Evaluating impact is very difficult, and Michelle has a really hard and thankless job to do. I’m excited for the GWWC impact report and I’d be very understanding if it isn’t entirely perfect, as ideas for measuring are hard to come by and even harder to execute. I think it would have been more polite to suggest this to GWWC privately and get their feedback before publishing it here.
I do think seeing cohort data would be pretty interesting, though, and I’m glad that you brought it up.
Personally, my top concern is instead about counterfactuals. Ravi Patel’s Facebook campaign is amazing—can you really move millions of dollars to charity through an FB event?! It would seem unlikely. I wonder if when GWWC opened the pledge, many people already giving 10% joined, as now they don’t feel constrained by cause area. (Of course these people may have been influenced by GWWC years before, especially if GWWC played an important role in the normalization of 10% as the EA giving schelling point.) I know GWWC tracks “how much would you have given if not for GWWC” data, and I’m interested to see how that fits into the report.
I wonder if when GWWC opened the pledge, many people already giving 10% joined, as now they don’t feel constrained by cause area.
That seems clearly what’d happen, and from what I hear is what most people think. People who’d favoured non-poverty causes and who join in the months after that change are unlikely to be giving as a result of GWWC’s work in those months after all, going out and convincing people to give to them from scratch. (Not to say that it’s not valuable for them to record their giving, or that the moves away from poverty have been a mistake.)
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.
Evaluating impact is very difficult, and Michelle has a really hard and thankless job to do. I’m excited for the GWWC impact report and I’d be very understanding if it isn’t entirely perfect, as ideas for measuring are hard to come by and even harder to execute. I think it would have been more polite to suggest this to GWWC privately and get their feedback before publishing it here.
I do think seeing cohort data would be pretty interesting, though, and I’m glad that you brought it up.
Personally, my top concern is instead about counterfactuals. Ravi Patel’s Facebook campaign is amazing—can you really move millions of dollars to charity through an FB event?! It would seem unlikely. I wonder if when GWWC opened the pledge, many people already giving 10% joined, as now they don’t feel constrained by cause area. (Of course these people may have been influenced by GWWC years before, especially if GWWC played an important role in the normalization of 10% as the EA giving schelling point.) I know GWWC tracks “how much would you have given if not for GWWC” data, and I’m interested to see how that fits into the report.
That seems clearly what’d happen, and from what I hear is what most people think. People who’d favoured non-poverty causes and who join in the months after that change are unlikely to be giving as a result of GWWC’s work in those months after all, going out and convincing people to give to them from scratch. (Not to say that it’s not valuable for them to record their giving, or that the moves away from poverty have been a mistake.)
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.
It’s not addressed to any one individual, but there was this. Maybe I should have made it more personalized.