Sam’s covered most of what I would say, but on 4): I think he’s right that it’s difficult to know to what extent growth is down to particular actions of our staff versus other growth factors (although we do have a bunch more information than we did back then). There are a lot of different factors at play, and often there are a lot of necessary conditions for someone becoming a member. Often it’s difficult even to know the difference between ‘organic growth’ and ‘staff activities’ – does someone joining due in part to an action of one of our staff 3 years ago count as organic or staff? A couple of concrete examples: 1) the Cambridge pledge event last year seemed to get around 80 people to join who wouldn’t otherwise have joined. The pledge event wouldn’t have happened without the Cambridge chapter, which wouldn’t have started up without GWWC central. The central team also did various things to support the chapter, and built a website where it’s easy to join etc. But initiative was taken and work was done by a group of students acting mostly on their own. 2) Marinella has been writing to people who attended EA Global who weren’t yet members of GWWC – learning about how they found out about us, answering questions they have etc. 9 of the people she contact joined GWWC directly after / during their conversations with her. On the one hand, that seems concretely down to her reaching out. On the other hand, EA Global was also a necessary part. And on the other hand again, the GWWC staff were at EA Global and actively making people aware of GWWC and effective giving there.
Individual outreach of the kind Marinella has been doing, along with setting up chapters from scratch using chapter seeding, seems quite clearly to be attributable to particular actions by particular of our staff. But it’s important to focus on only those kinds of really direct things. Advice from marketing seems to indicate that if you want to get people on board it’s important to have a strong brand, look professional etc. It would be very surprising if that wasn’t important for us too. That kind of thing isn’t really possible from organic growth. But it’s difficult to know precisely what effect it has – all we can do is learn as much as possible about what does and doesn’t work for other organisations, try things out, and see how it seems to affect our growth.
Thanks so much for providing such detailed answers to my questions :). I think that I am getting a much better idea now. Thanks Sam for linking me to the comments of GWWC’s fundraising prospectus- the discussions there cover most of my questions. If it’s not too much to ask I would really like it if you answered a few more questions that I have.
Just to follow up on Sam’s answer to my first and second questions.
To help me understand how I should feel about the ratio GWWC uses for actual donations to pledged donations could you please outline what percentage of members record enough information in My Giving for their information to be used in calculating the ratio of actual donations to pledged donations that was used in GWWC’s most recent realistic impact estimate?
To clarify, are you talking about the impact of changes to members’ income over time, or asking whether we’re accounting for potential changes to donation patterns over time which affect the counterfactual ratio?”
I was talking about accounting for potential changes to donation patterns over time which affect the counterfactual ratio- sorry that wasn’t clear :). I certainly agree that it’s really hard to know how accurate people’s counterfactual estimates are. I wonder what the best way of doing estimates for counterfactuals is. Do you guys think that it might be more accurate to ask people each year about their counterfactual estimates rather than asking people once and then using that number for the next 40 years to calculate the counterfactual impact of GWWC?
One last question. GWWC seems to be the only EA fundraising organization I know of which calculates its potential impact for 40 years into the future. Do you guys think that other EA fundraising organizations like Charity Science and Raising for Effective Giving should attempt to do this type of realistic impact calculation for 40 years into the future so that donors who are trying to decide between these organizations may be able to more accurately compare the different organizations?
On a sidenote, I think that up and down votes of comments provide a really valuable source of feedback. As a result I am interested if people have ideas about the possible reasoning behind the down vote or down votes of my previous comment so that I can hopefully improve my future comments :).
I’m glad you feel you’re getting a proper sense! It’s surprisingly hard to describe all the information in an informative and intelligible way.
I’m afraid I have no idea why the comment was downvoted. Given the number of upvotes, it could have just been a mistake?
The calculation we used was for people who joined before 2013, and it was 137 out of 268 people, or 51%. Updating it using the 2013 and 2014 cohorts didn’t make much difference (a very slight increase in the percentage), so we continued using the same figure. The cohort data linked to above gives an indication of how many members for 2013 and 2014 gave us enough information to calculate a pledge percentage.
With regard to the counterfactuals, we did at one point in the past ask that. People felt their answers weren’t more accurate when given later on though. The thing that seemed to be going on was that while when you’re considering joining but haven’t yet you have a fairly good sense of how you might act if you join, and if you don’t, but the longer you’re a member the less you identify with the counterfactual of not having joined and so the weirder it feels to think about what would have happened if it had been true. Asking people about these counterfactuals makes it harder to get other information we need (like income and giving data, and updated professions), either because we put it on the same email/survey making people more likely to put off responding to that, or because we send out an additional email/survey, increasing people’s fatigue of being asked stuff by us. So overall asking this seemed to make our calculations worse rather than better.
We’re actually not the only EA org who tries to calculate our overall impact rather than just value which has already come to fruition – for example, 80,000 Hours also does. This calculation is actually very different from one which would try to capture our ‘potential impact for 40 years into the future’. If we ceased all our activities today, I would expect that quite a few people would join and donate due to our past activities. I also expect that we’ve gained quite a bit of experience which will make us more effective in future than we have been in the past. So this calculation doesn’t even capture the potential impact of all the activities we’ve undertaken so far, let alone our potential impact into the future.
Yes, I think it’s very important for EA organisations to try to get a comprehensive picture of their overall impact, both for internal use and for informing others.
GWWC seems to be the only EA fundraising organization I know of which calculates its potential impact for 40 years into the future.
Even if you only focus on donations that have already been made, and ignore pledges, GWWC has a high positive multiplier. Moreover, completely ignoring the future value of pledges would be really pessimistic.
I think REG should try to value future pledged donations.
With CS you should value the future value of legacy commitments, even though they will take 20-60 years (though you’d need to apply discounting). (Presumably you do give them positive value even though they’re a long way in the future? :)) The case for valuing future birthday fundraisers is less strong because there’s no analogous long-term commitment.
Moreover, in all cases, we shouldn’t get too hung up on historical impact. Most of our impact lies in the future, so what really matters is the potential upside and probability of that upside. Historical money moved is only a weak indication of that.
Even if you only focus on donations that have already been made, and ignore pledges, GWWC has a high positive multiplier. Moreover, completely ignoring the future value of pledges would be really pessimistic.
I totally agree and think that a really interesting question is what the future value of pledges should be. I think may also be worth mentioning that if we focus on donations that have already been made, my understanding is GWWC’s impact is an order of magnitude less than their current realistic impact estimate. I am not sure how exactly we should weigh that information.
With CS you should value the future value of legacy commitments, even though they will take 20-60 years (though you’d need to apply discounting). (Presumably you do give them positive value even though they’re a long way in the future? :))
At CS we sure do value the future value of legacy commitments :). We haven’t yet determined exactly how we will calculate their expected value.
Zooming out for a bit, if you’re trying to evaluate GWWC’s historical impact, there’s five categories of impact:
Money pledgers have already donated
Money pledgers will donate in the future
People who will take the pledge in the future due to past investments (e.g. GWWC’s website will keep creating pledgers even if they closed tomorrow).
Money influenced by people who didn’t take the pledge
Impact that isn’t in the form of donations to top charities (creating the EA movement, founding CEA, their research contributions, spinning off 80k, substantial policy influence)
GWWC are very modest and only focus on (1) and (2) :)
To evaluate the total impact, you need to calculate the expected value for each component. You should make your own estimates given the best information you have.
Only counting (1) would be a very poor estimate. (2) to (5) are very unlikely to be zero. My personal guess is that:
(2) is about 10x (1) [because I think GWWC’s internal estimates are reasonable]
(3) and (4) are similar to (1)
(5) is much larger than (2)
However, even if you only cared about (1), GWWC’s multiplier would still be about 10x, which would make them more cost-effective than GiveWell recommended charities, and equal to or more cost-effective than the other EA fundraising orgs (in the past). So I’m not sure it’s even that decision relevant.
Personally if GWWC central closed tomorrow, I expect most of the growth would stop. There would be a remaining constant trickle of members from the website (providing at most linear growth, whereas GWWC has been growing faster than linear, and most members don’t join just from reading the website alone). Initially there would be continued growth from the chapters too, but the numbers would start to shrink. You may get continued growth from the EA community promoting GWWC, but I expect it would be much smaller.
More concretely, GWWC staff right now pursue several channels to growth that wouldn’t happen without them:
Speaking to interested people one-on-one (few join just from written content alone; being made ‘the ask’ is really important)
Fostering chapters (e.g. giving them materials, arranging pledge drives, encouraging them, doing events) - most of this wouldn’t happen otherwise.
Seeking press attention to get new people involved—ditto, mostly wouldn’t happen otherwise.
And there’s lots of other things they could do at the margin to get even more growth e.g. boosting the conversion rate of the website.
Finally, like Michelle says, much of the continued growth there would be if GWWC closed is due to staff efforts in past years (e.g. developing chapters in the first place), so should be included at some point in your evaluation. It would be wrong to just ignore new members from this year who didn’t result from activities by staff this year. Future staff efforts can also be expected to generate members many years into the future.
In this sense, GWWC leverage ratio is a big underestimate of their effectiveness. Past efforts will actually generate a continued stream of members who aren’t being counted.
More concretely, GWWC staff right now pursue several channels to growth that wouldn’t happen without them:
Speaking to interested people one-on-one (few join just from written content alone; being made ‘the ask’ is really important)
Fostering chapters (e.g. giving them materials, arranging pledge drives, encouraging them, doing events) - most of this wouldn’t happen otherwise.
Seeking press attention to get new people involved—ditto, mostly wouldn’t happen otherwise.
Does GWWC have rough estimates of how many members each of these channels lead to? Or could you or other CEA staff hazard a guess, even rough?
Hi Kieran,
Glad it’s useful!
Sam’s covered most of what I would say, but on 4): I think he’s right that it’s difficult to know to what extent growth is down to particular actions of our staff versus other growth factors (although we do have a bunch more information than we did back then). There are a lot of different factors at play, and often there are a lot of necessary conditions for someone becoming a member. Often it’s difficult even to know the difference between ‘organic growth’ and ‘staff activities’ – does someone joining due in part to an action of one of our staff 3 years ago count as organic or staff? A couple of concrete examples: 1) the Cambridge pledge event last year seemed to get around 80 people to join who wouldn’t otherwise have joined. The pledge event wouldn’t have happened without the Cambridge chapter, which wouldn’t have started up without GWWC central. The central team also did various things to support the chapter, and built a website where it’s easy to join etc. But initiative was taken and work was done by a group of students acting mostly on their own. 2) Marinella has been writing to people who attended EA Global who weren’t yet members of GWWC – learning about how they found out about us, answering questions they have etc. 9 of the people she contact joined GWWC directly after / during their conversations with her. On the one hand, that seems concretely down to her reaching out. On the other hand, EA Global was also a necessary part. And on the other hand again, the GWWC staff were at EA Global and actively making people aware of GWWC and effective giving there.
Individual outreach of the kind Marinella has been doing, along with setting up chapters from scratch using chapter seeding, seems quite clearly to be attributable to particular actions by particular of our staff. But it’s important to focus on only those kinds of really direct things. Advice from marketing seems to indicate that if you want to get people on board it’s important to have a strong brand, look professional etc. It would be very surprising if that wasn’t important for us too. That kind of thing isn’t really possible from organic growth. But it’s difficult to know precisely what effect it has – all we can do is learn as much as possible about what does and doesn’t work for other organisations, try things out, and see how it seems to affect our growth.
Hi Michelle and Sam,
Thanks so much for providing such detailed answers to my questions :). I think that I am getting a much better idea now. Thanks Sam for linking me to the comments of GWWC’s fundraising prospectus- the discussions there cover most of my questions. If it’s not too much to ask I would really like it if you answered a few more questions that I have.
Just to follow up on Sam’s answer to my first and second questions.
To help me understand how I should feel about the ratio GWWC uses for actual donations to pledged donations could you please outline what percentage of members record enough information in My Giving for their information to be used in calculating the ratio of actual donations to pledged donations that was used in GWWC’s most recent realistic impact estimate?
I was talking about accounting for potential changes to donation patterns over time which affect the counterfactual ratio- sorry that wasn’t clear :). I certainly agree that it’s really hard to know how accurate people’s counterfactual estimates are. I wonder what the best way of doing estimates for counterfactuals is. Do you guys think that it might be more accurate to ask people each year about their counterfactual estimates rather than asking people once and then using that number for the next 40 years to calculate the counterfactual impact of GWWC?
One last question. GWWC seems to be the only EA fundraising organization I know of which calculates its potential impact for 40 years into the future. Do you guys think that other EA fundraising organizations like Charity Science and Raising for Effective Giving should attempt to do this type of realistic impact calculation for 40 years into the future so that donors who are trying to decide between these organizations may be able to more accurately compare the different organizations?
On a sidenote, I think that up and down votes of comments provide a really valuable source of feedback. As a result I am interested if people have ideas about the possible reasoning behind the down vote or down votes of my previous comment so that I can hopefully improve my future comments :).
I’m glad you feel you’re getting a proper sense! It’s surprisingly hard to describe all the information in an informative and intelligible way.
I’m afraid I have no idea why the comment was downvoted. Given the number of upvotes, it could have just been a mistake?
The calculation we used was for people who joined before 2013, and it was 137 out of 268 people, or 51%. Updating it using the 2013 and 2014 cohorts didn’t make much difference (a very slight increase in the percentage), so we continued using the same figure. The cohort data linked to above gives an indication of how many members for 2013 and 2014 gave us enough information to calculate a pledge percentage.
With regard to the counterfactuals, we did at one point in the past ask that. People felt their answers weren’t more accurate when given later on though. The thing that seemed to be going on was that while when you’re considering joining but haven’t yet you have a fairly good sense of how you might act if you join, and if you don’t, but the longer you’re a member the less you identify with the counterfactual of not having joined and so the weirder it feels to think about what would have happened if it had been true. Asking people about these counterfactuals makes it harder to get other information we need (like income and giving data, and updated professions), either because we put it on the same email/survey making people more likely to put off responding to that, or because we send out an additional email/survey, increasing people’s fatigue of being asked stuff by us. So overall asking this seemed to make our calculations worse rather than better.
We’re actually not the only EA org who tries to calculate our overall impact rather than just value which has already come to fruition – for example, 80,000 Hours also does. This calculation is actually very different from one which would try to capture our ‘potential impact for 40 years into the future’. If we ceased all our activities today, I would expect that quite a few people would join and donate due to our past activities. I also expect that we’ve gained quite a bit of experience which will make us more effective in future than we have been in the past. So this calculation doesn’t even capture the potential impact of all the activities we’ve undertaken so far, let alone our potential impact into the future. Yes, I think it’s very important for EA organisations to try to get a comprehensive picture of their overall impact, both for internal use and for informing others.
Thanks again for answering these questions Michelle and Sam :)
Even if you only focus on donations that have already been made, and ignore pledges, GWWC has a high positive multiplier. Moreover, completely ignoring the future value of pledges would be really pessimistic.
I think REG should try to value future pledged donations.
With CS you should value the future value of legacy commitments, even though they will take 20-60 years (though you’d need to apply discounting). (Presumably you do give them positive value even though they’re a long way in the future? :)) The case for valuing future birthday fundraisers is less strong because there’s no analogous long-term commitment.
Moreover, in all cases, we shouldn’t get too hung up on historical impact. Most of our impact lies in the future, so what really matters is the potential upside and probability of that upside. Historical money moved is only a weak indication of that.
https://80000hours.org/2015/11/take-the-growth-approach-to-evaluating-startup-non-profits-not-the-marginal-approach/
Hi Ben,
Thanks for responding :)
I totally agree and think that a really interesting question is what the future value of pledges should be. I think may also be worth mentioning that if we focus on donations that have already been made, my understanding is GWWC’s impact is an order of magnitude less than their current realistic impact estimate. I am not sure how exactly we should weigh that information.
At CS we sure do value the future value of legacy commitments :). We haven’t yet determined exactly how we will calculate their expected value.
How do should you weigh the information?
Zooming out for a bit, if you’re trying to evaluate GWWC’s historical impact, there’s five categories of impact:
Money pledgers have already donated
Money pledgers will donate in the future
People who will take the pledge in the future due to past investments (e.g. GWWC’s website will keep creating pledgers even if they closed tomorrow).
Money influenced by people who didn’t take the pledge
Impact that isn’t in the form of donations to top charities (creating the EA movement, founding CEA, their research contributions, spinning off 80k, substantial policy influence)
GWWC are very modest and only focus on (1) and (2) :)
To evaluate the total impact, you need to calculate the expected value for each component. You should make your own estimates given the best information you have.
Only counting (1) would be a very poor estimate. (2) to (5) are very unlikely to be zero. My personal guess is that:
(2) is about 10x (1) [because I think GWWC’s internal estimates are reasonable] (3) and (4) are similar to (1) (5) is much larger than (2)
However, even if you only cared about (1), GWWC’s multiplier would still be about 10x, which would make them more cost-effective than GiveWell recommended charities, and equal to or more cost-effective than the other EA fundraising orgs (in the past). So I’m not sure it’s even that decision relevant.
Personally if GWWC central closed tomorrow, I expect most of the growth would stop. There would be a remaining constant trickle of members from the website (providing at most linear growth, whereas GWWC has been growing faster than linear, and most members don’t join just from reading the website alone). Initially there would be continued growth from the chapters too, but the numbers would start to shrink. You may get continued growth from the EA community promoting GWWC, but I expect it would be much smaller.
More concretely, GWWC staff right now pursue several channels to growth that wouldn’t happen without them:
Speaking to interested people one-on-one (few join just from written content alone; being made ‘the ask’ is really important)
Fostering chapters (e.g. giving them materials, arranging pledge drives, encouraging them, doing events) - most of this wouldn’t happen otherwise.
Seeking press attention to get new people involved—ditto, mostly wouldn’t happen otherwise.
And there’s lots of other things they could do at the margin to get even more growth e.g. boosting the conversion rate of the website.
Finally, like Michelle says, much of the continued growth there would be if GWWC closed is due to staff efforts in past years (e.g. developing chapters in the first place), so should be included at some point in your evaluation. It would be wrong to just ignore new members from this year who didn’t result from activities by staff this year. Future staff efforts can also be expected to generate members many years into the future.
In this sense, GWWC leverage ratio is a big underestimate of their effectiveness. Past efforts will actually generate a continued stream of members who aren’t being counted.
Does GWWC have rough estimates of how many members each of these channels lead to? Or could you or other CEA staff hazard a guess, even rough?