I have just published an article about effective donations on the online newspaper of my former university. I have already shared it in some groups, but was wondering about how cost-effective would it be to promote it via personal messages. As I could not find much information about this topic, I decided to share some thought here.
Cost-effectiveness considerations:
Writing personalised messages tends to increase the impact per message, but increases the cost (time) per message.
Thinking about the people to which sending the messages could be more impactful increases the impact per message, but also increases the cost per message.
Intuitively, I would expect most of the impact to come from a minority of people who would not be easy to identify a priori.
Consequently, cost-effectively selecting the targets seems hard.
What does a good standardised message look like?
If the same standardised message is sent to most people, writing a longer message does not significantly increase the cost.
It seems possible that the cost-effectiveness is maximised for some degree of personalisation.
Organisations looking for applications often send emails which contain the name of the recipient.
Example of impact required per message:
I estimated (via testing it) that I could send standardised Facebook messages at a speed of about 10 per minute, i.e. 600 per hour.
This means that, if I value my time at 6 € of effective donations per hour, the expected impact per message should be at least 0.01 € for sending messages to be effective.
An expected impact of 0.01 € per message could be thought of as the recipients of the personal messages having:
Probability (p(V)) of 10 % of viewing the article.
Probability (p(P|V)) of 1 % of being persuaded to make effective donations given that they view the article.
Expected donation (D) of 10 € given that they are persuaded to make effective donations.
No expected counterfactual donation (CD) if they had not received the personal message.
(A Monte Carlo simulation might be useful to model the effect of these factors.)
It is unclear to me whether this is feasible.
I published an article about the book “The Life You Can Save” on the same online newspaper about 1 year ago. Based on the results of a linked questionnaire, from the people who viewed the article:
2 % (17/800) said they would make a donation to an organisation recommended by The Life You Can Save or GiveWell.
2 % (19/800) said they would establish a monthly donation to an organisation recommended by The Life You Can Save or GiveWell.
I expect these results to overestimate the impact of the article.
I think people tend to overestimate their future altruistic intentions.
I guess p(P|V) and D (see above) would be smaller for the recipients of my personal messages than for the people who viewed the article about TLYCS.
People who viewed the article about TLYCS had some interest in it.
Cost-effectiveness of sending personal messages
I have just published an article about effective donations on the online newspaper of my former university. I have already shared it in some groups, but was wondering about how cost-effective would it be to promote it via personal messages. As I could not find much information about this topic, I decided to share some thought here.
Cost-effectiveness considerations:
Writing personalised messages tends to increase the impact per message, but increases the cost (time) per message.
Thinking about the people to which sending the messages could be more impactful increases the impact per message, but also increases the cost per message.
Intuitively, I would expect most of the impact to come from a minority of people who would not be easy to identify a priori.
Consequently, cost-effectively selecting the targets seems hard.
What does a good standardised message look like?
If the same standardised message is sent to most people, writing a longer message does not significantly increase the cost.
It seems possible that the cost-effectiveness is maximised for some degree of personalisation.
Organisations looking for applications often send emails which contain the name of the recipient.
Example of impact required per message:
I estimated (via testing it) that I could send standardised Facebook messages at a speed of about 10 per minute, i.e. 600 per hour.
This means that, if I value my time at 6 € of effective donations per hour, the expected impact per message should be at least 0.01 € for sending messages to be effective.
An expected impact of 0.01 € per message could be thought of as the recipients of the personal messages having:
Probability (p(V)) of 10 % of viewing the article.
Probability (p(P|V)) of 1 % of being persuaded to make effective donations given that they view the article.
Expected donation (D) of 10 € given that they are persuaded to make effective donations.
No expected counterfactual donation (CD) if they had not received the personal message.
(A Monte Carlo simulation might be useful to model the effect of these factors.)
It is unclear to me whether this is feasible.
I published an article about the book “The Life You Can Save” on the same online newspaper about 1 year ago. Based on the results of a linked questionnaire, from the people who viewed the article:
2 % (17/800) said they would make a donation to an organisation recommended by The Life You Can Save or GiveWell.
2 % (19/800) said they would establish a monthly donation to an organisation recommended by The Life You Can Save or GiveWell.
I expect these results to overestimate the impact of the article.
I think people tend to overestimate their future altruistic intentions.
I guess p(P|V) and D (see above) would be smaller for the recipients of my personal messages than for the people who viewed the article about TLYCS.
People who viewed the article about TLYCS had some interest in it.
Any comments would be welcome!