At the time of submission the post had been read by about 300 people for a total of 20 hours. It has since been posted to hacker news and read by more like 1500 people for a total of 60 hours.
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.
Submission: Ben Kuhn’s blog post Does Donation Matching Work?
At the time of submission the post had been read by about 300 people for a total of 20 hours. It has since been posted to hacker news and read by more like 1500 people for a total of 60 hours.
Is the number of reads really relevant? How come? I figure people who read content generally don’t act on it, and certainly not in high impact ways.
I don’t think it’s that important, but I certainly think it’s relevant. I expect better and more impactful pieces to be read more often.
It’s cited mostly because it’s a relevant fact that you couldn’t infer from public info.
We purchased 1⁄2 of this post in round 1 for $600. We have since sold 1⁄3 of the post to Owen Cotton-Barratt for $400. Current holdings:
Ben: 1⁄2
Owen: 1⁄3
Impact purchase: 1⁄6
Who is “Impact Purchase”? Is that you?
Katja and I jointly.
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.