Nice one. The success rate is quite phenomenal—especially how committed the founders are to bringing their concepts to fruition. Your biggest strength might be in selecting people even more than selecting causes.
My one slight issue with the data presentation is the use of “people reached” or “animals reached” as a headline metric. To some extent I understand using it outside of EA circles as we know that the biggest numbers sound the most impressive, but I don’t think it s a impact measurement with integrity. Basically any org that does mass media will reach millions very fast which is great, but it doesn’t necessarily translate to impact.
Endless NGOs spend millions on fairly useless media messages here - give me 10,000 dollars tomorrow in Uganda and I can reach 1 million people with whatever message you like—that’s not an impact measurement, what matters is the result of that message—which looks to be great with CE orgs. What sets your orgs apart is that their approach is backed by evidence and is likely to lead to real positive impact—not the fact that they can reach millions over the radio, anyone can do that!
Not the biggest deal, but I think within EA we can do better with our headline metrics.
Small question also, why no mention of Fortify Health, who I think are the CE org which has got the most funding to date and have done an amazing job?
Thank you for your comment, Nick. I used the word “reach” because it is difficult to objectively measure the impact of some of our charities, given their age. We wanted to give people a sense of their current progress despite this. Reach can also give a sense of the potential scale of the intervention. We also tried to include some estimated cost effectiveness to show the sense of level of impact per dollar. However, overall we do agree with the general sentiment that, sadly, people tend to look at more vanity level metrics like reach, funding, etc. Of course, many of our organizations will need to run an RCT (which some are already planning) before we can get a real sense of their impact, and we believe our organizations are committed to do this.
We indeed agree that Fortify Health has done a really great job, but we had to limit the number of charities we could talk to for this post, and some charities were more cautious about being associated with the EA movement. Feel free to check our website for updates.
Nice one. The success rate is quite phenomenal—especially how committed the founders are to bringing their concepts to fruition. Your biggest strength might be in selecting people even more than selecting causes.
My one slight issue with the data presentation is the use of “people reached” or “animals reached” as a headline metric. To some extent I understand using it outside of EA circles as we know that the biggest numbers sound the most impressive, but I don’t think it s a impact measurement with integrity. Basically any org that does mass media will reach millions very fast which is great, but it doesn’t necessarily translate to impact.
Endless NGOs spend millions on fairly useless media messages here - give me 10,000 dollars tomorrow in Uganda and I can reach 1 million people with whatever message you like—that’s not an impact measurement, what matters is the result of that message—which looks to be great with CE orgs. What sets your orgs apart is that their approach is backed by evidence and is likely to lead to real positive impact—not the fact that they can reach millions over the radio, anyone can do that!
Not the biggest deal, but I think within EA we can do better with our headline metrics.
Small question also, why no mention of Fortify Health, who I think are the CE org which has got the most funding to date and have done an amazing job?
Thank you for your comment, Nick. I used the word “reach” because it is difficult to objectively measure the impact of some of our charities, given their age. We wanted to give people a sense of their current progress despite this. Reach can also give a sense of the potential scale of the intervention. We also tried to include some estimated cost effectiveness to show the sense of level of impact per dollar. However, overall we do agree with the general sentiment that, sadly, people tend to look at more vanity level metrics like reach, funding, etc. Of course, many of our organizations will need to run an RCT (which some are already planning) before we can get a real sense of their impact, and we believe our organizations are committed to do this.
We indeed agree that Fortify Health has done a really great job, but we had to limit the number of charities we could talk to for this post, and some charities were more cautious about being associated with the EA movement. Feel free to check our website for updates.