family and myself) donate more.

If you don’t want to give away money but lend it or invest it (and eventually get it back with interest), there are many possibilities as well. For example there is Oikocredit (microfinancing), Lendahand (crowdfunding for investments in developing countries), and ZonnepanelenDelen (bonds for investments in solar energy projects).

5. Vote!

Until now, I’ve only spoken about possible avenues to increase your impact that will likely cost you money. But there is one way you can have significant impact and spend almost nothing. Vote!

As an example, the Dutch national government spends roughly 300 billion euros per year (pre-corona) and there are roughly 13 million people allowed to vote. With some 80% of the people that are allowed to vote actually voting, this means there is almost 30,000 euros per year of government expenditure per voter.

Of course your vote doesn’t mean you can directly determine how that money is spent, but you should see this as an indication of the financial value of your vote. It is such low hanging fruit to spend a couple of hours researching your vote and then exercising your right to vote. And besides deciding on a budget, governments of course also decide on policy and laws to enact. It’s impossible to quantize but your vote is the simplest way to give a nudge to the direction of those policies and laws.

If you really want to make an impact with your vote, you should go beyond what political parties and candidates promise in their advertisements and election manifestos. Actions speak louder than words, so ignore what they are selling to you and investigate their actions in the last couple of years. Think of some issues you care about and then find out how they actually voted on those issues. You may find that “your” political party makes statements in the media that you easily identify with, but that their voting history is the complete opposite of your beliefs or best interest. The voting history of the Dutch political parties can be found on partijgedrag.nl.

But I’m only one person!?!

You may think: there are almost 8 billion people on this planet (and counting), so what does it matter what I do? I guess the answer lies beyond the all-or-nothing line of thinking.

Indeed, your actions will not turn our entire planet into a utopia overnight. But it’s not like they have no impact at all either. Depending on your income and the country you live in, your choices affect up to hundreds of thousands of euros. You can easily help 1, 10, 100 people. And wouldn’t that be nice?

So focus on what you can do. Let go of what is beyond your control.

This was the second post on my blog. I would love to know what you think about these five tips. Please let me know in the comments below.