Giving What We Can is a community of effective givers – an international society that helps people commit to giving more, and giving more effectively. Our members donate at least 10% of their career incomes to the charities they believe will help others the most.
Over the last year, our community has doubled in size. Our members have now collectively donated more than $10 million, and pledged over half a billion dollars! We have been testing out a range of ways to attract and retain new members, and seem to have found some to be really successful. Amongst these are setting up new local chapters and engaging in individual outreach. We would like to capitalise on this by scaling up some of the most promising avenues for attracting and retaining new members. To do so, we need to increase our team size. We've been lucky enough to have had really excellent applicants in our recent recruitment round. In order to carry out our plans — detailed in our fundraising prospectus — we need to reach our fundraising goal.
We think that the most relevant considerations for choosing whether to donate to us are our strong track record, and our plans for growth. But we also regularly calculate our effectiveness, to ensure that we are providing a substantial leverage ratio for our top charities. Our most up-to-date estimate for this indicates that for every $1 spent by Giving We Can, around $103 (counterfactually adjusted and time-discounted) will be moved to top charities.
Our budget for 2016 is £475,000, of which we already have £193,000 pledged. We therefore need to raise a further £282,000. You can find a full breakdown of our budget, along with details on our plans and our cost-effectiveness estimates on our fundraising page — you’ll also find a link with instructions for how you can donate. If you have any questions, please get in touch with me at michelle.hutchinson@givingwhatwecan.org.
If you decide to support us, I’d like to extend a huge thanks on behalf of the whole team — your generosity means that we can continue to help make the world a better place as effectively as possible.
Hey Michelle,
Thank you very much for sharing the cohort analysis. I find it very valuable to understanding GWWC's membership flow. I also know it's stressful to release the data and have it publicly scrutinized, especially during a high-stakes fundraising round. But I think it's very important to have such public scrutiny when requesting public funds. :)
I have seven questions:
1.) I see from the Giving Review that GWWC had 386 members who joined prior to 2014, with 186 "going silent" (not responding with income and donation numbers) and 43 not completing the pledge, for an overall 40.7% "knowably kept pledge" rate.
But in the Fundraising doc, the "Realistic calculation" has a rate of leavers of 0.017 and a rate of people going silent of 0.031, for an overall estimate of "knowably kept pledge" rate of 95.2%. Do you have more information on how the attrition rate was calculated in the "Realistic calculation" and why these two numbers are so different?
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2.) You state a counterfactual donation rate of 51%. Can you explain where that number comes from?
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3.) You say that 66% of people say you've affected their choice of charity. Is this 66% of the entire population, or 66% of the 49% of people who would have donated anyway?
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4.) What does the "effectiveness ratio" of 0.5 mean and how was it calculated?
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5.) What credence, if any, do you give to the thought that the outside view for pledging working so successfully is pretty weak? My impression is that fundraising doesn't make much use of pledges, hough they do frequently seek out "monthly donations" over one-time giving). If it were more successful, would other orgs do it? (Of course, the inside view could still be strong and it could be that GWWC has caught on to something innovative that other people just haven't seen yet. And I suppose other orgs like REG have also had a lot of success with pledges.)
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6.) This is a positive question where I think GWWC underestimates it's impact -- what credence do you give to Ben Todd's position that EA is underemphasizing potential for growth and overestimating historical money moved metrics? Do you think GWWC is in a position to try new things it hasn't before? What kind of learning value do you think is in that? Do you think GWWC will have more economies of scale in getting new pledgers as it grows?
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7.) I hate to move the goalposts after releasing the cohort analysis, but I think what we ideally would like is "survival analysis". I find it interesting to compare how likely a GWWC pledger is to keep a pledge to how likely a person taking out a loan is to pay back their loan (my job is to calculate that second one). One tool we use is survival analysis, which is kind of like an improved cohort analysis, where we make predictions like given that someone paid back in year 1, how likely are they to pay back in year 2, etc.? My guess is that we could do something very similar for GWWC members and I'd be happy to help do that when my time allows (maybe sometime early next year).
I'd also be really interested in using any data we have on members (e.g., demographics, income, how they heard about GWWC, level of contact with GWWC, etc.) to help predict which members are more likely to keep their pledge.
Happy to help with the analysis project alluded to above.