Thanks for producing such a thorough doc Sam. Seems like an exciting possibility.
I’m not sure about your stat of it costing GWWC £1,000 to get a new member. Over 2015, just taking new members compared to budget, it cost £260 per additional member. On the other hand, it’s plausible it’s the marginal rather than mean cost per member that matters. One marginal activity which we could do more of with more staff (and indeed we will be doing more of in the future) is individual outreach—writing to people who have shown some interest in effective giving but aren’t gwwc members, seeing if we can answer any questions or concerns they have, as well as learning more about how people typically hear about gwwc, what kinds of things act as attractors and barriers. As well as providing information to those we reach out to and allowing us to learn more about how we can improve our activities, it often acts as a nudge to people to join. Over Sep-Nov 2015, we put 100 hours into that, which led to 9 new members (not including information gained, people signing up to the newsletter etc). Costed at £10 per hour, that’s £110 per member. (I’ll be publishing our mid year review next week.) It’s also plausible that the expected future mean effectiveness of gwwc is significantly higher than the impact of our median marginal activity, since we’re aiming to find ways to massively scale—see 80k’s blog post on taking the growth rather than marginal approach to evaluating start-ups. That’s why we’re trying out various different approaches rather than just putting more resources into existing activities.
Thanks Michelle, really useful feedback. Will update calculations and expected returns accordingly as soon as I get the chance.
If you are significantly more effective than I suggested above then that has two effects on the above: it would increase the expected effectiveness of this project, but decrease the chance that this project is worth funding when compared to GWWC etc.
My estimate for GWWC came from the 2015 Prospectus[1] For example the sentence “This equates to $67,000 per member, and suggests that our leverage ratio is around 60:1 – that is, for every $1 spent by Giving What We Can, around $60 will be donated to top charities.” This suggests you spent so far $67,000 * (1/60) = $1117 per member = £770. (I did perhaps confuse £ and $). Very happy to discuss. Will drop you an email.
Ah, thanks, good to know where it came from. That doc is actually outdated (it uses data up to the end of 2013 only), the more recent figure is 104:1, which gives you something more like £460 per member. You can always find our most up to date impact evaluation of ourselves at givingwhatwecan.org/impact. Our cost per member seems to have been dropping over time. This is one of the key numbers we track in our yearly reviews, all of which you can find on this page.
FYI: I have updated the estimated returns and relevant data above. Happy to chat further if you think it would be helpful for improving the figures here.
Presumably you wouldn’t work out how much it costs you to produce a member (or $67,000 in donations that wouldn’t have been made without you, which it sounds like is your current estimate per member) by dividing the number of new members per year by your budget? That doesn’t speak to whether these members pledged or gave due to particular activities you spent money on. Where’d I find your latest calculation of this?
The $67,000 is an average over all our members, given how much people estimate they would have given over their lives were it not for us, and also whether they think we influenced where they donated. So, it includes the fact that many people who are members of GWWC were influenced to donate a significant proportion of their income to effective charities for other reasons. But, as you say, it’s more accurate to look at cost per marginal member for particular activities, rather than an average like this.
You can always find our most up to date calculations to estimate our effectiveness (in a number of different ways) at givingwhatwecan.org/impact.
One marginal activity which we could do more of with more staff (and indeed we will be doing more of in the future) is individual outreach—writing to people who have shown some interest in effective giving but aren’t gwwc members, seeing if we can answer any questions or concerns they have, as well as learning more about how people typically hear about gwwc, what kinds of things act as attractors and barriers.
That’s very interesting, do you think you may have time to publish some of what you learn, and how “counterfactual” the 9 new members you found through it were?
We do try to publish updates on how particular activities are going, but I don’t want to speak to how fine grained an analysis of this particular activity we’ll publish soon. As I say, I’m currently working on a more overall update of our activities. One document you mind find useful, which brings together quite a lot of what we’ve learned about the best ways to do individual outreach is this guide to talking about GWWC and effective giving. (Thanks very much to Alison Woodman for putting that together!)
Thank you to Alison, that is useful. Should I throw out particular questions about your individual outreach efforts here, or wait for the update? Where I would I find updates on your activities? Do they all go into the overall update you mention, or do they get published individually throughout the year on some web page or blog?
Probably waiting until the update would be better, because that way the questions and answers are collected into one space.
We publish updates on our blog and here. Our main reviews and plans are published on an ongoing basis on this page. Our most recent prospectus had a lot about our plans etc, and we answered more detailed questions about our impact evaluations on this post. We also have this doc in which we tried to estimate the value of individual outreach, but note that it was intended for internal use, so is rather rough around the edges. (The data it uses is from a year or so ago, rather than being the most recent round.)
Okay, will do, that makes a good deal of sense. Based on that page it looks like information on projects goes into one overall retrospective analysis but say if I’m wrong.
Thanks for producing such a thorough doc Sam. Seems like an exciting possibility. I’m not sure about your stat of it costing GWWC £1,000 to get a new member. Over 2015, just taking new members compared to budget, it cost £260 per additional member. On the other hand, it’s plausible it’s the marginal rather than mean cost per member that matters. One marginal activity which we could do more of with more staff (and indeed we will be doing more of in the future) is individual outreach—writing to people who have shown some interest in effective giving but aren’t gwwc members, seeing if we can answer any questions or concerns they have, as well as learning more about how people typically hear about gwwc, what kinds of things act as attractors and barriers. As well as providing information to those we reach out to and allowing us to learn more about how we can improve our activities, it often acts as a nudge to people to join. Over Sep-Nov 2015, we put 100 hours into that, which led to 9 new members (not including information gained, people signing up to the newsletter etc). Costed at £10 per hour, that’s £110 per member. (I’ll be publishing our mid year review next week.) It’s also plausible that the expected future mean effectiveness of gwwc is significantly higher than the impact of our median marginal activity, since we’re aiming to find ways to massively scale—see 80k’s blog post on taking the growth rather than marginal approach to evaluating start-ups. That’s why we’re trying out various different approaches rather than just putting more resources into existing activities.
Thanks Michelle, really useful feedback. Will update calculations and expected returns accordingly as soon as I get the chance.
If you are significantly more effective than I suggested above then that has two effects on the above: it would increase the expected effectiveness of this project, but decrease the chance that this project is worth funding when compared to GWWC etc.
My estimate for GWWC came from the 2015 Prospectus[1] For example the sentence “This equates to $67,000 per member, and suggests that our leverage ratio is around 60:1 – that is, for every $1 spent by Giving What We Can, around $60 will be donated to top charities.” This suggests you spent so far $67,000 * (1/60) = $1117 per member = £770. (I did perhaps confuse £ and $). Very happy to discuss. Will drop you an email.
[1] https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/sites/givingwhatwecan.org/files/attachments/GivingWhatWeCan-FundraisingProspectus2015.pdf
Ah, thanks, good to know where it came from. That doc is actually outdated (it uses data up to the end of 2013 only), the more recent figure is 104:1, which gives you something more like £460 per member. You can always find our most up to date impact evaluation of ourselves at givingwhatwecan.org/impact. Our cost per member seems to have been dropping over time. This is one of the key numbers we track in our yearly reviews, all of which you can find on this page.
FYI: I have updated the estimated returns and relevant data above. Happy to chat further if you think it would be helpful for improving the figures here.
Presumably you wouldn’t work out how much it costs you to produce a member (or $67,000 in donations that wouldn’t have been made without you, which it sounds like is your current estimate per member) by dividing the number of new members per year by your budget? That doesn’t speak to whether these members pledged or gave due to particular activities you spent money on. Where’d I find your latest calculation of this?
The $67,000 is an average over all our members, given how much people estimate they would have given over their lives were it not for us, and also whether they think we influenced where they donated. So, it includes the fact that many people who are members of GWWC were influenced to donate a significant proportion of their income to effective charities for other reasons. But, as you say, it’s more accurate to look at cost per marginal member for particular activities, rather than an average like this. You can always find our most up to date calculations to estimate our effectiveness (in a number of different ways) at givingwhatwecan.org/impact.
That’s very interesting, do you think you may have time to publish some of what you learn, and how “counterfactual” the 9 new members you found through it were?
We do try to publish updates on how particular activities are going, but I don’t want to speak to how fine grained an analysis of this particular activity we’ll publish soon. As I say, I’m currently working on a more overall update of our activities. One document you mind find useful, which brings together quite a lot of what we’ve learned about the best ways to do individual outreach is this guide to talking about GWWC and effective giving. (Thanks very much to Alison Woodman for putting that together!)
Thank you to Alison, that is useful. Should I throw out particular questions about your individual outreach efforts here, or wait for the update? Where I would I find updates on your activities? Do they all go into the overall update you mention, or do they get published individually throughout the year on some web page or blog?
Probably waiting until the update would be better, because that way the questions and answers are collected into one space. We publish updates on our blog and here. Our main reviews and plans are published on an ongoing basis on this page. Our most recent prospectus had a lot about our plans etc, and we answered more detailed questions about our impact evaluations on this post. We also have this doc in which we tried to estimate the value of individual outreach, but note that it was intended for internal use, so is rather rough around the edges. (The data it uses is from a year or so ago, rather than being the most recent round.)
Okay, will do, that makes a good deal of sense. Based on that page it looks like information on projects goes into one overall retrospective analysis but say if I’m wrong.