Thanks for your feedback! It was really helpful and gave us a few things to think about. A few responses:
Marginal benefit: These are all good questions. They are ones we didn’t tackle in our general activism model laid out here (which was inspired more by looking backward at Sunrise’s previous activities) , but that we are thinking about as we consider whether or not to recommend Sunrise this giving season. Sunrise says that additional funds (especially to the c3) will be used to grow their movement in both size and effectivness. I think is is a compelling argument that Sunrise’s movement would be a lot more powerful if it could recruit more active, passionate members. However, I agree it’s not clear whether there may be declining marginal returns to money at this point and/or if Sunrise could easily raise all the money it needs from mainstream donors. (Both those points are intertwined.)
Expert interviews: We’ve spoken with philanthropists (who do this kind of thing for a living) as well as a spectrum of folks who work across the climate sphere (private sector, think tanks, government, nonprofits, etc). No, we haven’t pushed for numerical estimates and no we don’t have transcripts, but we do have notes. I’ll agree that this kind of information can be pretty unreliable, and be very influenced by the biases of the people you speak with. For the case of Sunrise in particular, we’re working on getting more opinions to hone our estimates. Thanks for attaching that document from FP- I’d seen it before but it was helpful to re-read as it gave me some ideas for how to push some of this estimation forward.
There are a few variables which change in the different scenarios, and we didn’t necessarily change all variables between all scenarios. The pessimistic and very pessimistic scenarios both have a very low (.5%) influence of activism on the progressive bill, but have different assumptions on activism’s influence on the bipartisan bill.
For this model, we have been “deriving them from Sunrise’s to date impact on influencing policy and how successful they’ve been so far”, though we understand that even doing this takes pretty great assumptions. We haven’t tried to reference to other activist orgs globally- we think it would get even less accurate if we try to move to different contexts.
Hi James,
Thanks for your feedback! It was really helpful and gave us a few things to think about. A few responses:
Marginal benefit: These are all good questions. They are ones we didn’t tackle in our general activism model laid out here (which was inspired more by looking backward at Sunrise’s previous activities) , but that we are thinking about as we consider whether or not to recommend Sunrise this giving season. Sunrise says that additional funds (especially to the c3) will be used to grow their movement in both size and effectivness. I think is is a compelling argument that Sunrise’s movement would be a lot more powerful if it could recruit more active, passionate members. However, I agree it’s not clear whether there may be declining marginal returns to money at this point and/or if Sunrise could easily raise all the money it needs from mainstream donors. (Both those points are intertwined.)
Expert interviews: We’ve spoken with philanthropists (who do this kind of thing for a living) as well as a spectrum of folks who work across the climate sphere (private sector, think tanks, government, nonprofits, etc). No, we haven’t pushed for numerical estimates and no we don’t have transcripts, but we do have notes. I’ll agree that this kind of information can be pretty unreliable, and be very influenced by the biases of the people you speak with. For the case of Sunrise in particular, we’re working on getting more opinions to hone our estimates. Thanks for attaching that document from FP- I’d seen it before but it was helpful to re-read as it gave me some ideas for how to push some of this estimation forward.
There are a few variables which change in the different scenarios, and we didn’t necessarily change all variables between all scenarios. The pessimistic and very pessimistic scenarios both have a very low (.5%) influence of activism on the progressive bill, but have different assumptions on activism’s influence on the bipartisan bill.
For this model, we have been “deriving them from Sunrise’s to date impact on influencing policy and how successful they’ve been so far”, though we understand that even doing this takes pretty great assumptions. We haven’t tried to reference to other activist orgs globally- we think it would get even less accurate if we try to move to different contexts.
Thanks again!