Hey Peter,
Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as you’d expect to find that out. In some cases we can tell fairly well what the ultimate nudge was. For example, Marinella has been writing to people who went to EA global but weren’t gwwc members to chat to them about how they heard about gwwc and whether they were interested in getting more involved with it. In 100 hours of doing that, 8 people she wrote to joined gwwc following their conversation. We also ask both in joining forms, and in conversation once people have joined, how people initially found out about gwwc and whether there was some particular nudge that led them to join. People often don’t remember either, and comparing the two methods indicates that neither are super reliable—eg often people don’t mention a chapter in their join form, but do turn out to be part of one when they skype with Alison. So, chapters do seem to be very signficant, but it’s hard to know how much so. That’s particularly so because the route from there being a chapter to members joining can be somewhat circuitous. The pledge event in Cambridge last December which resulted in at least 80 members who wouldn’t otherwise have joined was actually not run by the cambridge chapter, or even people who were involved with the chapter. On the other hand, the people who ran the pledge event knew about gwwc because of the cambridge chapter, so the chapter was a sine qua non of the 80 new members.
‘Heard through a friend’ comes up a lot (about a third of people), but it’s not clear how often that friend is part of a chapter. The pathway picture on the GWWC blog post (https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/post/2015/11/highlights-from-2015/) show the percentatages of people that cite various different things as their first hearing of gwwc. You might also be interested in reading Alison’s doc summarising things she learned from skyping her first 100 members (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1duBwFwxKpXJ8hZNIJlsz_nRRJ4btPg4Nzkvgvoq88CM/edit). She’ll be doing an updated one of these in Dec or Jan.
Sorry that link’s not working! I’ll looking into it.
Hey Peter, Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as you’d expect to find that out. In some cases we can tell fairly well what the ultimate nudge was. For example, Marinella has been writing to people who went to EA global but weren’t gwwc members to chat to them about how they heard about gwwc and whether they were interested in getting more involved with it. In 100 hours of doing that, 8 people she wrote to joined gwwc following their conversation. We also ask both in joining forms, and in conversation once people have joined, how people initially found out about gwwc and whether there was some particular nudge that led them to join. People often don’t remember either, and comparing the two methods indicates that neither are super reliable—eg often people don’t mention a chapter in their join form, but do turn out to be part of one when they skype with Alison. So, chapters do seem to be very signficant, but it’s hard to know how much so. That’s particularly so because the route from there being a chapter to members joining can be somewhat circuitous. The pledge event in Cambridge last December which resulted in at least 80 members who wouldn’t otherwise have joined was actually not run by the cambridge chapter, or even people who were involved with the chapter. On the other hand, the people who ran the pledge event knew about gwwc because of the cambridge chapter, so the chapter was a sine qua non of the 80 new members. ‘Heard through a friend’ comes up a lot (about a third of people), but it’s not clear how often that friend is part of a chapter. The pathway picture on the GWWC blog post (https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/post/2015/11/highlights-from-2015/) show the percentatages of people that cite various different things as their first hearing of gwwc. You might also be interested in reading Alison’s doc summarising things she learned from skyping her first 100 members (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1duBwFwxKpXJ8hZNIJlsz_nRRJ4btPg4Nzkvgvoq88CM/edit). She’ll be doing an updated one of these in Dec or Jan. Sorry that link’s not working! I’ll looking into it.
Thanks! I’ll definitely try to look more into this at some point. :)
For the pathways, this link that I found elsewhere works: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/sites/givingwhatwecan.org/files/attachments/givingwhatwecanpathway.pdf