How might you use additional funding to boost the program? I think this would be a really strong candidate for the EA Infrastructure Fund, and I’d also be open to providing a small grant ($3,000 or less) if you had a need that couldn’t be filled by the Fund or by Open Philanthropy.
If someone wanted to help with your social media, would they need to have debate experience? I know at least one person who might be interested, but I’m not sure they’ve done debate before.
Does your post-event survey ask about outcomes aside from interest — for example, people taking a giving pledge or joining a local group?
It sounds like the donation match may not have been counterfactual if the money came from Open Phil — did you try to communicate this to the debaters? Or was it in some sense counterfactual? (This is a tiny nitpick in the broader context of the event.)
The key budget item we’d need is recruiting a team member that will help in running the organizational aspects of our endeavours. If we find the pilot successful in a few months, or if we want to repeat the event in the future, having a paid member that can dedicate more time to run the program would be extremely useful.
Having a debate background is a big advantage, but we don’t think it is a must. We are happy to follow up to see whether the person is a good fit.
The survey was actually quite long and we asked for many more things (e.g. whether the positions of the participants changed on some EA related topics). In terms of direct outcomes we also asked about the willingness to share EA content with others and the willingness to donate. We are still processing this data, and if we find interesting conclusions we will report them.
We made no statements about how conterfactual the donation was (and most of our audience would not think of it in these terms). There’s some additional relevant context that we haven’t included in the above summary though. The matched funds were allocated to an effective charity chosen by the winners of the tournament. We did this as we believed this would seak to the competitive spirit of participants. As a result, most of our emphasis in our communications was not about the fact that these are additional funds (that would not have been donated effectively otherwise), but rather that these funds would empower whoever wins the tournament to choose where the funding goes—which is true (even in the counterfactual sense).
Thanks for the excellent writeup!
A few questions:
How might you use additional funding to boost the program? I think this would be a really strong candidate for the EA Infrastructure Fund, and I’d also be open to providing a small grant ($3,000 or less) if you had a need that couldn’t be filled by the Fund or by Open Philanthropy.
If someone wanted to help with your social media, would they need to have debate experience? I know at least one person who might be interested, but I’m not sure they’ve done debate before.
Does your post-event survey ask about outcomes aside from interest — for example, people taking a giving pledge or joining a local group?
It sounds like the donation match may not have been counterfactual if the money came from Open Phil — did you try to communicate this to the debaters? Or was it in some sense counterfactual? (This is a tiny nitpick in the broader context of the event.)
Thanks for the comment!
The key budget item we’d need is recruiting a team member that will help in running the organizational aspects of our endeavours. If we find the pilot successful in a few months, or if we want to repeat the event in the future, having a paid member that can dedicate more time to run the program would be extremely useful.
Having a debate background is a big advantage, but we don’t think it is a must. We are happy to follow up to see whether the person is a good fit.
The survey was actually quite long and we asked for many more things (e.g. whether the positions of the participants changed on some EA related topics). In terms of direct outcomes we also asked about the willingness to share EA content with others and the willingness to donate. We are still processing this data, and if we find interesting conclusions we will report them.
We made no statements about how conterfactual the donation was (and most of our audience would not think of it in these terms). There’s some additional relevant context that we haven’t included in the above summary though. The matched funds were allocated to an effective charity chosen by the winners of the tournament. We did this as we believed this would seak to the competitive spirit of participants. As a result, most of our emphasis in our communications was not about the fact that these are additional funds (that would not have been donated effectively otherwise), but rather that these funds would empower whoever wins the tournament to choose where the funding goes—which is true (even in the counterfactual sense).