Thanks for your questions. As you say, it’s very important to make sure people have a really thorough understanding of what’s going on, both with their money, and in general in the sphere of helping others, so that we can build on each other’s work.
You might like to check out our impact page, which has more detail on the methodology of our calculations.
1) Silent members in the fundraising document are defined as members who we have not had any contact with/information from in at least 2 years i.e. people who fulfil the following: joined before 2013, have not filled in My Giving in at least 2 years, not known to staff at CEA personally, has not joined the online GWWC community facebook group (set up at the start of 2014), has not responded to any emails in at least 2 years. There are therefore relatively few of them compared with the number of members who we couldn’t persuade to fill out My Giving in a given year. It’s worth noting that while you might think that filling in My Giving is a small thing compared to giving 10% of your income, we know many people personally who do donate at least 10% but can’t be persuaded to fill in My Giving—many people just find recording donations in any way a big hassle.
The claim in the fundraising document is not that 95.2% of members will donate their pledge each year—it’s more realistically estimating the % of members who will stop donating per year, who will not resume donating in future years.
2) From looking at the % members pledged and subtracting the percentage members say they would have given anyway, and dividing by the percentage pledged for each member, then averaging over these. More info on the Impact page of the website: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/impact/#realistic-impact-calculation-1031
3) 66% of the entire population
4) This represents how much more effective the charities people give to are than the ones they would have given to otherwise, for the case where people say we affected their donation. It’s simply an estimate, based on the reasoning that we’re probably if we affected someone’s donation it will be by nudging them to give in the developing world rather than developed world, or by nudging them from a typical developing world charity to one of our recommended charities. I therefore estimated that on average it might be something like a doubling in impact. That seems like a pretty conservative assumption to me.
5) I wouldn’t say there are no other examples of it—tithing works quite like this, and there are various examples of people encouraging each other to ‘promise’ to uphold some value that’s deemed important (I remember learning about the ‘silver ring thing’ in the US when I was at school).
I think the general principles of banding together to support each other upholding your values are fairly well established, and the outside view seems to be positive about the general psychological principles underlying pledging and forming a community. Most fundraisers are fundraising for one particular charity, and it doesn’t seem terribly surprising that pledges would seem less appealing if someone’s asking you just to pledge to their organisation. I also think that we shouldn’t be thinking of taking the pledge as the only thing—that’s the measurable thing, and the time when we can ask people the most easily about how we affect their donations. But in practice, the reason people pledge is to do with the overall community, with the information we can provide etc. So we shouldn’t think of it as ‘you put a pledge page online and then lots of behaviour changes’ which would be really surprising, but in a more holistic way.
Overall, I think it is somewhat surprising how the concept seems to be working. But my surprise is more with how many people are willing to actually give 10% of their income to effective charities, than with the fact that there being other people around inspiring them and holding them to account would have a big effect on that willingness.
6) Yes, I basically agree with Ben Todd on that, that’s why we tried to emphasise in our prospectus the importance of looking at our plan for growth, rather than the leverage numbers.
We’re always trying new ways of reaching out to people, changing the website to improve flow through and test different messages etc. I think it’s important we have credibility as a stable organisation in terms of the pledge remaining the same, and continuing to have regular contact with members. But when it comes to trying out different ways of outreach, we can be continuously improving.
Yes, I think there will be economies of scale. Eg. getting really good chapter resources made and online is high intensity, but can then be used by however many chapters we have. Last year we made a marginal assessment for members, but we were trying to focus more on our plans this year than on straightforward leverage ratios, so didn’t include that calculation.
7) Sounds good, I look forward to hearing from you when you have time for it.
Hi Peter,
Thanks for your questions. As you say, it’s very important to make sure people have a really thorough understanding of what’s going on, both with their money, and in general in the sphere of helping others, so that we can build on each other’s work. You might like to check out our impact page, which has more detail on the methodology of our calculations.
1) Silent members in the fundraising document are defined as members who we have not had any contact with/information from in at least 2 years i.e. people who fulfil the following: joined before 2013, have not filled in My Giving in at least 2 years, not known to staff at CEA personally, has not joined the online GWWC community facebook group (set up at the start of 2014), has not responded to any emails in at least 2 years. There are therefore relatively few of them compared with the number of members who we couldn’t persuade to fill out My Giving in a given year. It’s worth noting that while you might think that filling in My Giving is a small thing compared to giving 10% of your income, we know many people personally who do donate at least 10% but can’t be persuaded to fill in My Giving—many people just find recording donations in any way a big hassle. The claim in the fundraising document is not that 95.2% of members will donate their pledge each year—it’s more realistically estimating the % of members who will stop donating per year, who will not resume donating in future years.
2) From looking at the % members pledged and subtracting the percentage members say they would have given anyway, and dividing by the percentage pledged for each member, then averaging over these. More info on the Impact page of the website: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/impact/#realistic-impact-calculation-1031
3) 66% of the entire population
4) This represents how much more effective the charities people give to are than the ones they would have given to otherwise, for the case where people say we affected their donation. It’s simply an estimate, based on the reasoning that we’re probably if we affected someone’s donation it will be by nudging them to give in the developing world rather than developed world, or by nudging them from a typical developing world charity to one of our recommended charities. I therefore estimated that on average it might be something like a doubling in impact. That seems like a pretty conservative assumption to me.
5) I wouldn’t say there are no other examples of it—tithing works quite like this, and there are various examples of people encouraging each other to ‘promise’ to uphold some value that’s deemed important (I remember learning about the ‘silver ring thing’ in the US when I was at school). I think the general principles of banding together to support each other upholding your values are fairly well established, and the outside view seems to be positive about the general psychological principles underlying pledging and forming a community. Most fundraisers are fundraising for one particular charity, and it doesn’t seem terribly surprising that pledges would seem less appealing if someone’s asking you just to pledge to their organisation. I also think that we shouldn’t be thinking of taking the pledge as the only thing—that’s the measurable thing, and the time when we can ask people the most easily about how we affect their donations. But in practice, the reason people pledge is to do with the overall community, with the information we can provide etc. So we shouldn’t think of it as ‘you put a pledge page online and then lots of behaviour changes’ which would be really surprising, but in a more holistic way. Overall, I think it is somewhat surprising how the concept seems to be working. But my surprise is more with how many people are willing to actually give 10% of their income to effective charities, than with the fact that there being other people around inspiring them and holding them to account would have a big effect on that willingness.
6) Yes, I basically agree with Ben Todd on that, that’s why we tried to emphasise in our prospectus the importance of looking at our plan for growth, rather than the leverage numbers. We’re always trying new ways of reaching out to people, changing the website to improve flow through and test different messages etc. I think it’s important we have credibility as a stable organisation in terms of the pledge remaining the same, and continuing to have regular contact with members. But when it comes to trying out different ways of outreach, we can be continuously improving. Yes, I think there will be economies of scale. Eg. getting really good chapter resources made and online is high intensity, but can then be used by however many chapters we have. Last year we made a marginal assessment for members, but we were trying to focus more on our plans this year than on straightforward leverage ratios, so didn’t include that calculation.
7) Sounds good, I look forward to hearing from you when you have time for it.