Charity Science is looking for $35,000 to fund our 2015 operations. We fundraise for GiveWell-recommended charities, and over 2014 we moved over $150,000 to them that wouldn’t have been given otherwise: that’s $9 for every $1 we spent. We can’t do this work without your support, so please consider making a donation to us - however small, it will be appreciated. Donate now and you’ll also be matched by Matt Wage.
The donations pages below list other reasons to donate to us, which include that:
- Our costs are extremely low: the $35,000 (Canadian) pays for three to four full-time staff.
- We experiment with many different forms of fundraising and record detailed information on how these experiments go, so funding us lets the whole EA community learn about their prospects.
- We carefully track how much money each experiment raises, subtract money which would have been given anyway, and shut down experiments that don’t work.
- Our fundraising still has many opportunities to continue to scale as we try new ideas we haven’t tested yet.
There’s much more information, including our full budget and what we’d do if we raised over $35,000, in the linked document, and we’d be happy to answer any questions. Thank you in advance for your consideration.
Thanks Tom, you guys have done a lot on a very low budget and I'm keen to hear about what you do next. I think the value of information about different approaches makes the project very worthwhile.
One issue which I have with your $9-to-$1 figure is that your costs seem artificially low: you are not paying market rates for your employees' labour. I think this is true either in the sense of how much you would have to pay to replace them or in the sense of how much they might earn (and perhaps donate) elsewhere. It might be better to budget as paying a more normal wage to your employees with them donating the difference back to Charity Science.
Note that I actually think this is a budgeting issue for most EA orgs, which somewhat obscures counterfactual impact. I brought it up here not to pick on Charity Science but just because you guys are so amazingly frugal that it makes even more of a difference than normal!
Don't forget the staff are partly being paid in exciting work, the respect of their EA peers, a sense of purposefulness, and so on. As a result compensating differentials lowers the market price for their labour, and they are more well compensated holistically than they appear to be.
Conversely, bankers do work most people find boring and difficult, face hostility from much of the population, frequently think their work is pointless, and so on. As such compensating differentials increases the market price for their labour, and they are less well compensated holistically than they appear to be.