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 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.