My prior that you can just ask people to donate 10% for life and they will is very, very, very low—it just doesn’t seem like something that can happen and no other charity I know of does it.
Well, there are many things other charities don’t know and EAs do. :P
That doesn’t seem fair to me. I don’t know any evidence that suggests EAs outperform professional non-EA fundraisers at fundraising.
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This hypothesis also makes sense of the data that the 2014 pledge went better than the 2015 one despite the higher effort put into 2015, since in 2014 there were more EAs on the fence that you could convert over.
I think there are specific features of the 2014 pledge drive that I will talk about in a follow-up post (not least the sheer degree that the Cambridge group was able to mobilize) that are difficult to reproduce.
Yeah, you’d have to elaborate on that. ;)
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even if they do get a friend to pledge, it will likely just bring them in one year sooner than they otherwise would.
Hmm...how will you realistically define the Haste consideration? I generally think of it as “A persuades B to join x months earlier who persuades C to join y months earlier, etc.” Put another way, the entirety of the Haste consideration is shifting the curve earlier, I don’t think persuading people earlier will significantly change the final number of the people who wound up doing EA things. That said, when the growth is exponential, I think persuading people to join earlier is quite significant.
I’m unimpressed by the haste consideration. You’d have to make it more concrete—what additional benefits do you expect to get beyond having one more year of donations? How do you expect those benefits to compound? Do they compound that way in practice?
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This seems incorrect and needlessly unfair to the pledge event, since the pledge event could just be one of GWWC’s activities with the 100x ROI.
Not really. Consider: Assuming that the average ROI of GWWC’s activities are 100x. Then if GWWC doesn’t get unusually high funding, a simplified model would be that the organization should prioritize activities that have 100x or higher ROI before bothering with activities that have say 50x, or 5x. And from the perspective of an individual deciding between working on meta activities themselves or taking on a high-paying job and donating to GWWC or other meta orgs, this calculation might be helpful.
Well somebody needs to actually do the direct work—you can’t have 100% earn-to-give and 0% direct work or nothing actually gets done. So not everyone can use this argument. I got at this using a crank analogy earlier.
So the consideration for you is not what GWWC’s absolute ROI on activities is, but rather...
(a) is working on this GWWC project mean that a higher ROI project does not get done?
(b) could you earn to give and pay for someone to do your GWWC work for you and then some? If so, how much better are you at that GWWC work?
Even if the project has enormous ROI, I imagine that it is the case you could have paid someone else to do it and come out on a profit. But it’s possible that GWWC’s budget is tight and/or there isn’t anyone around who would do the work nearly as well.
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I don’t see any reason to think that it is distributed with a wide right tail except that it tells a better story for counterfactuals
Thanks for catching that: I actually got my directions wrong! I meant to say it is likely distributed with a LONG right tail, not high. I think this is defensible. The (like you said, probably very few) people who came across the pledge drive through serendipity or random happenstance rather than a close EA social network might counterfactually have taken years to hear about the pledge, and you don’t need that many of them to change the average considerably.
I agree that’s defensible and possibly 2x-10x’s the total ROI of the project. But I’d also be concerned that these pledgers are lower quality on average and unlikely to return the full $60K estimated value.
“That doesn’t seem fair to me. I don’t know any evidence that suggests EAs outperform professional non-EA fundraisers at fundraising.”
It’s easier to get a long-term pledge for ‘whatever charity looks best at the time’ than for a particular charity you are working for at the time.
So it’s no surprise normal fundraisers, who are paid to raise money for their single present employer, will have left GWWC’s approach alone, even if it is much more efficient—which it seems to be.
So it’s no surprise normal fundraisers, who are paid to raise money for their single present employer, will have left GWWC’s approach alone, even if it is much more efficient
That strikes me as overconfident. Normal fundraisers ask for regular, life-long giving all the time—just in the form of a small, monthly donation. They could be asking for a monthly donation of 10% of your income, but they don’t.
Though, of course, there are lots of reasons why a good idea might be ignored by the mainstream.
The thing they don’t get you to do is pledge to give for the rest of your life. Because if you’re committed to just one organisation (their employer) almost nobody would say yes. But GWWC has shown people do say yes at a reasonable rate if the recipient is flexible.
“I don’t know any evidence that suggests EAs outperform professional non-EA fundraisers at fundraising.”
GWWC’s experience make me think it’s above a 10:1 ratio, which is apparently typical for commercial fundraisers.
I will think about the other points later. But I definitely agree that there’s a distinct possibility that people join because of the pledge drive are less likely to be committed than people who join normally, and that this worry, if true, will be a significant concern to the validity of any impact measurement for the drive.
That said, as a separate point I actually think (~60% confidence) that people who join from hearing about the drive through the media, rather than from a social network initially high in EAs, are more likely to be committed rather than less. This is because they had less initial contact with EAs before being convinced of the idea, suggesting that they had strong innate urges in that direction that did not require a lot of “push” from a social environment conducive to EAness. Does that make sense?
Another data point is how a sizeable minority of EAs (over-represented here and on the FB groups) barely need any convincing for EA...it just made sense as soon as they heard about it.
However, even if my theory about media pledgers being more committed than pledgers from a peer group high in EAs, this is not necessarily evidence against the worry that the pledge drive’s pledgers are on average less committed than normal, since like you said, most people who joined from the pledge drive are not due to media outreach.
This is because they had less initial contact with EAs before being convinced of the idea, suggesting that they had strong innate urges in that direction that did not require a lot of “push” from a social environment conducive to EAness. Does that make sense?
Yeah, I could buy that. If there’s a certain amount of people that will just get EA immediately (which seems plausible based on what we know so far), then it makes sense that the pledge drive—like any other media campaign—would uncover some of those people.
That doesn’t seem fair to me. I don’t know any evidence that suggests EAs outperform professional non-EA fundraisers at fundraising.
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Yeah, you’d have to elaborate on that. ;)
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I’m unimpressed by the haste consideration. You’d have to make it more concrete—what additional benefits do you expect to get beyond having one more year of donations? How do you expect those benefits to compound? Do they compound that way in practice?
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Well somebody needs to actually do the direct work—you can’t have 100% earn-to-give and 0% direct work or nothing actually gets done. So not everyone can use this argument. I got at this using a crank analogy earlier.
So the consideration for you is not what GWWC’s absolute ROI on activities is, but rather...
(a) is working on this GWWC project mean that a higher ROI project does not get done?
(b) could you earn to give and pay for someone to do your GWWC work for you and then some? If so, how much better are you at that GWWC work?
Even if the project has enormous ROI, I imagine that it is the case you could have paid someone else to do it and come out on a profit. But it’s possible that GWWC’s budget is tight and/or there isn’t anyone around who would do the work nearly as well.
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I agree that’s defensible and possibly 2x-10x’s the total ROI of the project. But I’d also be concerned that these pledgers are lower quality on average and unlikely to return the full $60K estimated value.
“That doesn’t seem fair to me. I don’t know any evidence that suggests EAs outperform professional non-EA fundraisers at fundraising.”
It’s easier to get a long-term pledge for ‘whatever charity looks best at the time’ than for a particular charity you are working for at the time.
So it’s no surprise normal fundraisers, who are paid to raise money for their single present employer, will have left GWWC’s approach alone, even if it is much more efficient—which it seems to be.
That strikes me as overconfident. Normal fundraisers ask for regular, life-long giving all the time—just in the form of a small, monthly donation. They could be asking for a monthly donation of 10% of your income, but they don’t.
Though, of course, there are lots of reasons why a good idea might be ignored by the mainstream.
The thing they don’t get you to do is pledge to give for the rest of your life. Because if you’re committed to just one organisation (their employer) almost nobody would say yes. But GWWC has shown people do say yes at a reasonable rate if the recipient is flexible.
“I don’t know any evidence that suggests EAs outperform professional non-EA fundraisers at fundraising.”
GWWC’s experience make me think it’s above a 10:1 ratio, which is apparently typical for commercial fundraisers.
I will think about the other points later. But I definitely agree that there’s a distinct possibility that people join because of the pledge drive are less likely to be committed than people who join normally, and that this worry, if true, will be a significant concern to the validity of any impact measurement for the drive.
That said, as a separate point I actually think (~60% confidence) that people who join from hearing about the drive through the media, rather than from a social network initially high in EAs, are more likely to be committed rather than less. This is because they had less initial contact with EAs before being convinced of the idea, suggesting that they had strong innate urges in that direction that did not require a lot of “push” from a social environment conducive to EAness. Does that make sense?
Another data point is how a sizeable minority of EAs (over-represented here and on the FB groups) barely need any convincing for EA...it just made sense as soon as they heard about it.
However, even if my theory about media pledgers being more committed than pledgers from a peer group high in EAs, this is not necessarily evidence against the worry that the pledge drive’s pledgers are on average less committed than normal, since like you said, most people who joined from the pledge drive are not due to media outreach.
Yeah, I could buy that. If there’s a certain amount of people that will just get EA immediately (which seems plausible based on what we know so far), then it makes sense that the pledge drive—like any other media campaign—would uncover some of those people.