Sorry, pretty unclear post on my part. Owen basically got it right though; if we’re talking practically rather than theoretically, you don’t have to decide to always focus on effectiveness or always focus on quantity. You can choose, and your choice can be influenced by the information you have about your audience.
Since most individual people are around the median/mode and a long way below the mean, for most individual people talking about effectiveness is correct. There are a few exceptions to this (those ‘up the right tail’), and then you can talk about amount...or just accept that you aren’t going to achieve that much here and find more people where you can talk about effectiveness!
This is obviously dependent on how much ability you have to discriminate based on your audience, which in turn depends on context, hence my ‘mass marketing’ point.
I think it’s the reverse—if you exclude the people who already do give effectively then you’ve brought the mean of those who remain down closer to the vicinity of the median.
Sorry Alex, I can’t quite follow what you’re arguing here. Are you saying you can just focus on people who already give fairly effectively?
Sorry, pretty unclear post on my part. Owen basically got it right though; if we’re talking practically rather than theoretically, you don’t have to decide to always focus on effectiveness or always focus on quantity. You can choose, and your choice can be influenced by the information you have about your audience.
Since most individual people are around the median/mode and a long way below the mean, for most individual people talking about effectiveness is correct. There are a few exceptions to this (those ‘up the right tail’), and then you can talk about amount...or just accept that you aren’t going to achieve that much here and find more people where you can talk about effectiveness!
This is obviously dependent on how much ability you have to discriminate based on your audience, which in turn depends on context, hence my ‘mass marketing’ point.
I think it’s the reverse—if you exclude the people who already do give effectively then you’ve brought the mean of those who remain down closer to the vicinity of the median.