It probably depends on what you value. Based on your guess, for 42 hours of my time I could potentially cause:
-5% more cats adopted from a particular shelter
-5% increase in awareness of autism at partner workplaces
-5% more opera performances
-5% more women attending a particular ‘women’s empowerment’ conference
-5% more religious conversions
-5% increase in citations from research commissioned by a particular charity
-5% increase in protest attendance
Most of these things I imagine moving from ‘good but not cost effective’ to ‘good and still not all that cost effective’ or ‘basically useless’ to ‘still useless’. I don’t really imagine many of these charities changing categories from ‘useless’ to ‘good’ because of a 5% increase in productivity.
I agree. If none of the charities represented are ones which do things you think are valuable or can conceive of becoming valuable I suggest people turn down the offer.
However, perhaps you could get some budget moved from dog and cat shelters into factory farming or change the types of protests that your members attend. Some types of change would be efficiency though others could be new avenues or publishing impact. I think you are right to say you could get some sense of likelyhood of positive impact on being offered the trusteeship.
Can you think of a way to include this kind of variability simply? Otherwise I guess there is no way to know whether this is a good idea or not and I’m not sure what to do with that.
I think it would be easier to model the impact of being a trustee for a particular charity than a random charity—why don’t you try to adapt your model to include your guess about how impactful the specific charity’s aims are, along with the specific charity’s annual budget, how many trustees are on the board, etc?
You could just use it as a tool for your own decision making. Isn’t the point of this to help you, and others, decide if you would become trustees? That will necessarily depend on the position.
What I meant was, it’s good to tell people about the benefits of trusteeship. It’s also good to think about how that compares to other work. I think the quick calculation you did at the beginning shows that really well.
But trying to quantify the hourly benefit of trusteeship in general is like trying to quantify the hourly benefit of having a job in general. Some jobs are worth £3 per hour and some are worth £300. Rather than trying to calculate the average value, it’s better to find ways to pick the best jobs, or the best donation opportunities, or the best trusteeships.
So I really liked the idea of the article, and found a lot of it useful, but I would have suggested spending more time on figuring out which opportunities are the best rather than building a model estimating an average value.
You should definitely keep posting your thoughts! Take this not as ‘advice on what to post’, but rather as ‘advice on what to spend time thinking about (if you want to help me understand the pros and cons of bring a trustee)’.
It probably depends on what you value. Based on your guess, for 42 hours of my time I could potentially cause:
-5% more cats adopted from a particular shelter
-5% increase in awareness of autism at partner workplaces
-5% more opera performances
-5% more women attending a particular ‘women’s empowerment’ conference
-5% more religious conversions
-5% increase in citations from research commissioned by a particular charity
-5% increase in protest attendance
Most of these things I imagine moving from ‘good but not cost effective’ to ‘good and still not all that cost effective’ or ‘basically useless’ to ‘still useless’. I don’t really imagine many of these charities changing categories from ‘useless’ to ‘good’ because of a 5% increase in productivity.
I agree. If none of the charities represented are ones which do things you think are valuable or can conceive of becoming valuable I suggest people turn down the offer.
However, perhaps you could get some budget moved from dog and cat shelters into factory farming or change the types of protests that your members attend. Some types of change would be efficiency though others could be new avenues or publishing impact. I think you are right to say you could get some sense of likelyhood of positive impact on being offered the trusteeship.
Can you think of a way to include this kind of variability simply? Otherwise I guess there is no way to know whether this is a good idea or not and I’m not sure what to do with that.
I think it would be easier to model the impact of being a trustee for a particular charity than a random charity—why don’t you try to adapt your model to include your guess about how impactful the specific charity’s aims are, along with the specific charity’s annual budget, how many trustees are on the board, etc?
I don’t have enough money to do that kind of work for every charity and to do it for a specific one I’d have to know how representative it is.
You could just use it as a tool for your own decision making. Isn’t the point of this to help you, and others, decide if you would become trustees? That will necessarily depend on the position.
Sure though effectively that reads to me as “you shouldn’t have published this”. Is that what you mean?
If you mean “you should use a much more fine grained model if you ever get near a trustee board to decide if you should take it”- yes, I agree”
What I meant was, it’s good to tell people about the benefits of trusteeship. It’s also good to think about how that compares to other work. I think the quick calculation you did at the beginning shows that really well.
But trying to quantify the hourly benefit of trusteeship in general is like trying to quantify the hourly benefit of having a job in general. Some jobs are worth £3 per hour and some are worth £300. Rather than trying to calculate the average value, it’s better to find ways to pick the best jobs, or the best donation opportunities, or the best trusteeships.
So I really liked the idea of the article, and found a lot of it useful, but I would have suggested spending more time on figuring out which opportunities are the best rather than building a model estimating an average value.
You should definitely keep posting your thoughts! Take this not as ‘advice on what to post’, but rather as ‘advice on what to spend time thinking about (if you want to help me understand the pros and cons of bring a trustee)’.