How would one tell the difference between extra members which came for “capitalising on the media attention around Effective Altruism over the summer”, and 10% donors who simply got rustled up by this attention? Has GWWC publicly advertised conditions in which the money spent on this wouldn’t have been worthwhile and shouldn’t have been diverted to it?
How would one tell the difference between extra members which came for “capitalising on the media attention around Effective Altruism over the summer”, and 10% donors who simply got rustled up by this attention?
Joining members are asked what they likely would have given if not joining. This is quite a noisy process since people’s estimates of what they would have given will often be inaccurate, but I think it works as a first-order correction (and it’s hard to see how to do better). This is factored into the impact assessment.
Oh I meant how you distinguished between people who signed up to the pledge after seeing GWWC mentioned in the media attention or book (or elsewhere), and people who were a result of the efforts capitalising on this that EA donors are funding. For the question you answered I agree, I can’t think of any better (or other) data to get about individual pledgers and the only thing to compare it to is an overall estimate of the extra donations a pledge could lead to.
Sorry for the misunderstanding! Yeah, it looks kind of hard to distinguish. Maybe someone has a clever method. The only thing I can immediately think of is an RCT on follow-up to different bits of media coverage, but I expect this would be super-messy to run and might not produce great data.
How would one tell the difference between extra members which came for “capitalising on the media attention around Effective Altruism over the summer”, and 10% donors who simply got rustled up by this attention? Has GWWC publicly advertised conditions in which the money spent on this wouldn’t have been worthwhile and shouldn’t have been diverted to it?
Joining members are asked what they likely would have given if not joining. This is quite a noisy process since people’s estimates of what they would have given will often be inaccurate, but I think it works as a first-order correction (and it’s hard to see how to do better). This is factored into the impact assessment.
Oh I meant how you distinguished between people who signed up to the pledge after seeing GWWC mentioned in the media attention or book (or elsewhere), and people who were a result of the efforts capitalising on this that EA donors are funding. For the question you answered I agree, I can’t think of any better (or other) data to get about individual pledgers and the only thing to compare it to is an overall estimate of the extra donations a pledge could lead to.
Sorry for the misunderstanding! Yeah, it looks kind of hard to distinguish. Maybe someone has a clever method. The only thing I can immediately think of is an RCT on follow-up to different bits of media coverage, but I expect this would be super-messy to run and might not produce great data.