That would have been my guess, but a surprising number of these new members came through Ravi’s work, and wouldn’t have even known about the change to the pledge. Michelle could give a more exact share.
Oh, does the GWWC central team know how many of these members were non-poverty people? What was Ravi’s work, was it something the GWWC team did to follow up changing the pledge?
Hi. I recently joined Giving What We Can as Director of Community and am very happy to answer member-related questions!
Of the 83 people who became members between Dec 2014 - Jan 2015 after clicking ‘attend’ or ‘maybe’ on the Facebook event, 7 of these have said upon joining that they intend to give to non-poverty causes. There are an additional 7 members or so who joined during that period (bearing in mind the pledge change happened in early December) who also said they intend to give to non-poverty causes.
So it seems the spike over Dec-Jan is attributable more to the Facebook event than to the broadening of the pledge, although that certainly had a noticeable effect. Having spoken to quite a few of those who joined because of the event, I’d guess that Rob is right that most of these were likely not aware of the pledge change.
The pledge change and Ravi’s work just happened to coincide—we hadn’t heard from Ravi beforehand. He and a group of friends came up with the idea of a New Year pledging event and did most of the work themselves, though the GWWC team helped out.
I believe the updated pledging form asks people to specify the broad cause(s) they will donate to (eg poverty, animal suffering, existential risk), so that information would be readily available to the GWWC team.
Ravi Patel is a medical student in Cambridge who independently led the enormously successful campaign to get new pledges as a New Years resolution. It was hosted in a Facebook group, and you can see here the people posting as they joined.
https://www.facebook.com/events/1581545938749145/
This coincides with the Dec/jan spike on the chart above.
That would have been my guess, but a surprising number of these new members came through Ravi’s work, and wouldn’t have even known about the change to the pledge. Michelle could give a more exact share.
Oh, does the GWWC central team know how many of these members were non-poverty people? What was Ravi’s work, was it something the GWWC team did to follow up changing the pledge?
Hi. I recently joined Giving What We Can as Director of Community and am very happy to answer member-related questions!
Of the 83 people who became members between Dec 2014 - Jan 2015 after clicking ‘attend’ or ‘maybe’ on the Facebook event, 7 of these have said upon joining that they intend to give to non-poverty causes. There are an additional 7 members or so who joined during that period (bearing in mind the pledge change happened in early December) who also said they intend to give to non-poverty causes.
So it seems the spike over Dec-Jan is attributable more to the Facebook event than to the broadening of the pledge, although that certainly had a noticeable effect. Having spoken to quite a few of those who joined because of the event, I’d guess that Rob is right that most of these were likely not aware of the pledge change.
The pledge change and Ravi’s work just happened to coincide—we hadn’t heard from Ravi beforehand. He and a group of friends came up with the idea of a New Year pledging event and did most of the work themselves, though the GWWC team helped out.
I believe the updated pledging form asks people to specify the broad cause(s) they will donate to (eg poverty, animal suffering, existential risk), so that information would be readily available to the GWWC team.
Ravi Patel is a medical student in Cambridge who independently led the enormously successful campaign to get new pledges as a New Years resolution. It was hosted in a Facebook group, and you can see here the people posting as they joined. https://www.facebook.com/events/1581545938749145/ This coincides with the Dec/jan spike on the chart above.