Hi Michelle. I finally got around to reading through all of this and the supporting docs. I agree with Michael Dickens that it is awesome to have such a thoroughly transparent document published publicly. I certainly learned a lot about GWWC I didn’t know about and it definitely gives me increased confidence in GWWC that you look at yourselves this thoroughly.
I have some questions based on what I’ve read, if you don’t mind:
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and as we go from having two levels of management to three
My understanding of there being three layers of management is that everyone has a boss and then that boss has a boss, and then that boss’s boss has a boss. That seems like a lot of bosses for a nine person organization (though it may certainly be warranted if it’s best—promise I’m not judging negatively...) and I’m having a bit of trouble understanding the reporting structure. My guess is that you’re at the top, and Jon, Allison, Sam, and Hauke all report to you, and then Marinella and James report to Allison and Larissa reports to Sam? But this sounds like two levels, not three?
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One problem we had early on was finding someone to lead the drive who hadn’t yet taken the pledge themselves.
Why does the person who lead the drive need to have not taken the pledge? Is it because they’re inviting other people to take the pledge with them? This sounds like it poses a big barrier to me for future drives and I don’t think the value of the “take the pledge with me” theme outweighs the increasing cost.
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We will continue to do some of this, while simultaneously trying out riskier but potentially higher reward activities.
Oooh… what activities?
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She is in a good position to do this because her engagement with members (through skyping them and being in charge of data gathering / the giving review) means she has a good picture of what things have led people to join or acted as barriers in the past.
Curious to hear thoughts on what the causes and barriers of joining are. Any plans to write that up?
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We also think it is important for us as a community to have a thorough and deep knowledge of different cause areas and the effectiveness of charities in them – if we are to ask people to join our community and trust our recommendations, they have a right to expect this – as well as being lively and producing interesting content.
I certainly sympathize with the need to have in-house expertise and I really like the angle of creating reports for HNWs if you think this is leading them to donate a lot more effectively than they would otherwise. But I am concerned about there being a large potential for overlap with GiveWell and I didn’t see this discussed that much in the research prioritization doc.
What do you think of this overlap? Is there a concern of duplication of effort? Has there been any serious cost-benefit analysis of what impacts focusing on research has (e.g., found something cool that GiveWell didn’t know about, improving the reputation of GWWC which causes more people to take the pledge) against the costs (it seems to be at least 1/6th of GWWC’s budget?).
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Another suggestion was that we should have a list of people we can ask advice from in major bodies whose work is relevant to ours. Hauke has been gradually growing such a network, but we haven’t previously coordinated as much as we could with other members of CEA—we will try to do so in future.
This sounds really cool. Who would you think of reaching out to?
Since you are both an advocacy and research organization, are you trying to build contacts with both or focusing on building contacts in only one of those two areas?
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Metrics
It’s cool to see GWWC publishing metrics and focusing on cohort analysis. I’m still keen to learn more about the retention rate.
I’m curious if you’ve given any thought to dollar-weighted attrition, where you look at the total amount of money donated in year N divided by the total amount of money pledged in year N-1 for year N. (It’s possible this number could be above 100% if people underestimate how much they’ll donate.)
I also think there’s still a cool project around trying to predict retention using survival analysis, as I mentioned awhile back (point 7). I’ll think more about prioritizing this.
Hey Peter, Very glad you found it useful. I’ll answer the things I can quickly now, and get back to others later on.
Management levels
Sorry, mispoke—I meant going from me managing everyone on the team, to me managing managers. The structure is: I manage Alison, Jon, Sam and Hauke; they manage Marinella, James and Larissa.
Pledge drive run by a person who hadn’t yet taken the pledge
Agree this isn’t a decisive consideration, and we were going ahead with Harri as the main lead (who was already a member). Finding Linch was great in terms of him doing amazing work, and had the additional benefit of him not having taken the pledge yet. I do think typically a framing of ‘I’m going to do this thing I’m excited about, would you like to join me’ is better than ‘you should all be doing this thing, why aren’t you yet?’, but that might well be harder in future—if it is, that definitely won’t hinder future pledge drives. It may not be hard in the future though—we do every now and then chat to people who would like to join, but want to find the most impactful time possible to join—them leading a pledge drive is a pretty compelling answer to that.
Other outreach activities
One example we’re working on at the moment is working out how we can support our members to be effective champions of GWWC, and reach out to their friends about joining. Getting this kind of chain going could be a really promising growth model. Our planned outreach activities with our estimated priority ranking is here (supporting our members as champions we’ve been referring to as ‘activating membership’).
Causes and barriers to joining
She’s written a doc on Insights from member skypes in which she describes these (sections 2b-d) qualitatively, and we have a spreadsheet of what things people cited on the join form as how they heard about us. (Note that the latter was just made for our internal use, so is rough rather than explanatory.) Still working out what the most effective ways to summarise and present these things are.
We’d hope to find advisors in both these areas, but we’re particularly interested in advocacy within development and research (where knowledge is fairly easily transferable – our outreach is a bit more different from what others are doing). For example over the last couple of weeks we added someone to our advisory board whose PhD was on schistosomiasis and is about to take up a position working on a Gates foundation project to eliminate STHs, and connected with the person who runs the Emerging Policy, Innovation and Capability unit for the UK Department of international development.
HNW advising
We’ve started this by supporting a large donor who had previously been assessing projects entirely independently, and by working with the Founders’ Pledge. In the former case, it seems we have fairly good reason to think that we have been of genuine help to the person in determining which of the high impact projects considered were the best. As a HNW donor with good connections, he has various projects open to him that aren’t to other donors, and which smaller and more risk averse donors wouldn’t be interested in. He has said that he has found our advice useful. In the latter case, we produced reports like this one on mental health for donors who want to give partly within restricted areas. This collaboration is in early stages, so we don’t yet know to what extent donors will follow our recommendations. But so far donors have seemed grateful for the recommendations and interested in the research, and it seems likely they will follow them. If that’s the case, it would mean money going to our top recommended charities which otherwise almost certainly wouldn’t have, and money going to more effective charities within particular areas than it would otherwise have. Since these donors are donating substantial amounts, they expect more bespoke reports than simply being pointed towards GW’s research. Currently, the reports are somewhat labour intensive to create, though we estimate they are still worth it since each is moving 10s of thousands of dollars. In the future, we can pull together the reports from research we did previously, so we expect it the cost-effectiveness to increase fairly swiftly. This is something we are monitoring carefully however. One expected benefit of this work is simply presenting research in a form that makes it more likely to be acted on. The Founders’ Pledge know their donors well, and seem to think that the reports we produce are the kind that are likely to be acted on. Another benefit is in understanding the overall health sphere well enough to find particular synergies. People often want to help a particular sphere. Since the charities we recommend are the most cost-effective we could find, and helping in very basic ways, there are often synergies that aren’t immediately obvious. For example, as we write about in our mental health report, it seems that the most cost-effective way to reduce epilepsy incidence is actually to prevent malaria, since cerebral malaria causes in the region of a five-fold increase in chance of epilepsy. A similar example: when we’ve looked into cancer, the most cost-effective treatment to cancer we could find was to prevent Vitamin A deficiency, since that causes stomach cancer. In both these cases, this ignores the other benefits of malaria prevention and Vitamin A supplementation. These kinds of cases aren’t just interesting, they are likely to be persuasive to people who might not otherwise have given to such cost-effective charities. In neither of these cases did the points seem to have been made by others, so it does not appear to be a duplication of effort.
Thanks for all of your thoughts on this! I can speak a little to the question about metrics:
I’m curious if you’ve given any thought to dollar-weighted attrition, where you look at the total amount of money donated in year N divided by the total amount of money pledged in year N-1 for year N. (It’s possible this number could be above 100% if people underestimate how much they’ll donate.)
This isn’t something we’ve used in our impact evaluations since we’re missing donation data from around two fifths of our members (though in future we do hope to fill in some of these gaps by making it easier for members to record their donations at the point of donation). This calculation would therefore give us an estimated lower bound % of pledged money that was donated in a given year, but wouldn’t give us information about the expected contributions of members for whom we lack data. For what it’s worth, I’ve had a quick look, and, for 2014, 65% of the donations pledged for the year were recorded in My Giving.
It’d be good to hear more about your ideas for a survival analysis. If you have the time feel free to get in touch (alison[dot]woodman[at]givingwhatwecan.org)
Thanks for all of your thoughts on this! I can speak a little to the question about metrics:
I’m curious if you’ve given any thought to dollar-weighted attrition, where you look at the total amount of money donated in year N divided by the total amount of money pledged in year N-1 for year N. (It’s possible this number could be above 100% if people underestimate how much they’ll donate.)
This isn’t something we’ve used in our impact evaluations, since we are missing donation data from around two fifths of our members. This calculation would give us a lower bound % of pledged money that was donated in a given year, but wouldn’t give us information about the missing data. For what it’s worth, I’ve had a quick look, and for the year 2014, 65% of the donations pledged for the year were recorded in My Giving.
It’d be good to hear more about your ideas for a survival analysis. If you have the time feel free to get in touch (alison[dot]woodman[at]givingwhatwecan.org)
Hi Michelle. I finally got around to reading through all of this and the supporting docs. I agree with Michael Dickens that it is awesome to have such a thoroughly transparent document published publicly. I certainly learned a lot about GWWC I didn’t know about and it definitely gives me increased confidence in GWWC that you look at yourselves this thoroughly.
I have some questions based on what I’ve read, if you don’t mind:
-
My understanding of there being three layers of management is that everyone has a boss and then that boss has a boss, and then that boss’s boss has a boss. That seems like a lot of bosses for a nine person organization (though it may certainly be warranted if it’s best—promise I’m not judging negatively...) and I’m having a bit of trouble understanding the reporting structure. My guess is that you’re at the top, and Jon, Allison, Sam, and Hauke all report to you, and then Marinella and James report to Allison and Larissa reports to Sam? But this sounds like two levels, not three?
-
Why does the person who lead the drive need to have not taken the pledge? Is it because they’re inviting other people to take the pledge with them? This sounds like it poses a big barrier to me for future drives and I don’t think the value of the “take the pledge with me” theme outweighs the increasing cost.
-
Oooh… what activities?
-
Curious to hear thoughts on what the causes and barriers of joining are. Any plans to write that up?
-
I certainly sympathize with the need to have in-house expertise and I really like the angle of creating reports for HNWs if you think this is leading them to donate a lot more effectively than they would otherwise. But I am concerned about there being a large potential for overlap with GiveWell and I didn’t see this discussed that much in the research prioritization doc.
What do you think of this overlap? Is there a concern of duplication of effort? Has there been any serious cost-benefit analysis of what impacts focusing on research has (e.g., found something cool that GiveWell didn’t know about, improving the reputation of GWWC which causes more people to take the pledge) against the costs (it seems to be at least 1/6th of GWWC’s budget?).
-
This sounds really cool. Who would you think of reaching out to?
Since you are both an advocacy and research organization, are you trying to build contacts with both or focusing on building contacts in only one of those two areas?
-
It’s cool to see GWWC publishing metrics and focusing on cohort analysis. I’m still keen to learn more about the retention rate.
I’m curious if you’ve given any thought to dollar-weighted attrition, where you look at the total amount of money donated in year N divided by the total amount of money pledged in year N-1 for year N. (It’s possible this number could be above 100% if people underestimate how much they’ll donate.)
I also think there’s still a cool project around trying to predict retention using survival analysis, as I mentioned awhile back (point 7). I’ll think more about prioritizing this.
Hey Peter, Very glad you found it useful. I’ll answer the things I can quickly now, and get back to others later on.
Sorry, mispoke—I meant going from me managing everyone on the team, to me managing managers. The structure is: I manage Alison, Jon, Sam and Hauke; they manage Marinella, James and Larissa.
Agree this isn’t a decisive consideration, and we were going ahead with Harri as the main lead (who was already a member). Finding Linch was great in terms of him doing amazing work, and had the additional benefit of him not having taken the pledge yet. I do think typically a framing of ‘I’m going to do this thing I’m excited about, would you like to join me’ is better than ‘you should all be doing this thing, why aren’t you yet?’, but that might well be harder in future—if it is, that definitely won’t hinder future pledge drives. It may not be hard in the future though—we do every now and then chat to people who would like to join, but want to find the most impactful time possible to join—them leading a pledge drive is a pretty compelling answer to that.
One example we’re working on at the moment is working out how we can support our members to be effective champions of GWWC, and reach out to their friends about joining. Getting this kind of chain going could be a really promising growth model. Our planned outreach activities with our estimated priority ranking is here (supporting our members as champions we’ve been referring to as ‘activating membership’).
She’s written a doc on Insights from member skypes in which she describes these (sections 2b-d) qualitatively, and we have a spreadsheet of what things people cited on the join form as how they heard about us. (Note that the latter was just made for our internal use, so is rough rather than explanatory.) Still working out what the most effective ways to summarise and present these things are.
On the last two points:
We’d hope to find advisors in both these areas, but we’re particularly interested in advocacy within development and research (where knowledge is fairly easily transferable – our outreach is a bit more different from what others are doing). For example over the last couple of weeks we added someone to our advisory board whose PhD was on schistosomiasis and is about to take up a position working on a Gates foundation project to eliminate STHs, and connected with the person who runs the Emerging Policy, Innovation and Capability unit for the UK Department of international development.
We’ve started this by supporting a large donor who had previously been assessing projects entirely independently, and by working with the Founders’ Pledge. In the former case, it seems we have fairly good reason to think that we have been of genuine help to the person in determining which of the high impact projects considered were the best. As a HNW donor with good connections, he has various projects open to him that aren’t to other donors, and which smaller and more risk averse donors wouldn’t be interested in. He has said that he has found our advice useful. In the latter case, we produced reports like this one on mental health for donors who want to give partly within restricted areas. This collaboration is in early stages, so we don’t yet know to what extent donors will follow our recommendations. But so far donors have seemed grateful for the recommendations and interested in the research, and it seems likely they will follow them. If that’s the case, it would mean money going to our top recommended charities which otherwise almost certainly wouldn’t have, and money going to more effective charities within particular areas than it would otherwise have. Since these donors are donating substantial amounts, they expect more bespoke reports than simply being pointed towards GW’s research. Currently, the reports are somewhat labour intensive to create, though we estimate they are still worth it since each is moving 10s of thousands of dollars. In the future, we can pull together the reports from research we did previously, so we expect it the cost-effectiveness to increase fairly swiftly. This is something we are monitoring carefully however. One expected benefit of this work is simply presenting research in a form that makes it more likely to be acted on. The Founders’ Pledge know their donors well, and seem to think that the reports we produce are the kind that are likely to be acted on. Another benefit is in understanding the overall health sphere well enough to find particular synergies. People often want to help a particular sphere. Since the charities we recommend are the most cost-effective we could find, and helping in very basic ways, there are often synergies that aren’t immediately obvious. For example, as we write about in our mental health report, it seems that the most cost-effective way to reduce epilepsy incidence is actually to prevent malaria, since cerebral malaria causes in the region of a five-fold increase in chance of epilepsy. A similar example: when we’ve looked into cancer, the most cost-effective treatment to cancer we could find was to prevent Vitamin A deficiency, since that causes stomach cancer. In both these cases, this ignores the other benefits of malaria prevention and Vitamin A supplementation. These kinds of cases aren’t just interesting, they are likely to be persuasive to people who might not otherwise have given to such cost-effective charities. In neither of these cases did the points seem to have been made by others, so it does not appear to be a duplication of effort.
Hi Peter,
Thanks for all of your thoughts on this! I can speak a little to the question about metrics:
This isn’t something we’ve used in our impact evaluations since we’re missing donation data from around two fifths of our members (though in future we do hope to fill in some of these gaps by making it easier for members to record their donations at the point of donation). This calculation would therefore give us an estimated lower bound % of pledged money that was donated in a given year, but wouldn’t give us information about the expected contributions of members for whom we lack data. For what it’s worth, I’ve had a quick look, and, for 2014, 65% of the donations pledged for the year were recorded in My Giving.
It’d be good to hear more about your ideas for a survival analysis. If you have the time feel free to get in touch (alison[dot]woodman[at]givingwhatwecan.org)
Hi Peter,
Thanks for all of your thoughts on this! I can speak a little to the question about metrics:
This isn’t something we’ve used in our impact evaluations, since we are missing donation data from around two fifths of our members. This calculation would give us a lower bound % of pledged money that was donated in a given year, but wouldn’t give us information about the missing data. For what it’s worth, I’ve had a quick look, and for the year 2014, 65% of the donations pledged for the year were recorded in My Giving.
It’d be good to hear more about your ideas for a survival analysis. If you have the time feel free to get in touch (alison[dot]woodman[at]givingwhatwecan.org)