jonathonsmith

• jonathonsmithFeb 6, 2015, 5:17 AM

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  in reply to: jonathonsmith’s comment on: TLYCS Pam­phlet­ing Pilot Plan

  Actually it does appear you can hire a statistician like a lawyer or accountant, I’ll be damned lol. I just typed “statistical consultant” into Google and got like a million hits. I would love a personal recommendation if you have one though.

• jonathonsmithFeb 6, 2015, 4:54 AM

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  in reply to: Bernadette_Young’s comment on: TLYCS Pam­phlet­ing Pilot Plan

  Thanks Bernadette! Other people have suggested consulting a statistician, but it’s not been clear to me precisely what she is supposed to do. I went through some lengths to be as specific as possible in our plan about what our data is, what we expect to see, and how we plan to calculate our success criteria (e.g. creating dummy numbers and producing working code that runs through our calculations). Can you maybe poke some holes in our approach so that I get a better idea of what a statistician would be bringing to the table?

  Also, do you know how one goes about finding a statistician? I assume there aren’t just statisticians around for hire, like lawyers or accountants. This came up in a previous thread and someone mentioned Statistics Without Borders and Charity Science, but it didn’t seem like these organizations offered this as a service, I would just be cold-calling and asking for their help. If you have someone particular in mind who would be qualified to do this, I’d love to get their contact info; at least then I could get a cost estimate to take back to TLYCS.

• jonathonsmithFeb 3, 2015, 6:22 PM

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  in reply to: Ben Kuhn’s comment on: TLYCS Pam­phlet­ing Pilot Plan

  Thanks Ben. Yes, I know that you can quantitatively define this, and it’s something we may look into more in the future. We decided against pursuing it right now because 1.) none of us know how to work this problem and we would have to sink some time into learning, 2.) we’re pretty sure we know the gist of the answer (my previous comment), and 3.) we’re not really in a position to change our strategy based on the results anyway. I’m hoping to be able to publish our actual data after we run the pilot, so if there are any enterprising statistical EA’s out there that want to sink their teeth into it, we’d be delighted.

• jonathonsmithFeb 2, 2015, 4:31 PM

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  in reply to: Ben Kuhn’s comment on: TLYCS Pam­phlet­ing Pilot Plan

  Very good point here. As I mentioned in another comment, I think we will have strong statistics for our baseline numbers, because we will be mining a year-plus of Google analytics data to generate them. So we should be able to tell if the individual distributions deviate significantly from the baseline. The way we have things planned now, we will be handing out a large number of pamphlets on a small number of days. In a best case scenario, we will get really large deviations from the baseline, so even if we’re not able to hone-in on the true mean and standard deviation for the distribution days, we’ll be confident that the pamphlets have a big effect. If we only get small deviations, then we will have to make the call to continue the program based on other possible metrics (or just gut feeling); if we continue then we can continue to collect more data and refine these numbers. I had considered handing out small numbers of pamphlets on more days to get a larger sample set, but due to volunteer time limitations it’s just not feasible for the pilot.

• jonathonsmithFeb 2, 2015, 4:21 PM

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  in reply to: Peter Wildeford’s comment on: TLYCS Pam­phlet­ing Pilot Plan

  We have a custom URL to a quiz page, but as I mentioned in another comment, it’s uncertain right now how many interested people will actually type in the full URL address rather than just Googling “life you can save”. I think that the hits to the custom page will be a good indication of “strong engagement”, as in, people were really into what they read enough to type in a URL.

• jonathonsmithFeb 2, 2015, 4:17 PM

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  in reply to: Dan_Keys’s comment on: TLYCS Pam­phlet­ing Pilot Plan

  I think we’ll be able to get a standard deviation, as well as mean, for the baseline values we compare against, which should be helpful to determine if the individual distribution results are significantly different than the baseline rates. I don’t think we’ll have enough distribution days in the pilot to be able to get the same for the pilot numbers (e.g. we won’t be able to tell if the results of individual distributions is typical of all distributions), but that seems like something we could accumulate over time if we proceed with the program.

  There is a custom URL only advertised in the pamphlet leading to a “quiz” page, and we will be tracking that, although I would guess that most of the traffic generated by the pamphlets would just be to the main homepage. Like if someone handed me a pamphlet for an organization and I was interested in learning more, I’d probably just Google the orgs name and go from there, rather than type in a URL. But we’ll see.

TLYCS Pam­phlet­ing Pilot Plan

• jonathonsmithJan 9, 2015, 5:48 PM

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  in reply to: Owen Cotton-Barratt’s comment on: TLYCS Pam­phlet­ing Pilot Program

  This is a really good point. Yeah, the scaling model is to have local TLYCS chapters organizing volunteers to do this as a regular, rolling semester activity. I hadn’t really considered myself a confounding variable in this sense, because I’m definitely not a master pamphleteer. I’m an engineer by trade, and if this program takes off, I’ll eventually just be another volunteer in the LA area that helps hand out leaflets occasionally. We’re also thinking about splitting crews on Friday distribution days—so I would have a crew that hits up two universities, and there would be another volunteer crew hitting up two different campuses. Any thoughts on this?

• jonathonsmithJan 9, 2015, 5:38 PM

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  in reply to: Tom_Ash’s comment on: TLYCS Pam­phlet­ing Pilot Program

  That is definitely the intention. We are really hoping that the data we gather will be useful to other orgs considering a similar program, which was part of the motivation for posting up here ahead of time to get feedback.

• jonathonsmithJan 7, 2015, 9:41 PM

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  in reply to: yboris’s comment on: TLYCS Pam­phlet­ing Pilot Program

  Pretty sharp! If I had seen this before, I definitely would have passed it along to our designer as something to work from.

• jonathonsmithJan 7, 2015, 9:34 PM

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  in reply to: jonathancourtney’s comment on: TLYCS Pam­phlet­ing Pilot Program

  That would be great! I’ll connect with you on Facebook and we can open up a line of communication there.

• jonathonsmithJan 7, 2015, 9:33 PM

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  in reply to: Ben Kuhn’s comment on: TLYCS Pam­phlet­ing Pilot Program

  Yeah, if you give me the contact info of a statistician that you recommend that would be great. I don’t know if we have the budget for it, but I would definitely reach out.

• jonathonsmithJan 6, 2015, 4:45 PM

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  in reply to: Owen Cotton-Barratt’s comment on: TLYCS Pam­phlet­ing Pilot Program

  Really good point here; I was a fan myself of the online Giving Game, but that would be hard to scale with the program without securing a donor willing to finance it at a pretty large level.

• jonathonsmithJan 6, 2015, 2:12 AM

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  in reply to: Giles’s comment on: TLYCS Pam­phlet­ing Pilot Program

  Some really good points here. I never considered that handing out the leaflets only on Fridays might skew the results (I just happen to have every other Friday off, thanks California), I’ll have to think that through. And it would definitely be a good idea to have a “Where did you hear about the pledge?” question on the pledge site, I’ll check into that as well.

  I’m not sure what our initial run on the pamphlets will be, but I’m thinking in the 5K-15K range. I haven’t done any analysis to figure out how many we’d need to hand out to get good statistics; not even really sure how to go about doing that, to be honest. And absolutely no idea what to expect in terms of a response rate. Any thoughts on how to estimate that?

• jonathonsmithJan 6, 2015, 2:05 AM

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  in reply to: Giles’s comment on: TLYCS Pam­phlet­ing Pilot Program

  Just took a look at their website, very cool stuff. You suggesting I email them and get their feedback on our plan?

TLYCS Pam­phlet­ing Pilot Program