Introducing Your free Personalized Consultant for Positive Impact

Well not quite yet. But I woke up this week thinking about a startup idea I've been dreaming of for a while – tell me what you think.

Rich people who want to make positive impact have wealth advisors, family office managers, foundation consultants, and life coaches. What about everybody else?

How about a free advisory service that helps you build a comprehensive "portfolio" of positive impact, including: charitable giving, responsible investing, volunteering, environmental footprint, career impact, civic/political engagement, etc.

In each domain, the advisor helps you think about what causes you care about most and suggests opportunities for action, from small steps to large, depending on your capacity. It could be donating $10 a month to a charity, volunteering to advise a nonprofit, committing to vote, running for office, donating blood, or even a kidney (my cousin just did that!).

It is ideologically neutral and entirely customized to what you care about. Liberal, conservative, agnostic... it works with your values. The result is a beautifully designed "portfolio" of your actions and a dashboard for tracking and sharing.

It's probably a nonprofit and I assume it's free for the advisee. The value proposition to funders is that it's a multiplier: people donate more to the charities of their choice, are more involved in their communities, and take more value-aligned action, all of which is good for our society (and the user's mental health).

Even with modest steps, people could feel more efficacious, purposeful, and happy – the evidence shows this stuff is a path to more cohesion and happiness in life, something our society greatly needs.

Is it a human or an AI? How about a hybrid. The "robo-advisor" supports the intake questions, accesses all the great existing resources available (charity evaluators, volunteer matching, investing services), and builds the portfolio of suggestions, while a human is available to consult the user and build accountability. Or maybe the robo is free and the advisor costs a bit?

I've been calling it AltruismAdvisors.org (though I hesitate to associate it too much with Effective Altruism, given people's mixed feelings).

I wonder if it's too simple or general – do people really want to "do more good" in this way? We know we all have so much more potential than we're using. And we're in the midst of the largest generational wealth transfer in history ($84 trillion will be inherited in the U.S. by 2045). Even modest impacts could do a whole lot.

Tell me what you think. If this service were free and beautifully designed, would you use it?