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.
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.