The best volunteer opportunities we’ve seen in terms of cost-effectiveness cash out to the equivalent of about a $150-200/hr rate if you were going to donate that money to our top recommendations instead. So if you can earn more than that OR if you have spare money lying around OR if you can raise more than that easily from others, then donating/raising is a better use of your time. Otherwise, volunteering is great at this stage. As mentioned in the post, we’ll be rolling out a curated list/calendar of recommended & evidence-based textbanking events in the next few days, so watch this space.
The best volunteer opportunities we’ve seen in terms of cost-effectiveness cash out to the equivalent of about a $150-200/hr rate if you were going to donate that money to our top recommendations instead
I find that very surprising! Couldn’t a campaign hire a person to do these top volunteering opportunities for ~$20/hr? Presumably that would cap the value of volunteering at ~$20/hr?
Interestingly, the “typical” volunteering opportunity is in fact worth more like $20/hr. You only get into that 10x range by using a very specific combination of techniques and targeting that we’re trying to incorporate into our textbanking recommendations. So I think this is partly an arbitrage opportunity due to the market not yet catching up to the research on a widespread basis.
Perhaps you are right, but my outside view would suggest some skepticism that professional campaigns haven’t identified these winning techniques that you have. Perhaps they have some reason for doubting them?
Relatedly, do you worry about optimizers curse when identifying top opportunities?
(FWIW my personal experience does suggest campaigns can be shortsighted at times… I recall volunteering for Hillary in 2016 and spending an unfortunate amount of volunteer time being directed to make calls in Iowa)
Sorry for the delayed response—the past week has been pretty crazy as you might imagine!
I think we’re both falling prey to a tendency to oversimplify things in this thread. The reality is that the value of a volunteer hour is highly context-dependent. Textbanking is a lot more efficient than phonebanking because you can reach more people in a given amount of time. However, textbanking is also a lot less neglected than phonebanking this year because it’s easier to do. In-person canvassing is probably the least efficient of all, but you can reach people in person that you can’t reach by either phone or text—so it doesn’t make sense to abandon it entirely. And regardless of the mode, if a campaign hasn’t done a good job of curating its list, a volunteer’s efforts are going to be pretty ineffectual.
We’ve put a lot of research into trying to identify high-impact volunteer opportunities, but honestly what we’ve done is just scratching the surface of what it would really take to get to a confident answer. Campaigns don’t say on their websites, “hey, sign up to volunteer and by the way what we REALLY need is phonebankers who can speak Spanish.” Because they don’t want to alienate anyone who could be a productive volunteer and they want to make it as easy as possible for people. Because of that, finding out what the actual needs are takes a lot of shoe-leather investigation: talking to knowledgeable people in the field, analyzing the kinds and frequency of voter contact that’s taking place across all campaigns to assess the level of saturation in different geographies. This kind of real-time cross-campaign landscape analysis simply doesn’t exist at scale right now, so the best we can do is look at what the research says about the cost-effectiveness of different methods in terms of converting volunteer hours into net votes and try to make holistic judgments about where additional efforts would have the most value. What I can say is that I’m confident that the suggestions we’ve offered a) will be helpful rather than harmful and b) are substantially better than just randomly signing up for a volunteer opportunity.
As a side note, you seem to have a lot more faith in the efficient markets hypothesis as it applies to organizational behavior than I do! I don’t think I have ever encountered an institutional ecosystem that was unburdened by poor strategic thinking, inefficient legacy practices, and failure to coordinate complementary or duplicative efforts. In that regard, I’ve actually been pleasantly surprised with how high-functioning the progressive organizing space seems to be on the whole.
What I can say is that I’m confident that the suggestions we’ve offered a) will be helpful rather than harmful and b) are substantially better than just randomly signing up for a volunteer opportunity.
I agree that’s totally fair! And I appreciate you doing that work.
As a side note, you seem to have a lot more faith in the efficient markets hypothesis as it applies to organizational behavior than I do! I don’t think I have ever encountered an institutional ecosystem that was unburdened by poor strategic thinking, inefficient legacy practices, and failure to coordinate complementary or duplicative efforts. In that regard, I’ve actually been pleasantly surprised with how high-functioning the progressive organizing space seems to be on the whole.
I’m not sure this is a side note… this might be the main crux of our disagreement!
My prior is that a team of smart non-experts uncovering some large tactical error in large well-funded groups that are highly incentivized to not have errors of that type is certainly possible and actually quite achievable, but probably takes on the order of >4K hours of work. I also think it is easy to think you have found an error that is not in fact an error. I’m not sure how much time you’ve spent on this?
I do have massive uncertainty about how true the efficient market hypothesis is, for a variety of domains.
My experience has been that across most domains, there is kind of a Pareto-optimality to coming in as an outsider and trying to find superior giving or intervention opportunities. It usually takes only a few hours of research to determine an approach that will be above average. It may take a couple hundred hours to find opportunities that will be in the top 10-20%. And unless you get lucky early on, it can easily take more like the 4k you’re describing to find the very best that’s out there. So it depends on what your standard for excellence is and the opportunity cost of the time you’re willing to put in.
The best volunteer opportunities we’ve seen in terms of cost-effectiveness cash out to the equivalent of about a $150-200/hr rate if you were going to donate that money to our top recommendations instead. So if you can earn more than that OR if you have spare money lying around OR if you can raise more than that easily from others, then donating/raising is a better use of your time. Otherwise, volunteering is great at this stage. As mentioned in the post, we’ll be rolling out a curated list/calendar of recommended & evidence-based textbanking events in the next few days, so watch this space.
I find that very surprising! Couldn’t a campaign hire a person to do these top volunteering opportunities for ~$20/hr? Presumably that would cap the value of volunteering at ~$20/hr?
Interestingly, the “typical” volunteering opportunity is in fact worth more like $20/hr. You only get into that 10x range by using a very specific combination of techniques and targeting that we’re trying to incorporate into our textbanking recommendations. So I think this is partly an arbitrage opportunity due to the market not yet catching up to the research on a widespread basis.
Perhaps you are right, but my outside view would suggest some skepticism that professional campaigns haven’t identified these winning techniques that you have. Perhaps they have some reason for doubting them?
Relatedly, do you worry about optimizers curse when identifying top opportunities?
(FWIW my personal experience does suggest campaigns can be shortsighted at times… I recall volunteering for Hillary in 2016 and spending an unfortunate amount of volunteer time being directed to make calls in Iowa)
Sorry for the delayed response—the past week has been pretty crazy as you might imagine!
I think we’re both falling prey to a tendency to oversimplify things in this thread. The reality is that the value of a volunteer hour is highly context-dependent. Textbanking is a lot more efficient than phonebanking because you can reach more people in a given amount of time. However, textbanking is also a lot less neglected than phonebanking this year because it’s easier to do. In-person canvassing is probably the least efficient of all, but you can reach people in person that you can’t reach by either phone or text—so it doesn’t make sense to abandon it entirely. And regardless of the mode, if a campaign hasn’t done a good job of curating its list, a volunteer’s efforts are going to be pretty ineffectual.
We’ve put a lot of research into trying to identify high-impact volunteer opportunities, but honestly what we’ve done is just scratching the surface of what it would really take to get to a confident answer. Campaigns don’t say on their websites, “hey, sign up to volunteer and by the way what we REALLY need is phonebankers who can speak Spanish.” Because they don’t want to alienate anyone who could be a productive volunteer and they want to make it as easy as possible for people. Because of that, finding out what the actual needs are takes a lot of shoe-leather investigation: talking to knowledgeable people in the field, analyzing the kinds and frequency of voter contact that’s taking place across all campaigns to assess the level of saturation in different geographies. This kind of real-time cross-campaign landscape analysis simply doesn’t exist at scale right now, so the best we can do is look at what the research says about the cost-effectiveness of different methods in terms of converting volunteer hours into net votes and try to make holistic judgments about where additional efforts would have the most value. What I can say is that I’m confident that the suggestions we’ve offered a) will be helpful rather than harmful and b) are substantially better than just randomly signing up for a volunteer opportunity.
As a side note, you seem to have a lot more faith in the efficient markets hypothesis as it applies to organizational behavior than I do! I don’t think I have ever encountered an institutional ecosystem that was unburdened by poor strategic thinking, inefficient legacy practices, and failure to coordinate complementary or duplicative efforts. In that regard, I’ve actually been pleasantly surprised with how high-functioning the progressive organizing space seems to be on the whole.
I agree that’s totally fair! And I appreciate you doing that work.
I’m not sure this is a side note… this might be the main crux of our disagreement!
My prior is that a team of smart non-experts uncovering some large tactical error in large well-funded groups that are highly incentivized to not have errors of that type is certainly possible and actually quite achievable, but probably takes on the order of >4K hours of work. I also think it is easy to think you have found an error that is not in fact an error. I’m not sure how much time you’ve spent on this?
I do have massive uncertainty about how true the efficient market hypothesis is, for a variety of domains.
My experience has been that across most domains, there is kind of a Pareto-optimality to coming in as an outsider and trying to find superior giving or intervention opportunities. It usually takes only a few hours of research to determine an approach that will be above average. It may take a couple hundred hours to find opportunities that will be in the top 10-20%. And unless you get lucky early on, it can easily take more like the 4k you’re describing to find the very best that’s out there. So it depends on what your standard for excellence is and the opportunity cost of the time you’re willing to put in.