Exciting to see the new dashboard! Two observations:
1) The donation figures seem somewhat off, or at least inconsistent with the payout report data. For example, the Meta Fund payout reports list >$2 million in “payouts to date”. But the dashboard shows donations of <$1.7 million from the inception of the fund through the most recent payout in November. Looks like the other funds have similar (though smaller) discrepancies.
2) I think the dashboard would be much more helpful if data for prior years were shown for the full year, not just YTD. That would essentially make all the data available and add a lot of valuable context for interpreting the current year YTD numbers. Otherwise, the dashboard will only be able to answer a very narrow set of questions once we move to the new year.
Yeah, that’s interesting – I think this is an artefact of the way we calculate the numbers. The ‘total donations’ figure is calculated from donations registered through the platform, whereas the Fund balances are calculated from our accounting system. Sometimes donations (especially by larger donors) are arranged outside of the EA Funds platform. They count towards the Fund balance (and accordingly show up in the payouts), but they won’t show up in the total donations figure. We’d love to get to a point where these donations are recorded in EA Funds, but it’s a non-trivial task to synchronise accounting systems in two directions, and so this hasn’t been a top priority so far.
I agree that the YTD display isn’t the most useful for assessing total inflows because it cuts out the busiest period of December (which takes in 4-5 times more than other months, and is responsible for ~35% of annual donations). It was useful for us internally (to see how we were tracking year-on-year), and so ended up being one of the first things we put on the dashboard, but I think that a whole-of-year view will be more useful for the public stats page.
Exciting to see the new dashboard! Two observations:
1) The donation figures seem somewhat off, or at least inconsistent with the payout report data. For example, the Meta Fund payout reports list >$2 million in “payouts to date”. But the dashboard shows donations of <$1.7 million from the inception of the fund through the most recent payout in November. Looks like the other funds have similar (though smaller) discrepancies.
2) I think the dashboard would be much more helpful if data for prior years were shown for the full year, not just YTD. That would essentially make all the data available and add a lot of valuable context for interpreting the current year YTD numbers. Otherwise, the dashboard will only be able to answer a very narrow set of questions once we move to the new year.
Yeah, that’s interesting – I think this is an artefact of the way we calculate the numbers. The ‘total donations’ figure is calculated from donations registered through the platform, whereas the Fund balances are calculated from our accounting system. Sometimes donations (especially by larger donors) are arranged outside of the EA Funds platform. They count towards the Fund balance (and accordingly show up in the payouts), but they won’t show up in the total donations figure. We’d love to get to a point where these donations are recorded in EA Funds, but it’s a non-trivial task to synchronise accounting systems in two directions, and so this hasn’t been a top priority so far.
I agree that the YTD display isn’t the most useful for assessing total inflows because it cuts out the busiest period of December (which takes in 4-5 times more than other months, and is responsible for ~35% of annual donations). It was useful for us internally (to see how we were tracking year-on-year), and so ended up being one of the first things we put on the dashboard, but I think that a whole-of-year view will be more useful for the public stats page.
Got it, thanks for clarifying!