Does the claim “We are currently due to run out of funding next month” include the £62,500 donation? It seems like not, but you didn’t insert any caveats about that into your claim. At any rate, what’s the situation for marginal funds? What do you anticipate getting cut if you don’t meet your goal, and what would you do with funds over your budget (or will you just stop accepting donations)?
Unfortunately the £62,500 donation is only a ballpark figure at the moment and won’t be confirmed until late December or January. Sorry that I didn’t make this clearer.
The first thing that would be cut from the budget is an external publicist for Will’s book. We would have to rely on Penguin to do much of the publicity, and we would do as much as we had time for in-house as well. I would probably want to fundraise additional funds to hire a summer intern to help with marketing and pitching media outlets in this case.
You can see the full list of everything that we could fund if money was available in this spreadsheet (which uses this now-outdated documentation). The budget that we are using to fundraise includes only a small fraction of these opportunities, as they are the ones that we most wanted to fund.
At time of writing, we need an additional £15k on top of our current pledges to be able to fund our top priorities except Will’s publicist. Paying for Will’s publicist would require another ~£19k on top of that.
Some of the most salient failure modes for EA Outreach are in the individual sub-projects:
For Will and Peter’s books, the outside-view median outcome is that they don’t make a splash in the media and don’t sell very well. Unfortunately there are just so many books published each year (~1m per year) that the outside-view chances of ours being one of few that gain considerable attention and sell well is slim. Even when you account for the fact that we have a substantial advance and top-tier publisher, the outside view says that we’ll only sell a moderate number of books and will be unlikely to make more than the advance. Inside view says that we’ll do better than this because of the amount of resources going into the book, the fact that there is a movement behind the book, and because people seem pretty interested in EA-style questions at the moment. The reason we are doing this is not for the median case though, it’s for the upper tail in which we become a best-seller and EA becomes well known enough that media hosts feel the need to include it in their discussions of charity, philanthropy, and doing good. The outside-view chances of this happening are slim, and the inside-view chances are better but not huge, though we have been told by publishers, publicists, etc. that it is a real possibility. I will be working very hard over the coming year to give these books the best possible launches I can, but unfortunately the risk is still probably the biggest one that we are taking.
My most salient worry for EA Global is that it doesn’t sell tickets, people don’t come, and it makes a major loss. We are going to be marketing it hard, and part of the reason for moving to a global model is that it makes it easier for more people to come as they won’t have to travel as far.
My biggest worry for EffectiveAltruism.org is that it doesn’t get much traffic. There are now many popular sites that discuss EA, and though EA.org is ranked at no. 5 when I do an incognito search for ‘Effective Altruism’, my main worry is that it won’t get enough traffic. My other worry is that we will never actually finish building it as other higher-priority projects will take precedent, but I don’t see that as as much of a risk.
I suppose my worries can be put into two broad categories, either we fail to get enough attention for EA, or we get the attention and fail to convert it sufficiently into growth of the movement. I think both of these are very real possibilities that we are working every day to reduce the chances of.