Fantastic work! It’s awesome to see a national EA chapter taking on such an ambitious project and having the follow through to make it happen.
I just want to clarify what you mean when you say “most of our research is empirical and quasi-experimental designed (and RCTs when possible) based on the outputs of each nonprofits”:
I assume this means that your research uses existing empirical (preferably quasi-experimental or better yet RCT) evidence . You don’t mean you’re actually conducting or funding any primary research, right? I ask because that would be insanely cheap and fast
As you’ve mentioned, with the time constraints of the program, it was unreasonable for all data collection to occur within the program timeframe. So in most cases, we relied on high-quality evidence from prior research conducted by the nonprofits. So yes, the cost per nonprofit I mentioned doesn’t include data collection in most cases (which can be VERY costly, specifically when doing RCTs)
Some assessments did leverage experiments that had started before and continued during the program. And in select cases, we assisted nonprofits with parts of their data collection and experiment implementation through facilitation.
Fantastic work! It’s awesome to see a national EA chapter taking on such an ambitious project and having the follow through to make it happen.
I just want to clarify what you mean when you say “most of our research is empirical and quasi-experimental designed (and RCTs when possible) based on the outputs of each nonprofits”: I assume this means that your research uses existing empirical (preferably quasi-experimental or better yet RCT) evidence . You don’t mean you’re actually conducting or funding any primary research, right? I ask because that would be insanely cheap and fast
Good point, thanks for bringing this up.
As you’ve mentioned, with the time constraints of the program, it was unreasonable for all data collection to occur within the program timeframe. So in most cases, we relied on high-quality evidence from prior research conducted by the nonprofits. So yes, the cost per nonprofit I mentioned doesn’t include data collection in most cases (which can be VERY costly, specifically when doing RCTs)
Some assessments did leverage experiments that had started before and continued during the program. And in select cases, we assisted nonprofits with parts of their data collection and experiment implementation through facilitation.