I’m currently the chair of OFTW’s volunteer group so hopefully can help answer this. I’ll take your questions together as they’re related.
On the current giving as % of income rate: There’s a chart of our progress on this over time about half way down the post. This year, about half of donors are giving at least 0.9% of their income.
On average all time the proportion would be lower than this. This is an area where we’re making progress by a) better understanding our donor base (what makes them resistant to giving more?) b) better training / equipping our campus leaders to ask their classmates to make a larger pledge (our chapter leader training has materially improved on this front) and c) improving our donation platform settings and defaults.
We have a small (single digit) number of donors who have given meaningfully more than this as a result of OFTW. We’ve done some small experiments aimed at getting existing donors to increase their pledges, but haven’t had much success and haven’t prioritized this as much as we have training new chapter leaders and increasing our penetration rates in existing chapters.
Ultimately getting people acculturated to thoughtful, effective giving is the near term goal, because if we build that habit it gives us a platform for bigger asks. If you think about the long term there are two potential prizes: 1) get a generation of people to give to effective causes and to give more, earlier than they otherwise would, and 2) get people to give more effectively on the path they would’ve otherwise followed (e.g. once someone is mid career and would normally give to their alma mater, give to AMF). Clearly 1) is a much bigger, more valuable change, and we want to work out how to do it. But preserving a relationship and building affinity over time also keeps 2) alive as an option, which is valuable.
One quick P.S.: Clearly if our low, 1%, ask were creating moral permission for people to give less than they otherwise would, it would be bad. We don’t see much evidence of this—very few of our donors were giving to EA causes before pledging to OFTW, and not many were giving at all.
Hi Aaaron,
I’m currently the chair of OFTW’s volunteer group so hopefully can help answer this. I’ll take your questions together as they’re related.
On the current giving as % of income rate: There’s a chart of our progress on this over time about half way down the post. This year, about half of donors are giving at least 0.9% of their income.
On average all time the proportion would be lower than this. This is an area where we’re making progress by a) better understanding our donor base (what makes them resistant to giving more?) b) better training / equipping our campus leaders to ask their classmates to make a larger pledge (our chapter leader training has materially improved on this front) and c) improving our donation platform settings and defaults.
We have a small (single digit) number of donors who have given meaningfully more than this as a result of OFTW. We’ve done some small experiments aimed at getting existing donors to increase their pledges, but haven’t had much success and haven’t prioritized this as much as we have training new chapter leaders and increasing our penetration rates in existing chapters.
Ultimately getting people acculturated to thoughtful, effective giving is the near term goal, because if we build that habit it gives us a platform for bigger asks. If you think about the long term there are two potential prizes: 1) get a generation of people to give to effective causes and to give more, earlier than they otherwise would, and 2) get people to give more effectively on the path they would’ve otherwise followed (e.g. once someone is mid career and would normally give to their alma mater, give to AMF). Clearly 1) is a much bigger, more valuable change, and we want to work out how to do it. But preserving a relationship and building affinity over time also keeps 2) alive as an option, which is valuable.
Steve
One quick P.S.: Clearly if our low, 1%, ask were creating moral permission for people to give less than they otherwise would, it would be bad. We don’t see much evidence of this—very few of our donors were giving to EA causes before pledging to OFTW, and not many were giving at all.