I lead the team at GWWC and thought it might help for me to share some quick context, clarifications, and thoughts (sorry for the delay, I was on leave). Iāve kept this short and in bullet points.
Firstly, thank you for writing this. I think that broadly you are correct in the view that FTX has done much more damage than is commonly recognised within the EA community, however, I think that this effect is overstated in your post due to various reasons (some of which have been outlined by others already in the comments).
Here is our Growth Dashboard (live metrics, unaudited, but mostly accurate) and a specific monthly graph for when pledges are created (as opposed to their start date which can be any date a pledger chooses, although it is often the day they pledge).
When you get a bit more granular, you can see that GWWC pledge data can be quite spikey due to (a) large advocacy moments (e.g. Sam Harris podcast, What We Owe The Future promotion, news articles etc) that then tend to cool down over the coming months after the spike; and (b) seasonality (e.g. giving season and new years day) where people tend to pledge or donate at key moments (and we also focus our growth activities around these times).
While the specific time periods you selected in your comparison tend to overstate the impact (due to seasonality and regression to the mean like Bella mentioned), the impact is definitely there. In fact, when we zoom in to the daily metrics, we see that the average daily new pledgers or new donors drops quite sharply in mid-November. This is magnified by both seasonality and advocacy being key to us. In terms of seasonality, we were instructed to pause all our giving season campaigns around the time of the crisis, and in terms of advocacy, it has been harder to get people to advocate post-FTX collapse (both regular pledgers/ādonors and high-profile ones). In my experience this doesnāt seem limited to just FTX but also the series of other difficult issues that followed immediately after it (as mentioned by Dustin).
One thing that Iāve found when speaking with pledgers/ādonors and other people in the charitable sector is that economic conditions are also a very important part of the story. This has held since early 2022 when the dollar value of large donations dropped when financial markets and crypto markets declined (our larger donors tend to be more likely to have made money in tech or finance instead of other industries).
Weāve also noted a conversion rate drop in various places. Because we have a very long funnel with a long time between awareness and action (after all, the pledge is a big decision) it can be a big problem if you lose a lot of people in the consideration phase who were just on the edge of action but then end up distancing themselves because things look less rosy.
My general observation is that both regular and high-profile pledgers/ādonors who would normally have been the most engaged and best advocates for us have been less likely to do so post-FTX-collapse (not just because of the FTX-collapse). This also seems to be because theyāre the ones that are most likely to be aware of the collapse and other issues. Since advocacy is so important to our outreach efforts, this reduction in the willingness and motivation of existing pledgers and donors to advocate (along with potentially losing new pledgers who were close to signing but who then distanced themselves because of the FTX association) seems more of a problem to me than the general public being aware of an FTX connection or any other issues.
we were instructed to pause all our giving season campaigns around the time of the crisis
This line surprised me, as my impression was that GWWC is essentially autonomous. Who gave this instruction? The EV board? I think the decision was reasonable, Iām just trying to understand how it was made.
This is very surprising to me (though I donāt doubt you it happened). My impression from reading other things put out by EV has been that the individual orgs were meant to be very independent. For example here Rebecca explicitly lists you as being responsible for āstrategicā issues with GWWC; if this does not count as a strategic decision I struggle to see what would.
The GWWC team are responsible for our strategy. This was a legal response decision (while it obviously affected our strategy and day-to-day operations).
The page you linked to lists pledges as the very first item under strategy. Pledges seem like a pretty core activity to GWWC, and the decision not to hold a pledge campaign a clear example of a strategic decision.
Legal decisions are not a separate magisteria from strategic decisions. Lawyers provide input into strategic decision making, by informing decision makers about the tradeoffs and legal risks of different options. At times they might give very strong advice. But lawyers do not give advice about non-legal consequences of actions, and nor will they give precise probabilities; they are not equipped to weigh legal considerations against other factors, and so ultimately the decisions fall to management, not the lawyers. The decision to not hold a pledge drive involves a tradeoff of (apparently) some legal risk to EV against the good that those pledges could have done for the poorest people in the world; EVās lawyers are not qualified to make that decision. This was a strategic management decision that EVās board took for you.
Perhaps part of my confusion here is coming from being unable to understand what legal reasons would lead to the banning of pledge drive or donation campaign. I donāt see what supposed legal risk EV would be incurring by encouraging people to donate to AMF, or to promise to do so in the future. Maybe youāre afraid that EV might be bankrupt, so you donāt want to solicit donations to the non-bankruptcy-remote EA Funds, but that shouldnāt entail an end to all GWWC campaigns.
Per my original comment, I agree that the EV decision (driven by legal considerations) obviously impacted GWWC strategy and day-to-day operations.
āManagementā ultimately flows up to the board (and then EV recruited an Exec team to handle entity-wide decisions and processes for EV UK and EV US).
In a fiscal sponsorship scenario the fiscal sponsees actions can affect one another so it isnāt simply the case that an individual project can/āshould only think of their own risk appetite. During a crisis period I can understand the fiscal sponsor management not having the capacity to review all communications/ādecisions and therefore temporarily having blanket rules that sometimes may turn out to not have been necessary or nuanced enough after the fact.
In the comment you linked to Rebecca said that the Interim CEOs are responsible for ācharity-wide issues, including legal response, coordination, and org structures, etc (that is, things that span multiple projects: 80k, CEA, GWWC, etc)ā and prior to them being hired that fell to the board. This decision was part of the legal response/ācoordination and not a decision for project leads to make.
Note that I said we paused the giving season campaigns around the time of the crisis, we didnāt decide not to have a pledge campaign entirely (though the pause and the crisis itself did negatively impact pledges significantly).
To clarify: are you just saying that the campaigns were paused but then eventually resumed (which was my understanding), or that the giving season campaigns (which were paused) are distinct from some other kind of pledge campaign, which were not paused?
While I agree in terms of the ethos, I also understand the difficulty and a reasonable amount of the complexity of the situation and why this would have been difficult (and possibly bad, all things considered) to do at the time. I do not envy the position of those involved in this level of decision making/ācrisis response, and recognise the need to do a lot of satisficing at the time.
Thanks Luke, for this extremely thoughtful and informative comment!
The dashboard is a fantastic resource, very impressive. I poked around a bit and noticed that the āmonthly active effective giversā series look a lot less spikey than the pledge data (which makes sense). It seems like the various permutations of the active effective givers metrics (pledged, unpledged, reported, facilitated, one-off, recurring) all follow a pretty similar patterns: many years of growth (with some periods growing faster than others and some rare short flattish periods for some metrics) with spikes in December that get higher each year. Then starting at the beginning of 2023 theses metrics flatten out or show modest declines. If Iām understanding your view correctly, you would attribute that change to some combination of poor financial market performance (starting in early 2022), reduced outreach after FTX collapsed, reduced community advocacy due to FTX, and reduced community advocacy due to non-FTX factors. Is that a fair characterization?
Regarding reduced community advocacy for GWWC, have you seen any signs of this dynamic easing? FTX was in late 2022 and the āseries of other difficult issuesā was mostly in early 2023, so Iām curious whether you think these issues are still as impactful as they were right after they occurred. Also, do you think the other issues would have had as much of an impact if FTX hadnāt just happened? My sense is that e.g. the Bostrom incident wouldnāt have had much impact in isolation but the accumulation of things turned into a problem; Iād love to hear your take on this.
No strong signs yet. This upcoming giving season will be a true test of that though.
Iām curious whether you think these issues are still as impactful as they were right after they occurred.
My impression is that itās less, but far from back to normal. Also bearing in mind that ānormalā is hard to define (especially with GWWC) as a lot has changed over the last decade!
Also, do you think the other issues would have had as much of an impact if FTX hadnāt just happened? My sense is that e.g. the Bostrom incident wouldnāt have had much impact in isolation but the accumulation of things turned into a problem; Iād love to hear your take on this.
My impression is that that there was a confluence of things that peaking around the FTX-collapse. There was building hostility towards some of the more avant garde EA ideas an actions of those associated with EA[1] (towards both accurate and also misrepresentations of those ideas and actions) that seemed to get traction around just prior to the launch of WWOTF which meant there were a lot of people/āopinions that got a lot more light when WWOTF was getting lots of attention and FTX failed so spectacularly. Then there was so much energy and angst in the system (both within the community and its critics) that I think the other issues compounded more than any individual one would have. The confluence of all this has sadly left a bad taste in a lot of peopleās mouths that costs fairly uncontroversially good things a lot in terms of action and advocacy.
I lead the team at GWWC and thought it might help for me to share some quick context, clarifications, and thoughts (sorry for the delay, I was on leave). Iāve kept this short and in bullet points.
Firstly, thank you for writing this. I think that broadly you are correct in the view that FTX has done much more damage than is commonly recognised within the EA community, however, I think that this effect is overstated in your post due to various reasons (some of which have been outlined by others already in the comments).
Here is our Growth Dashboard (live metrics, unaudited, but mostly accurate) and a specific monthly graph for when pledges are created (as opposed to their start date which can be any date a pledger chooses, although it is often the day they pledge).
When you get a bit more granular, you can see that GWWC pledge data can be quite spikey due to (a) large advocacy moments (e.g. Sam Harris podcast, What We Owe The Future promotion, news articles etc) that then tend to cool down over the coming months after the spike; and (b) seasonality (e.g. giving season and new years day) where people tend to pledge or donate at key moments (and we also focus our growth activities around these times).
While the specific time periods you selected in your comparison tend to overstate the impact (due to seasonality and regression to the mean like Bella mentioned), the impact is definitely there. In fact, when we zoom in to the daily metrics, we see that the average daily new pledgers or new donors drops quite sharply in mid-November. This is magnified by both seasonality and advocacy being key to us. In terms of seasonality, we were instructed to pause all our giving season campaigns around the time of the crisis, and in terms of advocacy, it has been harder to get people to advocate post-FTX collapse (both regular pledgers/ādonors and high-profile ones). In my experience this doesnāt seem limited to just FTX but also the series of other difficult issues that followed immediately after it (as mentioned by Dustin).
One thing that Iāve found when speaking with pledgers/ādonors and other people in the charitable sector is that economic conditions are also a very important part of the story. This has held since early 2022 when the dollar value of large donations dropped when financial markets and crypto markets declined (our larger donors tend to be more likely to have made money in tech or finance instead of other industries).
Weāve also noted a conversion rate drop in various places. Because we have a very long funnel with a long time between awareness and action (after all, the pledge is a big decision) it can be a big problem if you lose a lot of people in the consideration phase who were just on the edge of action but then end up distancing themselves because things look less rosy.
My general observation is that both regular and high-profile pledgers/ādonors who would normally have been the most engaged and best advocates for us have been less likely to do so post-FTX-collapse (not just because of the FTX-collapse). This also seems to be because theyāre the ones that are most likely to be aware of the collapse and other issues. Since advocacy is so important to our outreach efforts, this reduction in the willingness and motivation of existing pledgers and donors to advocate (along with potentially losing new pledgers who were close to signing but who then distanced themselves because of the FTX association) seems more of a problem to me than the general public being aware of an FTX connection or any other issues.
This line surprised me, as my impression was that GWWC is essentially autonomous. Who gave this instruction? The EV board? I think the decision was reasonable, Iām just trying to understand how it was made.
It was a board level decision.
While that is largely true for day to day operations, EV UK and EV US are still essentially responsible for the actions of their projects.
This is very surprising to me (though I donāt doubt you it happened). My impression from reading other things put out by EV has been that the individual orgs were meant to be very independent. For example here Rebecca explicitly lists you as being responsible for āstrategicā issues with GWWC; if this does not count as a strategic decision I struggle to see what would.
The GWWC team are responsible for our strategy. This was a legal response decision (while it obviously affected our strategy and day-to-day operations).
The page you linked to lists pledges as the very first item under strategy. Pledges seem like a pretty core activity to GWWC, and the decision not to hold a pledge campaign a clear example of a strategic decision.
Legal decisions are not a separate magisteria from strategic decisions. Lawyers provide input into strategic decision making, by informing decision makers about the tradeoffs and legal risks of different options. At times they might give very strong advice. But lawyers do not give advice about non-legal consequences of actions, and nor will they give precise probabilities; they are not equipped to weigh legal considerations against other factors, and so ultimately the decisions fall to management, not the lawyers. The decision to not hold a pledge drive involves a tradeoff of (apparently) some legal risk to EV against the good that those pledges could have done for the poorest people in the world; EVās lawyers are not qualified to make that decision. This was a strategic management decision that EVās board took for you.
Perhaps part of my confusion here is coming from being unable to understand what legal reasons would lead to the banning of pledge drive or donation campaign. I donāt see what supposed legal risk EV would be incurring by encouraging people to donate to AMF, or to promise to do so in the future. Maybe youāre afraid that EV might be bankrupt, so you donāt want to solicit donations to the non-bankruptcy-remote EA Funds, but that shouldnāt entail an end to all GWWC campaigns.
Per my original comment, I agree that the EV decision (driven by legal considerations) obviously impacted GWWC strategy and day-to-day operations.
āManagementā ultimately flows up to the board (and then EV recruited an Exec team to handle entity-wide decisions and processes for EV UK and EV US).
In a fiscal sponsorship scenario the fiscal sponsees actions can affect one another so it isnāt simply the case that an individual project can/āshould only think of their own risk appetite. During a crisis period I can understand the fiscal sponsor management not having the capacity to review all communications/ādecisions and therefore temporarily having blanket rules that sometimes may turn out to not have been necessary or nuanced enough after the fact.
In the comment you linked to Rebecca said that the Interim CEOs are responsible for ācharity-wide issues, including legal response, coordination, and org structures, etc (that is, things that span multiple projects: 80k, CEA, GWWC, etc)ā and prior to them being hired that fell to the board. This decision was part of the legal response/ācoordination and not a decision for project leads to make.
Note that I said we paused the giving season campaigns around the time of the crisis, we didnāt decide not to have a pledge campaign entirely (though the pause and the crisis itself did negatively impact pledges significantly).
To clarify: are you just saying that the campaigns were paused but then eventually resumed (which was my understanding), or that the giving season campaigns (which were paused) are distinct from some other kind of pledge campaign, which were not paused?
Thanks for clarifying. FWIW, given community desires for more communication from leadership and greater transparency, I think it would have been good for the board to share this decision publicly.
While I agree in terms of the ethos, I also understand the difficulty and a reasonable amount of the complexity of the situation and why this would have been difficult (and possibly bad, all things considered) to do at the time. I do not envy the position of those involved in this level of decision making/ācrisis response, and recognise the need to do a lot of satisficing at the time.
Thanks Luke, for this extremely thoughtful and informative comment!
The dashboard is a fantastic resource, very impressive. I poked around a bit and noticed that the āmonthly active effective giversā series look a lot less spikey than the pledge data (which makes sense). It seems like the various permutations of the active effective givers metrics (pledged, unpledged, reported, facilitated, one-off, recurring) all follow a pretty similar patterns: many years of growth (with some periods growing faster than others and some rare short flattish periods for some metrics) with spikes in December that get higher each year. Then starting at the beginning of 2023 theses metrics flatten out or show modest declines. If Iām understanding your view correctly, you would attribute that change to some combination of poor financial market performance (starting in early 2022), reduced outreach after FTX collapsed, reduced community advocacy due to FTX, and reduced community advocacy due to non-FTX factors. Is that a fair characterization?
Regarding reduced community advocacy for GWWC, have you seen any signs of this dynamic easing? FTX was in late 2022 and the āseries of other difficult issuesā was mostly in early 2023, so Iām curious whether you think these issues are still as impactful as they were right after they occurred. Also, do you think the other issues would have had as much of an impact if FTX hadnāt just happened? My sense is that e.g. the Bostrom incident wouldnāt have had much impact in isolation but the accumulation of things turned into a problem; Iād love to hear your take on this.
Thanks š Glad it was helpful!
Yep!
No strong signs yet. This upcoming giving season will be a true test of that though.
My impression is that itās less, but far from back to normal. Also bearing in mind that ānormalā is hard to define (especially with GWWC) as a lot has changed over the last decade!
My impression is that that there was a confluence of things that peaking around the FTX-collapse. There was building hostility towards some of the more avant garde EA ideas an actions of those associated with EA[1] (towards both accurate and also misrepresentations of those ideas and actions) that seemed to get traction around just prior to the launch of WWOTF which meant there were a lot of people/āopinions that got a lot more light when WWOTF was getting lots of attention and FTX failed so spectacularly. Then there was so much energy and angst in the system (both within the community and its critics) that I think the other issues compounded more than any individual one would have. The confluence of all this has sadly left a bad taste in a lot of peopleās mouths that costs fairly uncontroversially good things a lot in terms of action and advocacy.
e.g. actions related to the influx of money
Thanks for taking the time to write this! Very helpful to get your perspective!