The donation distribution statistics do not exclude our top 10 donors (neither on the pledge nor on the non-pledge side), so our takeaways from those arenât influenced.
I should also clarify that we do not exclude all top 10 donors (on either the pledge or non-pledge side) from all of our donation estimates that influence the giving multiplier: we only exclude all top 10 pledge donors from our estimates of the value of the pledge (for more detail on how we treated large donors differently and why, see this appendix).
Please also note that we havenât (yet) made any decisions on which groups to target more or less on the basis of these results: our takeaways will inform our organisation-wide strategic discussions going forwards but we havenât had any of those yetâas we have only just finished this evaluationâandâas we also emphasize in the reportâthe takeaways provide updates on our views but not our all-things-considered views.
This is a great question and I think points at the importance of considering the difference between marginal and average cost-effectiveness when interpreting our findings: as you say, many people might have still donated âhad GWWC existed from 2020 in a very minimal formâ, i.e. the first few dollars spent on GWWC may be worth a lot more than the last few dollars spent on it. As we note in the plans for future evaluations section, we are interested in making further estimates like the one you suggest (i.e. considering only a part of our activities) and will consider doing so in the future; we just didnât get to doing this in this evaluation and chose to make an estimate of our total impact (i.e. considering us not existing as the counterfactual) first.
We explain how we deal with this in this appendix. In short, we use two approaches, one of which counts all the impact of a pledge in the year the pledge is taken and the other in the years donations are made against that pledge. We take a weighted average of these two approaches to avoid double-counting our impact across different years.
Thanks for asking these in-depth questions, Stan!
The donation distribution statistics do not exclude our top 10 donors (neither on the pledge nor on the non-pledge side), so our takeaways from those arenât influenced. I should also clarify that we do not exclude all top 10 donors (on either the pledge or non-pledge side) from all of our donation estimates that influence the giving multiplier: we only exclude all top 10 pledge donors from our estimates of the value of the pledge (for more detail on how we treated large donors differently and why, see this appendix). Please also note that we havenât (yet) made any decisions on which groups to target more or less on the basis of these results: our takeaways will inform our organisation-wide strategic discussions going forwards but we havenât had any of those yetâas we have only just finished this evaluationâandâas we also emphasize in the reportâthe takeaways provide updates on our views but not our all-things-considered views.
This is a great question and I think points at the importance of considering the difference between marginal and average cost-effectiveness when interpreting our findings: as you say, many people might have still donated âhad GWWC existed from 2020 in a very minimal formâ, i.e. the first few dollars spent on GWWC may be worth a lot more than the last few dollars spent on it. As we note in the plans for future evaluations section, we are interested in making further estimates like the one you suggest (i.e. considering only a part of our activities) and will consider doing so in the future; we just didnât get to doing this in this evaluation and chose to make an estimate of our total impact (i.e. considering us not existing as the counterfactual) first.
We explain how we deal with this in this appendix. In short, we use two approaches, one of which counts all the impact of a pledge in the year the pledge is taken and the other in the years donations are made against that pledge. We take a weighted average of these two approaches to avoid double-counting our impact across different years.
Thank you for the explanation & references, all three points make sense to me!