Thanks for posting this here, and congrats on your great growth so far! I got a chance to read the prospectus more thoroughly and now I have some other questions about GWWC’s activities:
How was staff time allocated between projects over the past year? How do you anticipate allocating it next year? If you didn’t raise as much funds as you wanted, which projects would get cut first?
Just to check that I understand the numbers properly, your actual cash spent in 2014 was £120,000 and your actual cash spent in 2015 is expected to be £220,000, correct? How was the budget divided up last year? What’s the source of the increase? If it’s more staff, what will they be doing? Your description of planned operations for 2015 only included one statement of intent to hire someone (and one recent hire who presumably will cost more next year as they’re employed for the full year), so it’s hard to figure out exactly where capacity/expenses are being added here.
Why does GWWC continue to do charity evaluation research? This seems to have very high overlap with GiveWell’s operations, while GiveWell has a much larger staff, more organizational focus on it, and moves more money to their recommendations. Obviously GWWC and GiveWell’s recommendations differ somewhat, but is it really worth maintaining a separate research team and splitting the focus of GWWC between outreach and research?
Which of the people on the “our team” page is paid by GWWC and how much time do the team members spend on it? Presumably Toby Ord and Andreas Morgensen do not work full time on GWWC if they’re both professors, and Luke Ilott hasn’t started yet; does that mean that GWWC is five full-time people right now?
I notice that you budgeted for volunteer interns as if you were paying them a standard hourly rate, which is great. However, I also notice that a lot of your growth strategy for next year involves leveraging local volunteers who aren’t employed by GWWC per se. What would your estimated budget be like if these people’s time was also included? And what is the reasoning behind omitting it?
Out of curiosity, is there a timeline of how many full-time equivalent people were working at GWWC at any one time? It would be interesting to compare that to the growth data (which, by the way, it’s super awesome that you make available!)
Thanks again for answering everyone’s questions! I’m sure you’re probably tired of fielding them by now, but I really appreciate that we get to have these conversations publicly when EA orgs fundraise!
Thanks for your questions – great to know what people would like to hear more about.
Hauke and Rob have very kindly already answered most of the questions – the main thing left as far as I can see is what our activities have been over 2014 and what they will be over 2015. I’ll give a very brief summary, mostly for others who were also wondering, since I sent you our reviews and plans which have more detail in.
For most of 2014 we had one full-time person on Communications (Steph Crampin, who was staff) and one on Community (Ben Clifford (intern), followed by Lloyd Chapman (intern) and then Jon (staff)). Steph’s main focus for the first half of the year was a major overhaul of the website, aiming to update its look and feel, make it easier to navigate and use, cut down a bunch of our admin by automating a lot of the pledging process, and make individual dashboards for people to make it easier for members to let us know about their donations. In the second half of the year she was more focused on the September internship and running events. The idea behind the events strategy was to work out the best ways to run events, aiming to then scale those through our chapters. Ben and Jon worked on inducting new members and administration linked to that (more so early on in the year, before the website changes), ran our chapters and did individual outreach and follow-up – encouraging people who had had some contact with effective altruism to join GWWC. We planned to hire a staff member to be our community director over the year (hence Jon), because the turn-over of interns meant loss of information, and in particular of relationships with members and chapters (although each individually did a very good job!). Over this period, we didn’t have a full-time researcher – Rob, Andreas and Owen all pitched in to varying degrees. To a large extent we were drawing from the research we had previously done. The reason we didn’t hire a researcher was simply that we didn’t find someone we were happy with for the role.
At the beginning of 2015, we had a bit of a change in strategy. Rather than focusing on running events ourselves, we shifted to focusing on chapters. Chapters have seemed to be most effective when carrying out their own initiatives, so we decided it would work best to play a mentoring role for chapter presidents, rather than taking a top down approach. Since chapters play a larger role in our new strategy, and since it involves conversation with each individual chapter, it made sense to have one person focusing solely on chapters, so Jon moved to doing that. We had also found that following up with people individually – offering to answer questions and address concerns about donating to effective charities, prompting them to start etc seemed pretty effective. So we planned for our communications person to do more of that (that will be a large part of what Luke focuses on). We finally found a great candidate for research – Hauke. Over 2014, our membership doubled. Yet if anything, we want to have more rather than less contact with our members than we have in the past – we want to get a good sense of the path people take to actually deciding to give away 10% of their income to the most effective charities, and support our members to reach out to others. Therefore, we decided to hire someone dedicated to our members – Alison. In terms of if we don’t find the funds we want—we will not be able to hire Sam Deere long-term. His role going forward is still flexible, but it would include maintaining the GWWC website, since he is great at webdevelopment, and PR (which he has experience in from working in politics). It will likely include public speaking, and connecting with people in CSR departments. I think it would be a very bad outcome if we aren’t able to employ Sam long-term. He has a wide variety of extremely useful experience (webdevelopment, PR, social media, graphic design, writing and public speaking), and fits very well into the team. He very much increases our capacity to experiment in terms of time, skills and ideas.
Thanks everyone for your interesting in GWWC research.
The purpose of GWWC doing research is fourfold:
Find very effective charities/interventions and add to Givewell’s research.
In the past we might have influenced Givewell’s recommendations—see: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-ky1zIxhwx_aUZiY3ZfOWplTXd2ODF5aEt2aUJOU2dKWTFV/view?usp=sharing
Our niche is to specialize on global poverty charities / interventions and we hope to continue to add to the knowledge base in this area. For instance, this means that we likely will not do much in-depth research on Marijuana legalization in Vermont. We also focus more on intervention effectiveness than operations and the financials of charities (even though we do shallow investigations on this). Givewell now has 18 Full-time staff (and is expanding), but many work on the Open Philanthropy project and not that many on their top charities. There are still relatively few independent evaluators in world working on the intersection of effectiveness under ideal trial conditions (efficacy) and the effectiveness under large-scale programme conditions (effectiveness), and so I think it’s good to have more people working on this.
It’s also good to have some independent evaluation and peer-review of Givewell’s research, even in the case of highly transparent organisations such as Givewell
Provide supervision for global poverty / effectiveness research projects to highly motivated students, in order to deeply involve them with EA.
Finally, if we want to scale and grow roughly exponentially to eventually consistently move many millions to effective charities every year, it’s important to have in-house expertise to inform and fact-check our outreach and marketing, and make us credible when recommending charities to our members.
It’s also good to have some independent evaluation and peer-review of Givewell’s research, even in the case of highly transparent organisations such as Givewell
In the past, where has this led? Has your peer review uncovered any errors GiveWell has made? Or has it been more conceptual disagreements like the one over GiveDirectly?
I don’t think there’s a clear cut-off between conceptual and empirical disagreements, and I think it’s really important for us to highlight agreement rather than disagreement. That’s partly because it’s easy to give yourself a pretext for not donating / not donating to charities you aren’t personally connected with, so we don’t want to give people the impression of argument where there isn’t any (think of people citing disagreements over vaccines causing autism, or over climate change, when really scientists all basically agree). And it’s partly because actually we do agree over all the fundamentals, and I’d really like to foster a friendly more collaborate atmosphere in effective altruism. For those reasons, while I’ll briefly mention a couple of examples where we’ve disagreed, please read them in the spirit of us being fundamentally very much on the same page and extremely grateful for the brilliant work GW do. These are simply my impression, and a reason we think our doing research is likely to have value despite GW’s excellent work. Times we’ve disagreed – GWWC didn’t recommend VillageReach (subsequently dropped by GW); GWWC continued recommending AMF over 2014 because we thought it was important AMF had continuity in donations in order to have leverage for making larger distribution agreements (GW has now stated they will recommend AMF for at least 2 years, for a similar reason); GWWC recommended both DWI and SCI earlier on than GW did.
When we report on our recommended charities such as the Against Malaria Foundation, we try to add to what Givewell has already researched and believe that they’ll hopefully take this into account in their future reports. For instance, here’s our new report on AMF:
where we cite research that hasn’t been taken into account by Givewell as of yet.
We’re also in contact with Givewell about their reports when we uncover errors (conceptual and factual). So far I’ve only had one email conversation with Givewell’s Jake Marcus about what I perceived as a misinterpretation about the decline in worm burden with age—but we ended up agreeing that we have different interpretation of the statistics.
Hi Hauke, thanks for answering! I’m going to split up sub-questions into multiple comments so the threads don’t get too tangled.
Our niche is to specialize on global poverty charities / interventions and we hope to continue to add to the knowledge base in this area. For instance, this means that we likely will not do much in-depth research on Marijuana legalization in Vermont. … Givewell now has 18 Full-time staff (and is expanding), but many work on the Open Philanthropy project and not that many on their top charities.
It sounds like you think GiveWell isn’t very focused on global poverty charities, but that’s not true. Compared to GWWC, they devote both a larger absolute number of staff, and a larger fraction of their staff, to researching global poverty charities (they attribute about half of their costs to their traditional work here, which implies ~9 full-time-equivalent people working on the traditional work.)
Oh sorry, I think I was not clear enough on this issue. I absolutely agree with you. Givewell is quite focused on global poverty issues. I do think that Givewell spends significantly more resources on research than we do. But as you said it’s only ~9 full-time staff instead of 18 full time staff as one might think just looking at the staff page.
Provide supervision for global poverty / effectiveness research projects to highly motivated students, in order to deeply involve them with EA.
Cool, I hadn’t thought about this one. What’s the scope of this? How many students do you typically have working on the research? What’s a typical student project?
This year we’ll have 3 summer interns for GWWC coming for 2-3 months and potentially a bit longer. Two of them will likely be substantially involved in research. I think this is somewhat representative of a typical GWWC summer internship cohort (Michelle might be able to add to this?).
We also have students from the UK doing research projects with us part-time. Some are at Oxford and come in to talk in person and some we talk to over skype. I estimate that I have about 2-3 hours of meetings with them a week and then spend some time to give feedback on their research (or sometimes on their essays). We’re currently trying to scale this up and get more volunteers.
Here’s a recent report from one of our student volunteers Max on TB (which is still in manuscript form and is not published yet):
“Why does GWWC continue to do charity evaluation research?”
I think it could be useful to have more than one organisation evaluating interventions, rather than having all our eggs in one basket. That doesn’t mean it should be GWWC but I’m happy for there to be overlap, it will add verification to GiveWell’s recommendations as well as potentially uncovering new ones.
It is true that redundancy typically adds resilience to complex systems. But how much is this added resilience worth if you try to put a dollar amount on it? I think that what GWWC is doing overall is great, but I concur with Ben, it is a bit unclear at the moment what value GWWC adds in this regard.
Thanks everyone for your interesting in GWWC research.
The purpose of GWWC doing research is fourfold:
Find very effective charities/interventions and add to Givewell’s research.
In the past we might have influenced Givewell’s recommendations—see: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-ky1zIxhwx_aUZiY3ZfOWplTXd2ODF5aEt2aUJOU2dKWTFV/view?usp=sharing
Our niche is to specialize on global poverty charities / interventions and we hope to continue to add to the knowledge base in this area. For instance, this means that we likely will not do much in-depth research on Marijuana legalization in Vermont. We also focus more on intervention effectiveness than operations and the financials of charities (even though we do shallow investigations on this). Givewell now has 18 Full-time staff (and is expanding), but many work on the Open Philanthropy project and not that many on their top charities. There are still relatively few independent evaluators in world working on the intersection of effectiveness under ideal trial conditions (efficacy) and the effectiveness under large-scale programme conditions (effectiveness), and so I think it’s good to have more people working on this.
It’s also good to have some independent evaluation and peer-review of Givewell’s research, even in the case of highly transparent organisations such as Givewell
Provide supervision for global poverty / effectiveness research projects to highly motivated students, in order to deeply involve them with EA.
Finally, if we want to scale and grow roughly exponentially to eventually consistently move many millions to effective charities every year, it’s important to have in-house expertise to inform and fact-check our outreach and marketing, and make us credible when recommending charities to our members.
Michelle or Hauke can add more, but part of the answer is that being across the best research out there is crucial to our outreach.
People are willing to take our recommendations seriously because we show that we understand why these charities are excellent and are keeping tabs on them. We also need to be able to explain how these cost effectiveness estimates are arrived at, and generally say other smart things to be taken seriously. That isn’t possible without someone working almost full time understanding the research that GiveWell and others are producing.
As a result, even if the research had no value in discovering new knowledge (which isn’t true of course) and we were only focussed on outreach, we would probably want to have a researcher on our team (especially as we now have six people working on GWWC so can afford some specialisation).
Of course Hauke is actually turning up new points and looking into approaches for reducing poverty that we haven’t looked at properly before and should be able to say something intelligent about.
Hi Ben, thanks for these questions. I’ll just field those that I’m well placed to answer.
“Which of the people on the “our team” page is paid by GWWC and how much time do the team members spend on it? Presumably Toby Ord and Andreas Morgensen do not work full time on GWWC if they’re both professors, and Luke Ilott hasn’t started yet; does that mean that GWWC is five full-time people right now?”
Toby and Andreas don’t receive any income from GWWC and indeed are more part-time advisors than staff, though very valuable ones. You are right that Luke hasn’t started yet, so there are five staff: Michelle, Jon, Alison, and the recent recruits Hauke and Sam.
“Out of curiosity, is there a timeline of how many full-time equivalent people were working at GWWC at any one time? It would be interesting to compare that to the growth data (which, by the way, it’s super awesome that you make available!)”
Hmmm, I don’t think we have a close record easily accessible, but going from my memory and averaging over people coming and going month-to-month:
Mid 2012- mid 2013 − 2 staff
Mid 2013- mid 2014 − 3 staff
Late 2014 - still 3 staff
2015 - Have gone from 3 to 5 staff
Late 2015 − 6 staff
GWWC, being an outreach organisation, has historically had a lot of interns and volunteers staying for 1-10 months. However, it would take me some time to get averages for those (because the lengths of stay and amounts of work are so irregular)! If anything that has been stable or somewhat decreasing over the last 3 years.
“I notice that you budgeted for volunteer interns as if you were paying them a standard hourly rate, which is great. However, I also notice that a lot of your growth strategy for next year involves leveraging local volunteers who aren’t employed by GWWC per se. What would your estimated budget be like if these people’s time was also included? And what is the reasoning behind omitting it?”
We reimburse interns (some) of their living expenses when they are here if they need it. As a result it actually costs money. Volunteers or interns working in chapters around the world don’t get paid anything by us (or if they are, only very rarely). So there is no direct financial cost. In most cases we don’t think those volunteers would be doing something similar to Giving What We Can (like say, earning a lot of money to donate) if they weren’t on campuses encouraging people to give to effective charities, so we haven’t counted it as having a significant opportunity cost that would interest donors.
“Why does GWWC continue to do charity evaluation research? This seems to have very high overlap with GiveWell’s operations, while GiveWell has a much larger staff, more organizational focus on it, and moves more money to their recommendations. Obviously GWWC and GiveWell’s recommendations differ somewhat, but is it really worth maintaining a separate research team and splitting the focus of GWWC between outreach and research?”
I’ve given one possible answer to this in the thread below.
“Just to check that I understand the numbers properly, your actual cash spent in 2014 was £120,000 and your actual cash spent in 2015 is expected to be £220,000, correct? How was the budget divided up last year? ”
That’s roughly right, yes.
“How was the budget divided up last year?”
I haven’t done that breakdown for 2014 yet, but it will be very similar to 2013, which was 80-85% salaries and intern expenses support, 10% office rent, and 5-10% materials.
“What’s the source of the increase?”
It’s overwhelmingly new staff. Salaries/office rent has also increased about 10% in the last year (reflecting inflation and older/more experienced hires).
“If it’s more staff, what will they be doing?”
I’ll leave this one for Michelle as she can give the clearest answer.
“If you didn’t raise as much funds as you wanted, which projects would get cut first?”
We would have to have one less staff member, very likely cutting back our media, talk and support for chapters. Again I’ll leave Michelle to give a more precise answer.
Toby and Andreas don’t receive any income from GWWC and indeed are more part-time advisors than staff, though very valuable ones.
Cool. I think it would have been less confusing if the prospectus had explicitly noted this, since I only realized it because I read the bios closely and know some of what Toby has been up to.
We would have to have one less staff member, very likely cutting back our media, talk and support for chapters. Again I’ll leave Michelle to give a more precise answer.
Can you give any more detail about what these operations looked like last year and what they accomplished? I can’t find very much information about that in the prospectus.
Thanks for posting this here, and congrats on your great growth so far! I got a chance to read the prospectus more thoroughly and now I have some other questions about GWWC’s activities:
How was staff time allocated between projects over the past year? How do you anticipate allocating it next year? If you didn’t raise as much funds as you wanted, which projects would get cut first?
Just to check that I understand the numbers properly, your actual cash spent in 2014 was £120,000 and your actual cash spent in 2015 is expected to be £220,000, correct? How was the budget divided up last year? What’s the source of the increase? If it’s more staff, what will they be doing? Your description of planned operations for 2015 only included one statement of intent to hire someone (and one recent hire who presumably will cost more next year as they’re employed for the full year), so it’s hard to figure out exactly where capacity/expenses are being added here.
Why does GWWC continue to do charity evaluation research? This seems to have very high overlap with GiveWell’s operations, while GiveWell has a much larger staff, more organizational focus on it, and moves more money to their recommendations. Obviously GWWC and GiveWell’s recommendations differ somewhat, but is it really worth maintaining a separate research team and splitting the focus of GWWC between outreach and research?
Which of the people on the “our team” page is paid by GWWC and how much time do the team members spend on it? Presumably Toby Ord and Andreas Morgensen do not work full time on GWWC if they’re both professors, and Luke Ilott hasn’t started yet; does that mean that GWWC is five full-time people right now?
I notice that you budgeted for volunteer interns as if you were paying them a standard hourly rate, which is great. However, I also notice that a lot of your growth strategy for next year involves leveraging local volunteers who aren’t employed by GWWC per se. What would your estimated budget be like if these people’s time was also included? And what is the reasoning behind omitting it?
Out of curiosity, is there a timeline of how many full-time equivalent people were working at GWWC at any one time? It would be interesting to compare that to the growth data (which, by the way, it’s super awesome that you make available!)
Thanks again for answering everyone’s questions! I’m sure you’re probably tired of fielding them by now, but I really appreciate that we get to have these conversations publicly when EA orgs fundraise!
Thanks for your questions – great to know what people would like to hear more about. Hauke and Rob have very kindly already answered most of the questions – the main thing left as far as I can see is what our activities have been over 2014 and what they will be over 2015. I’ll give a very brief summary, mostly for others who were also wondering, since I sent you our reviews and plans which have more detail in.
For most of 2014 we had one full-time person on Communications (Steph Crampin, who was staff) and one on Community (Ben Clifford (intern), followed by Lloyd Chapman (intern) and then Jon (staff)). Steph’s main focus for the first half of the year was a major overhaul of the website, aiming to update its look and feel, make it easier to navigate and use, cut down a bunch of our admin by automating a lot of the pledging process, and make individual dashboards for people to make it easier for members to let us know about their donations. In the second half of the year she was more focused on the September internship and running events. The idea behind the events strategy was to work out the best ways to run events, aiming to then scale those through our chapters. Ben and Jon worked on inducting new members and administration linked to that (more so early on in the year, before the website changes), ran our chapters and did individual outreach and follow-up – encouraging people who had had some contact with effective altruism to join GWWC. We planned to hire a staff member to be our community director over the year (hence Jon), because the turn-over of interns meant loss of information, and in particular of relationships with members and chapters (although each individually did a very good job!). Over this period, we didn’t have a full-time researcher – Rob, Andreas and Owen all pitched in to varying degrees. To a large extent we were drawing from the research we had previously done. The reason we didn’t hire a researcher was simply that we didn’t find someone we were happy with for the role.
At the beginning of 2015, we had a bit of a change in strategy. Rather than focusing on running events ourselves, we shifted to focusing on chapters. Chapters have seemed to be most effective when carrying out their own initiatives, so we decided it would work best to play a mentoring role for chapter presidents, rather than taking a top down approach. Since chapters play a larger role in our new strategy, and since it involves conversation with each individual chapter, it made sense to have one person focusing solely on chapters, so Jon moved to doing that. We had also found that following up with people individually – offering to answer questions and address concerns about donating to effective charities, prompting them to start etc seemed pretty effective. So we planned for our communications person to do more of that (that will be a large part of what Luke focuses on). We finally found a great candidate for research – Hauke. Over 2014, our membership doubled. Yet if anything, we want to have more rather than less contact with our members than we have in the past – we want to get a good sense of the path people take to actually deciding to give away 10% of their income to the most effective charities, and support our members to reach out to others. Therefore, we decided to hire someone dedicated to our members – Alison. In terms of if we don’t find the funds we want—we will not be able to hire Sam Deere long-term. His role going forward is still flexible, but it would include maintaining the GWWC website, since he is great at webdevelopment, and PR (which he has experience in from working in politics). It will likely include public speaking, and connecting with people in CSR departments. I think it would be a very bad outcome if we aren’t able to employ Sam long-term. He has a wide variety of extremely useful experience (webdevelopment, PR, social media, graphic design, writing and public speaking), and fits very well into the team. He very much increases our capacity to experiment in terms of time, skills and ideas.
Thanks everyone for your interesting in GWWC research.
The purpose of GWWC doing research is fourfold:
Find very effective charities/interventions and add to Givewell’s research. In the past we might have influenced Givewell’s recommendations—see: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-ky1zIxhwx_aUZiY3ZfOWplTXd2ODF5aEt2aUJOU2dKWTFV/view?usp=sharing Our niche is to specialize on global poverty charities / interventions and we hope to continue to add to the knowledge base in this area. For instance, this means that we likely will not do much in-depth research on Marijuana legalization in Vermont. We also focus more on intervention effectiveness than operations and the financials of charities (even though we do shallow investigations on this). Givewell now has 18 Full-time staff (and is expanding), but many work on the Open Philanthropy project and not that many on their top charities. There are still relatively few independent evaluators in world working on the intersection of effectiveness under ideal trial conditions (efficacy) and the effectiveness under large-scale programme conditions (effectiveness), and so I think it’s good to have more people working on this.
It’s also good to have some independent evaluation and peer-review of Givewell’s research, even in the case of highly transparent organisations such as Givewell
Provide supervision for global poverty / effectiveness research projects to highly motivated students, in order to deeply involve them with EA.
Finally, if we want to scale and grow roughly exponentially to eventually consistently move many millions to effective charities every year, it’s important to have in-house expertise to inform and fact-check our outreach and marketing, and make us credible when recommending charities to our members.
In the past, where has this led? Has your peer review uncovered any errors GiveWell has made? Or has it been more conceptual disagreements like the one over GiveDirectly?
I don’t think there’s a clear cut-off between conceptual and empirical disagreements, and I think it’s really important for us to highlight agreement rather than disagreement. That’s partly because it’s easy to give yourself a pretext for not donating / not donating to charities you aren’t personally connected with, so we don’t want to give people the impression of argument where there isn’t any (think of people citing disagreements over vaccines causing autism, or over climate change, when really scientists all basically agree). And it’s partly because actually we do agree over all the fundamentals, and I’d really like to foster a friendly more collaborate atmosphere in effective altruism. For those reasons, while I’ll briefly mention a couple of examples where we’ve disagreed, please read them in the spirit of us being fundamentally very much on the same page and extremely grateful for the brilliant work GW do. These are simply my impression, and a reason we think our doing research is likely to have value despite GW’s excellent work. Times we’ve disagreed – GWWC didn’t recommend VillageReach (subsequently dropped by GW); GWWC continued recommending AMF over 2014 because we thought it was important AMF had continuity in donations in order to have leverage for making larger distribution agreements (GW has now stated they will recommend AMF for at least 2 years, for a similar reason); GWWC recommended both DWI and SCI earlier on than GW did.
When we report on our recommended charities such as the Against Malaria Foundation, we try to add to what Givewell has already researched and believe that they’ll hopefully take this into account in their future reports. For instance, here’s our new report on AMF:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-ky1zIxhwx_QVBBb3ZuaVR5dEU/view?usp=sharing
a lot of the research cited in this report has not been taken into account by Givewell I believe.
Also look at our recent report on SCI here:
https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/blog/2015-03-31/charity-update-ii-schistosomiasis-control-initiative-sci
where we cite research that hasn’t been taken into account by Givewell as of yet.
We’re also in contact with Givewell about their reports when we uncover errors (conceptual and factual). So far I’ve only had one email conversation with Givewell’s Jake Marcus about what I perceived as a misinterpretation about the decline in worm burden with age—but we ended up agreeing that we have different interpretation of the statistics.
Hi Hauke, thanks for answering! I’m going to split up sub-questions into multiple comments so the threads don’t get too tangled.
It sounds like you think GiveWell isn’t very focused on global poverty charities, but that’s not true. Compared to GWWC, they devote both a larger absolute number of staff, and a larger fraction of their staff, to researching global poverty charities (they attribute about half of their costs to their traditional work here, which implies ~9 full-time-equivalent people working on the traditional work.)
Oh sorry, I think I was not clear enough on this issue. I absolutely agree with you. Givewell is quite focused on global poverty issues. I do think that Givewell spends significantly more resources on research than we do. But as you said it’s only ~9 full-time staff instead of 18 full time staff as one might think just looking at the staff page.
Cool, I hadn’t thought about this one. What’s the scope of this? How many students do you typically have working on the research? What’s a typical student project?
This year we’ll have 3 summer interns for GWWC coming for 2-3 months and potentially a bit longer. Two of them will likely be substantially involved in research. I think this is somewhat representative of a typical GWWC summer internship cohort (Michelle might be able to add to this?). We also have students from the UK doing research projects with us part-time. Some are at Oxford and come in to talk in person and some we talk to over skype. I estimate that I have about 2-3 hours of meetings with them a week and then spend some time to give feedback on their research (or sometimes on their essays). We’re currently trying to scale this up and get more volunteers.
Here’s a recent report from one of our student volunteers Max on TB (which is still in manuscript form and is not published yet):
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lEy4PuJHWVD0JQufb8FPyYm1bN5JYAiA6Ivoko5ROGY/edit?usp=sharing
you can find more of our students writing on our blog:
https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/blog
“Why does GWWC continue to do charity evaluation research?”
I think it could be useful to have more than one organisation evaluating interventions, rather than having all our eggs in one basket. That doesn’t mean it should be GWWC but I’m happy for there to be overlap, it will add verification to GiveWell’s recommendations as well as potentially uncovering new ones.
It is true that redundancy typically adds resilience to complex systems. But how much is this added resilience worth if you try to put a dollar amount on it? I think that what GWWC is doing overall is great, but I concur with Ben, it is a bit unclear at the moment what value GWWC adds in this regard.
Thanks everyone for your interesting in GWWC research.
The purpose of GWWC doing research is fourfold:
Find very effective charities/interventions and add to Givewell’s research. In the past we might have influenced Givewell’s recommendations—see: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-ky1zIxhwx_aUZiY3ZfOWplTXd2ODF5aEt2aUJOU2dKWTFV/view?usp=sharing Our niche is to specialize on global poverty charities / interventions and we hope to continue to add to the knowledge base in this area. For instance, this means that we likely will not do much in-depth research on Marijuana legalization in Vermont. We also focus more on intervention effectiveness than operations and the financials of charities (even though we do shallow investigations on this). Givewell now has 18 Full-time staff (and is expanding), but many work on the Open Philanthropy project and not that many on their top charities. There are still relatively few independent evaluators in world working on the intersection of effectiveness under ideal trial conditions (efficacy) and the effectiveness under large-scale programme conditions (effectiveness), and so I think it’s good to have more people working on this.
It’s also good to have some independent evaluation and peer-review of Givewell’s research, even in the case of highly transparent organisations such as Givewell
Provide supervision for global poverty / effectiveness research projects to highly motivated students, in order to deeply involve them with EA.
Finally, if we want to scale and grow roughly exponentially to eventually consistently move many millions to effective charities every year, it’s important to have in-house expertise to inform and fact-check our outreach and marketing, and make us credible when recommending charities to our members.
Michelle or Hauke can add more, but part of the answer is that being across the best research out there is crucial to our outreach.
People are willing to take our recommendations seriously because we show that we understand why these charities are excellent and are keeping tabs on them. We also need to be able to explain how these cost effectiveness estimates are arrived at, and generally say other smart things to be taken seriously. That isn’t possible without someone working almost full time understanding the research that GiveWell and others are producing.
As a result, even if the research had no value in discovering new knowledge (which isn’t true of course) and we were only focussed on outreach, we would probably want to have a researcher on our team (especially as we now have six people working on GWWC so can afford some specialisation).
Of course Hauke is actually turning up new points and looking into approaches for reducing poverty that we haven’t looked at properly before and should be able to say something intelligent about.
Hi Ben, thanks for these questions. I’ll just field those that I’m well placed to answer.
“Which of the people on the “our team” page is paid by GWWC and how much time do the team members spend on it? Presumably Toby Ord and Andreas Morgensen do not work full time on GWWC if they’re both professors, and Luke Ilott hasn’t started yet; does that mean that GWWC is five full-time people right now?”
Toby and Andreas don’t receive any income from GWWC and indeed are more part-time advisors than staff, though very valuable ones. You are right that Luke hasn’t started yet, so there are five staff: Michelle, Jon, Alison, and the recent recruits Hauke and Sam.
“Out of curiosity, is there a timeline of how many full-time equivalent people were working at GWWC at any one time? It would be interesting to compare that to the growth data (which, by the way, it’s super awesome that you make available!)”
Hmmm, I don’t think we have a close record easily accessible, but going from my memory and averaging over people coming and going month-to-month:
Mid 2012- mid 2013 − 2 staff
Mid 2013- mid 2014 − 3 staff
Late 2014 - still 3 staff
2015 - Have gone from 3 to 5 staff
Late 2015 − 6 staff
GWWC, being an outreach organisation, has historically had a lot of interns and volunteers staying for 1-10 months. However, it would take me some time to get averages for those (because the lengths of stay and amounts of work are so irregular)! If anything that has been stable or somewhat decreasing over the last 3 years.
“I notice that you budgeted for volunteer interns as if you were paying them a standard hourly rate, which is great. However, I also notice that a lot of your growth strategy for next year involves leveraging local volunteers who aren’t employed by GWWC per se. What would your estimated budget be like if these people’s time was also included? And what is the reasoning behind omitting it?”
We reimburse interns (some) of their living expenses when they are here if they need it. As a result it actually costs money. Volunteers or interns working in chapters around the world don’t get paid anything by us (or if they are, only very rarely). So there is no direct financial cost. In most cases we don’t think those volunteers would be doing something similar to Giving What We Can (like say, earning a lot of money to donate) if they weren’t on campuses encouraging people to give to effective charities, so we haven’t counted it as having a significant opportunity cost that would interest donors.
“Why does GWWC continue to do charity evaluation research? This seems to have very high overlap with GiveWell’s operations, while GiveWell has a much larger staff, more organizational focus on it, and moves more money to their recommendations. Obviously GWWC and GiveWell’s recommendations differ somewhat, but is it really worth maintaining a separate research team and splitting the focus of GWWC between outreach and research?”
I’ve given one possible answer to this in the thread below.
“Just to check that I understand the numbers properly, your actual cash spent in 2014 was £120,000 and your actual cash spent in 2015 is expected to be £220,000, correct? How was the budget divided up last year? ”
That’s roughly right, yes.
“How was the budget divided up last year?”
I haven’t done that breakdown for 2014 yet, but it will be very similar to 2013, which was 80-85% salaries and intern expenses support, 10% office rent, and 5-10% materials.
“What’s the source of the increase?”
It’s overwhelmingly new staff. Salaries/office rent has also increased about 10% in the last year (reflecting inflation and older/more experienced hires).
“If it’s more staff, what will they be doing?”
I’ll leave this one for Michelle as she can give the clearest answer.
“If you didn’t raise as much funds as you wanted, which projects would get cut first?”
We would have to have one less staff member, very likely cutting back our media, talk and support for chapters. Again I’ll leave Michelle to give a more precise answer.
Thanks Rob!
Cool. I think it would have been less confusing if the prospectus had explicitly noted this, since I only realized it because I read the bios closely and know some of what Toby has been up to.
Can you give any more detail about what these operations looked like last year and what they accomplished? I can’t find very much information about that in the prospectus.