Hi Brian—Jack here (ED at OFTW). Thanks for your thoughtful questions and it looks like Sabrina ha answered them really well :-)
Some quick additions:
as Sabrina says, activation is moderate (~2/3). However, our models suggest that we would still provide decent ROI at even 50% activation rates. One advantage that we have is that we process all our donations ourselves and so actually know our activation and retention rates, where a lot of pledge orgs have to estimate them. My reading of our data is that most orgs are extremely optimistic in their assumptions around this.
definitely open to this and some individual chapters have done it already. It’s on the roadmap!
this is where processing our donations is so helpful—we see in real time how donors behave, and so know if people stop their donations. We do ask people who cancel if they have changed cause area but we only get the usual response rates to cancellation surveys (~1%)
we do not currently plan to expand our cause areas, for few reasons. First, and for transparency, GiveWell is one of our main funders and that influences this decision. Second, our founders were very focussed on global health and poverty and so I would want their input before any change. But third, and most importantly—OFTW on average engages a donor for ~10-60 mins before they pledge (and pre-COVID this was sometimes as little as 2 mins when our volunteers were tabling). When you are recruiting people with this level of engagement, message clarity is essential. Using global health and poverty, which is both the most popular EA cause area and the simplest ‘sell’ to someone who isn’t part of EA yet, makes a lot of sense to me in this context. All that being said, this may well evolve over time!
Hi Brian—Jack here (ED at OFTW). Thanks for your thoughtful questions and it looks like Sabrina ha answered them really well :-)
Some quick additions:
as Sabrina says, activation is moderate (~2/3). However, our models suggest that we would still provide decent ROI at even 50% activation rates. One advantage that we have is that we process all our donations ourselves and so actually know our activation and retention rates, where a lot of pledge orgs have to estimate them. My reading of our data is that most orgs are extremely optimistic in their assumptions around this.
definitely open to this and some individual chapters have done it already. It’s on the roadmap!
this is where processing our donations is so helpful—we see in real time how donors behave, and so know if people stop their donations. We do ask people who cancel if they have changed cause area but we only get the usual response rates to cancellation surveys (~1%)
we do not currently plan to expand our cause areas, for few reasons. First, and for transparency, GiveWell is one of our main funders and that influences this decision. Second, our founders were very focussed on global health and poverty and so I would want their input before any change. But third, and most importantly—OFTW on average engages a donor for ~10-60 mins before they pledge (and pre-COVID this was sometimes as little as 2 mins when our volunteers were tabling). When you are recruiting people with this level of engagement, message clarity is essential. Using global health and poverty, which is both the most popular EA cause area and the simplest ‘sell’ to someone who isn’t part of EA yet, makes a lot of sense to me in this context. All that being said, this may well evolve over time!