Project Idea: ‘Cost to save a life’ interactive calculator promotion
What about making and promoting a ‘how much does it cost to save a life’ quiz and calculator.
This could be adjustable/customizable (in my country, around the world, of an infant/child/adult, counting ‘value added life years’ etc.) … and trying to make it go viral (or at least bacterial) as in the ‘how rich am I’ calculator?
The case
People might really be interested in this… it’s super-compelling (a bit click-baity, maybe, but the payoff is not click bait)!
May make some news headlines too (it’s an “easy story” for media people, asks a question people can engage with, etc. … ’how much does it cost to save a life? find out after the break!)
if people do think it’s much cheaper than it is, as some studies suggest, it would probably be good to change this conception… to help us build a reality-based impact-based evidence-based community and society of donors
similarly, it could get people thinking about ‘how to really measure impact’ --> consider EA-aligned evaluations more seriously
GWWC probably doesn’t have the design/engineering time for this (not to mention refining this for accuracy and communication). But if someone else (UX design, research support, IT) could do the legwork I think they might be very happy to host it.
It could also mesh well with academic-linked research so I may have some ‘Meta academic support ads’ funds that could work with this.
[This was originally posted as a response in the wrong thread—I’ve deleted the incorrectly placed response.]
Hi, David,
Thanks for tagging us in this suggestion! We’re happy to see people talking about the creation of more compelling resources to correct misperceptions and get people thinking about the true cost of saving a life.
This doesn’t seem exactly like what you have in mind, as it was more narrowly focused on GiveWell’s recommended charities, but in the past we provided an impact calculator on our site. It allowed users to insert a donation amount and choose a GiveWell top charity to give to, and would return the number of outputs (e.g., nets or vitamin A supplements distributed) and outcomes (e.g., lives saved).
We stopped sharing the impact calculator in November 2021, because we didn’t feel confident enough in our ability to produce a useful forward-looking estimate of an individual donation’s impact. We now report on the impact of past grants directed by GiveWell (see this spreadsheet, for example, and our 2021 cost per life saved estimates for top charities). We feel that giving the estimated cost per life saved of a past grant to a program serves as a helpful proxy for the impact of a future donation to that same program, even if we can’t count on the impact remaining the same.
We’ve written a bit more about why we focus on backwards-looking impact estimates here and here.
I’ve thought about something similar. I’m surprised no one has done it yet.
I was thinking you could click on a bunch of different organizations, and it will show the resulting QALY or whatever metric.
Like for example, there’d be a bunch of orgs with nice ‘cost to save a life’ information, then if you clicked on donating to your university it will display something like the annual interest of your donation as part of the endowment..? Just as a way to illustrate differences in impact.
Project Idea: ‘Cost to save a life’ interactive calculator promotion
What about making and promoting a ‘how much does it cost to save a life’ quiz and calculator.
This could be adjustable/customizable (in my country, around the world, of an infant/child/adult, counting ‘value added life years’ etc.) … and trying to make it go viral (or at least bacterial) as in the ‘how rich am I’ calculator?
The case
People might really be interested in this… it’s super-compelling (a bit click-baity, maybe, but the payoff is not click bait)!
May make some news headlines too (it’s an “easy story” for media people, asks a question people can engage with, etc. … ’how much does it cost to save a life? find out after the break!)
if people do think it’s much cheaper than it is, as some studies suggest, it would probably be good to change this conception… to help us build a reality-based impact-based evidence-based community and society of donors
similarly, it could get people thinking about ‘how to really measure impact’ --> consider EA-aligned evaluations more seriously
While GiveWell has a page with a lot of tech details, but it’s not compelling or interactive in the way I suggest above, and I doubt they market it heavily.
GWWC probably doesn’t have the design/engineering time for this (not to mention refining this for accuracy and communication). But if someone else (UX design, research support, IT) could do the legwork I think they might be very happy to host it.
It could also mesh well with academic-linked research so I may have some ‘Meta academic support ads’ funds that could work with this.
Tags/backlinks (~testing out this new feature)
@GiveWell @Giving What We Can
Projects I’d like to see
EA Projects I’d Like to See
Idea: Curated database of quick-win tangible, attributable projects
[This was originally posted as a response in the wrong thread—I’ve deleted the incorrectly placed response.]
Hi, David,
Thanks for tagging us in this suggestion! We’re happy to see people talking about the creation of more compelling resources to correct misperceptions and get people thinking about the true cost of saving a life.
This doesn’t seem exactly like what you have in mind, as it was more narrowly focused on GiveWell’s recommended charities, but in the past we provided an impact calculator on our site. It allowed users to insert a donation amount and choose a GiveWell top charity to give to, and would return the number of outputs (e.g., nets or vitamin A supplements distributed) and outcomes (e.g., lives saved).
We stopped sharing the impact calculator in November 2021, because we didn’t feel confident enough in our ability to produce a useful forward-looking estimate of an individual donation’s impact. We now report on the impact of past grants directed by GiveWell (see this spreadsheet, for example, and our 2021 cost per life saved estimates for top charities). We feel that giving the estimated cost per life saved of a past grant to a program serves as a helpful proxy for the impact of a future donation to that same program, even if we can’t count on the impact remaining the same.
We’ve written a bit more about why we focus on backwards-looking impact estimates here and here.
Best,
Miranda Kaplan
GiveWell Communications Associate
For what it is worth, even people that one might think would know better like professors of international development really get these sort of questions wrong.
That could also be an interesting promo tag … ‘are you smarter than a professor of international development’ :)
I’ve thought about something similar. I’m surprised no one has done it yet.
I was thinking you could click on a bunch of different organizations, and it will show the resulting QALY or whatever metric.
Like for example, there’d be a bunch of orgs with nice ‘cost to save a life’ information, then if you clicked on donating to your university it will display something like the annual interest of your donation as part of the endowment..? Just as a way to illustrate differences in impact.