Thank you for this post. I agree with its central premise and I know that Michelle is already working on an impact evaluation that will contain a lot of this sort of information.
However, your post contains a couple of misleading points that I thought would be worth correcting.
The online-only pledge was launched on 4th April 2014, not in mid-2013, though there are a handful people who joined online in experiments before this date. (In your Internet Archive link the form has just been spread over 2 pages.) For what it’s worth, the increased growth rate from around September 2013 coincided with Ben Clifford starting as Director of Community and encouraging people who had expressed an interest to join.
The cause-neutral pledge wording was added to the website on 5th December 2014. As Greg mentioned, the huge spike in growth over the new year was due to over 100 new members from Ravi Patel’s Facebook campaign. Taking into account the growth rate since mid-January, this appears to be more-or-less unrelated to the pledge wording.
For future reference, it may have been courteous to contact someone at Giving What We Can before posting this. In case that sounds intimidating I can assure you they are all very friendly :)
(Disclosure: I manage Giving What We Can’s website as a volunteer.)
Thank you for this post. I agree with its central premise and I know that Michelle is already working on an impact evaluation that will contain a lot of this sort of information.
However, your post contains a couple of misleading points that I thought would be worth correcting.
The online-only pledge was launched on 4th April 2014, not in mid-2013, though there are a handful people who joined online in experiments before this date. (In your Internet Archive link the form has just been spread over 2 pages.) For what it’s worth, the increased growth rate from around September 2013 coincided with Ben Clifford starting as Director of Community and encouraging people who had expressed an interest to join.
The cause-neutral pledge wording was added to the website on 5th December 2014. As Greg mentioned, the huge spike in growth over the new year was due to over 100 new members from Ravi Patel’s Facebook campaign. Taking into account the growth rate since mid-January, this appears to be more-or-less unrelated to the pledge wording.
For future reference, it may have been courteous to contact someone at Giving What We Can before posting this. In case that sounds intimidating I can assure you they are all very friendly :)
(Disclosure: I manage Giving What We Can’s website as a volunteer.)
Thanks very much for this!