We estimate that EAs and other related groups move around $500k annually through donation matching. We are thinking of drives run by MIRI, CFAR, GiveDirectly, Charity Science, Good Ventures, among others.
We think a full and clear understanding of donation matching would improve this by around $6k, through such drives being better optimized. We lowered this figure to account for the data being less relevant to some matching drives, and costs and inefficiencies in the information being spread.
We think this work constitutes around 1/30th of a full and clear understanding of donation matching.
We used a time horizon of three years, though in retrospect it probably should have been longer. This implicitly included some general concerns about the fraction of people who have seen it being smaller in the future, and information accruing from other sources and conditions changing, and so on.
We get $6,000 * 3 years / 30 = $600 of stimulated EA donations
In addition to this analysis we did some sanity-checking based on readership and the plausible direct impact of the post on smaller matching drives. Overall this seemed like a plausible estimate to us.
Our very crude evaluation:
We estimate that EAs and other related groups move around $500k annually through donation matching. We are thinking of drives run by MIRI, CFAR, GiveDirectly, Charity Science, Good Ventures, among others.
We think a full and clear understanding of donation matching would improve this by around $6k, through such drives being better optimized. We lowered this figure to account for the data being less relevant to some matching drives, and costs and inefficiencies in the information being spread.
We think this work constitutes around 1/30th of a full and clear understanding of donation matching.
We used a time horizon of three years, though in retrospect it probably should have been longer. This implicitly included some general concerns about the fraction of people who have seen it being smaller in the future, and information accruing from other sources and conditions changing, and so on.
We get $6,000 * 3 years / 30 = $600 of stimulated EA donations
In addition to this analysis we did some sanity-checking based on readership and the plausible direct impact of the post on smaller matching drives. Overall this seemed like a plausible estimate to us.