jonathonsmith

TLYCS Pam­phlet­ing Pilot Program

• jonathonsmith 6 Jan 2015 2:05 UTC

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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?

• jonathonsmith 6 Jan 2015 2:12 UTC

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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?

• jonathonsmith 6 Jan 2015 16:45 UTC

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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.

• jonathonsmith 7 Jan 2015 21:33 UTC

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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.

• jonathonsmith 7 Jan 2015 21:34 UTC

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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.

• jonathonsmith 7 Jan 2015 21:41 UTC

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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.

• jonathonsmith 9 Jan 2015 17:38 UTC

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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.

• jonathonsmith 9 Jan 2015 17:48 UTC

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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?

TLYCS Pam­phlet­ing Pilot Plan

• jonathonsmith 2 Feb 2015 16:17 UTC

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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.

• jonathonsmith 2 Feb 2015 16:21 UTC

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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.

• jonathonsmith 2 Feb 2015 16:31 UTC

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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.

• jonathonsmith 3 Feb 2015 18:22 UTC

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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.

• jonathonsmith 6 Feb 2015 4:54 UTC

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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.

• jonathonsmith 6 Feb 2015 5:17 UTC

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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.

• jonathonsmith 7 Feb 2015 23:00 UTC

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

  Awesome, thanks for diving to this level of detail. You mention a lot of good points, some of which we’ve thought of, some not. I’ve started emailing statistical consulting companies, we’ll see what comes back.

  I do want to pose this question in another way that I think reflects more accurately my doubts about the necessity for a statistician. I mean, I definitely agree having someone on board with that skill set would be nice … so would having a world class add agency designing the pamphlet, and a small army of volunteers to hand them out, etc. But is it necessary? So, let me frame up the question this way. Let’s say we run this study, and afterwards publish a report. We say, this is how we calculated our baseline values (and give the data), these are the resulting spikes in our tracked metrics (and give the data), these are the assumptions we used in calculating our success criteria, and these are the conclusions that we’ve made. How can this possibly be bad or counterproductive? Would you look at the data and be like, “well they didn’t use the best possible calculation for baseline, so I’m throwing it all out”? You follow what I’m asking here? I just fail to see how collecting the data and doing the calculations we proposed—even if they’re not perfect—could possibly be bad or counterproductive. Maybe we’re leaving some value on the table by not consulting a statistician, but I don’t understand the mode in which our entire effort fails by not consulting one.

TLYCS Pam­phlet Pilot Results

• jonathonsmith 27 Jul 2015 18:19 UTC

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  in reply to: zdgroff’s comment on: TLYCS Pam­phlet Pilot Results

  Unfortunately, we could only track website visitors as far as clicking a “donate” button on TLYCS “Where To Donate” page (http://​​www.thelifeyoucansave.org/​​Where-to-Donate). After clicking the button they are directed to the individual charity website, so we don’t have visibility into if they actually followed through with making a donation, or how much that donation was.

  That being said, we only had one visitor that plausibly came from the pamphlets that clicked a donate button; if we had paid closer to Vegan Outreach prices for the pamphlets ($0.07), the cost of the 3500 pamphlets would have been about $245, and so the donation would have had to be on that level to get parity. Would definitely have been an interesting data point to see if /​ how much our clicker actually donated.

• jonathonsmith 27 Jul 2015 18:34 UTC

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  in reply to: Michelle_Hutchinson’s comment on: TLYCS Pam­phlet Pilot Results

  Yeah, one of the main “unmeasurables” of the pilot was how much more of an impression a pamphlet, handed out by a real volunteer, can have on someone over an online add. This goes into the “touchpoint” theory, where it may take multiple exposures to an idea before someone bites; and maybe getting a pamphlet is a much stronger “touchpoint” than seeing an online add. I personally think that getting handed a pamphlet by a non-paid volunteer is a really powerful thing; and that’s the reason that (again personally) I think that it would be great to see someone in the EA movement give a pamphleting program another shot, along the lines I sketched in the lessons learned (branded on EA, including multiple organizations, with a stronger, repeated ask).

  We ran cost numbers including volunteer time and pamphlet development expenses, but I decided to ignore those for the final writeup, mainly because; the way we envisioned the program, the leaflets would be handed out on a volunteer basis by college students not paid TLYCS staff; and the cost of developing the pamphlets would amortize to a minimal effect over the lifetime of an ongoing pamphleting program. It’s definitely a debatable decision though.