About us

We use volunteers to treat mental illnesses and otherwise help people become happier and more productive. We mainly use CBT and ACT. Here’s an overview of our results:

Data on General Population

Average from across all the client groups we serve. Excludes dropouts.

On average, people are 2 points out of 10 happier after their first six sessions. Each session costs just $5 to deliver (ALL costs inclusive—marketing, training of coach, supervision, management, etc).

Here are the preliminary results of an RCT we’re doing to treat insomnia. I’m showing this to demonstrate our results against a control group. This RCT only cost us $32k (all costs inclusive) to run because almost all the relevant staff were volunteers.

The biggest marginal costs for most charities, by far, are counsellor salaries and client acquisition. We pay neither. We used $120k of free advertising from Google to get started.

And now grow primarily by word-of-mouth:

This graph shows our organic growth (i.e. not as a result of advertising)

We also get clients via partnerships—the trend is similar

Volunteers sign up because they need experience to be competitive for paid roles. Within 3 months of completing our programme, the majority go from unemployable to paid employment. We’re now getting more and better applicants:

Left shows how many people apply. Right shows how many we decide to train.

See our cost-effectiveness analysis here. We successfully treat people for ~$45. At the equivalent time point in their history, Strong Minds cost-per-participant was participant for ~$415

Best of all for donors / charity evaluators, you don’t have to trust our statistics. Literally anyone can sign up at any time and be seen in days. ~15 EA founders just did that:

Testimonials from Founders

Their insomnia went from “Clinically Severe” to “Not clinically significant”

I also helped a few out with social skills / communication.

Some didn’t have traditional mental health problems. By offering something bespoke, help people who fall between the cracks of other services.

The results we got were, on average, better than professional therapists e.g. we retained almost 100% of founders, whereas the average therapist only retains 70% of their clientele (who are on average less discerning with their time than founders)

To demonstrate that I’m not cherry-picking

A few people have expressed something to the effect of “surely it’s only the worst founders, with weak charities, that seek support”. Here’s some stats:

~80% of founders were AIM-incubated
~30% had Open Philanthropy funding or were rated as top charities by GiveWell / Rethink / Founders Pledge / Animal Charity Evaluators / GWWC
Most had received budget increases compared to previous years
Multiple founders had multi-million dollar annual budgets.

Funding

Seeing this, you might think we’d be in a good spot to raise money. We’re not. We’re too early to get large institutional donors, but fall between the cracks of most early stage-funders.

EA Global health funders don’t rate mental health and neither do meta funders. The one funder we align well with is the Mental Health Funding Circle:

We got >1/3 of their total allocation that round; a vote of confidence, but also a sign that raising more from them is going to tough.

Here’s what we could do with different sums of money

Successfully treat someone who otherwise couldn’t afford it: $45

Sounds impossibly low given that we have pathetic economies of scale? Consider this—The four biggest costs of running a psychotherapy intervention are: marketing, coach salaries, management salaries, and training costs. Our costs for each are tiny.

Marketing: Google ads (free via Ad Grant), search (free) and word of mouth (free) attract the clients
Coach salaries: they’re volunteers
Training: Two native Kenyans ($7.6k) oversee the training (~$277 per coach)
Management: I volunteer full-time. The manager responsible is paid $34k to oversee all clients, and only ~50% of her time is spent on that (the rest is on R&D).

Here’s a detailed Cost-Effectiveness Analysis. Most CEAs showing a figure this good are speculative. Ours is concrete—we have internal data to back up almost every number used, and those numbers are about what you’d expect from the literature anyway (for example, CEARCH did a BOTEC based on our model and found it was 10x cash transfers in expectation (see page 42))

Screenshot from their report—this part specifically relates to Overcome’s model.

Successfully treat one EA founder: $350

I suspect this is ~10x higher EV than donating to GiveWell top-rated charities. Here’s a cost-effectiveness model which lets you change the values and come up with your own estimate. It also justifies our numbers. It’s more expensive because we pay the very best coaches. We think each founder treated becomes ~10-25% more productive as a result.

Double our applicant pool every month for a year: $4.5k

We could be a LOT pickier about who we let in. We’re sure about the doubling because we’ve tested it

Two adjacent months. One with ads. The other without.

Let me work on Overcome full-time: $15.7k

I volunteer full-time at Overcome and work on the side to pay bills. This amount would let me focus exclusively on Overcome. My funders did allocate money for me to take a salary, but I’ve never been able to justify taking it.

Let us take a shot at becoming fully self-sufficient: $35k

If we could just get 20 new or old customers to buy each month, we could fund our entire charity. We’d just need one additional team member to handle the marketing and project management. We’re doing a pilot at the moment—people seem happy to pay $70 per session and buy six at a time. Lead generation is the limiting factor, ~7 of the ~10 signups agreed to buy. If you’d like to try us out, email me.

Cover our entire operating costs for a year: $150k

We’d train <180 coaches who’d successfully treat <1200 people, run <2 small RCTs which could result in millions in subsequent funding, and treat ~150 EA founders.

To donate, email me with the amount and your preferred payment method. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or would like to see a more detailed proposal.

Other ways to help

Volunteer to treat clients (requires 3 months full-time commitment)
Pay us to train you the same way we train our coaches, but work around your schedule. One EA has completed our training, and now clients pay $70 for 45 minutes of their time (1 month post-training). See reviews from our alumni here (scroll to bottom).
We’re recruiting trustees.
If you’d like to volunteer with us, send your CV and a letter explaining your skills/availability. We’re especially interested in:
1. Marketing support in general (especially Google Ad optimisation)
2. Clinical supervision/experts who can review our training
3. “Mystery Shoppers”—no qualification needed

If interested, email me.

Overcome: Growth and Marginal Cost-Effectiveness Data