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The following is an update on Giving What We Can's activities over the last 6 months. We do a full review and plan yearly in summer: this is our mid year update. It was initially sent to our advisory board - a brief summary of their comments is included at the bottom. The current plan GWWC is working to is this one which covers July 2015 to June 2016. We're always on the look out for ways to improve not only our actual activities, but also our methods of evaluating and explaining them, so please do comment or get in touch. I'm hoping this will be interesting for people to read and will provide a way for people to learn from things we've tried as well as for us to learn from everyone's comments/questions/suggestions!

Team:

Michelle Hutchinson – Executive Director

Jon Courtney – Assistant Director

Alison Woodman – Director of Community

Sam Deere – Director of Communication

Hauke Hillebrandt – Director of Research

Marinella Capriati – Research Analyst and Outreach Coordinator

James Snowden – Research Analyst and Chapter Coordinator

Larissa Rowe – Communications Manager

Andreas Mogensen – Senior Advisor

Key metric:

Our key metric is number of new members. Over the previous year (Jul 2014 - Jun 2015) our average (mean) new members per month was 53. Over the last 6 months (Jul 2015 - Dec 2015) our average new members per month was 62.


Our aim for the year is to get to 2000 members, starting from 1122 at the end of June 2015. We are now up to 1599, so over the last 7 months we’ve had 477 people join, and we need 401 new members to reach our target. However, we typically get far more members in Dec and Jan, due to holding an annual pledge drive, giving season and new year’s resolutions. At this stage, it seems somewhat unlikely we will reach our target, since we would need to get an average of 80 new members per month. In a typical month over 2015 we got 50 new members. That was up from 30 in a typical month during 2014. The pattern for 2015 was something like – Dec and Jan were way up, Feb and March were down, and after that in a typical month we had around 50. This year, our daily average doesn’t seem to be down much since the pledge drive has finished (10th of Jan), so we hope that Feb will be at least a typical month. But we don’t yet have good evidence for expecting more members in a typical month than 50, which would leave us ~150 members down on our goal.

Operational aspects:

Recruitment

        We hired Marinella Capriati to work on both individual outreach and research. We hired James Snowden to work on both research and chapters. We hired Larissa Rowe to work on both communications and individual outreach. We made an offer to Peter McIntyre to work on chapters (in which case James would have worked on individual outreach rather than chapters), but he turned it down to explore offers at 80k and FHI. The recruitment round went well – we had excellent applicants, and are very pleased with the calibre of our new hires. Central was likewise very happy to have to Amy Labenz join them.

The joining of the new GWWC staff has been staggered – Marinella started in Sep part-time (and short term at that point), James at the start of Jan and Larissa will be joining us mid February. This has worked well for integrating people into the team. I’m putting quite a bit of energy at the moment into thinking about how to maintain our team culture as new staff join, and as we go from having two levels of management to three. For example, we’ve re-evaluated our values (they’ve remained similar) and we will be doing a staff retreat in February, the first week that Larissa joins us.

Fundraising:

        Over December we held a fundraising round. Our main target was to raise our whole 2016 budget - £475,000. Our plan was that if we raised £325,000, we would go ahead with this year’s plans as intended, but would expect to have to fundraise again towards the middle of the year, while if we raised our full goal we wouldn’t expect to fundraise until next December. The plans we would change if we had not raised our minimum goal is that we wouldn’t have offered positions to James Snowden and Peter McIntyre, and we wouldn’t change our salary policy. We raised around £370k in the fundraising round. We had two new significant donors (more than £30k). We had around 10 new mid-range donors (~£2k), who we hope will continue giving yearly. We had around 20 new smaller donors (£500-£1k).

Since we raised over our minimum target, we offered positions to both James and Peter. The former accepted, the latter didn’t. We are more concerned with growing a really strong team at the moment than with having particular positions filled, so we didn’t offer the position to anyone else. This means our budget for next year is more like £440k. Changes to the way the Central budget is split has also reduced our budget – likely by around £50k. However, looking at commercial options for offices has made us aware that our next office may be more expensive than we previously budgeted for.

        Since we made our minimum target, we changed our salary policy. The new guidelines for a full-time staff member of Giving What We Can are:

·   The base salary is £21k

·   Salary increases of up to £1500 are awarded every 6 months following a successful performance review, beginning at the end of the probationary period (at the discretion of the ED for the staff, and the trustees for the ED in the annual review)

·   New staff start at: £21K + (years of experience * relevance of experience * £3K). It’s at the ED’s discretion what counts as relevant experience.

o Higher education can count. The default is that a Phd is 2 years of experience, a Masters 1 year

·   No salaries can be higher than the ED’s without a further review.

·   In the case of strong financial need (e.g. debt or dependents) the ED can award up to an extra £6k of salary over and above their experience level.

This policy is approximately the same as that of 80,000 Hours and Effective Altruism Outreach. Important considerations for us in setting this were retaining good staff and attracting staff with experience. The Trustees expressly preferred us to have guidelines for salaries rather than a rigid policy, in order to accommodate the use of judgement for difficult cases.

Metrics on our pathway to membership:

Goals

Metrics

July - September 2015

Oct - Dec 2015

A) Making people aware of Giving What We Can and effective giving

Number of sessions by new visitors to the website

89,000

113,000


% sessions are new visitors

81.40%

86.70%


Number of new chapters



B) Generating interest in hearing more

Newsletter signups

537

402


Number of sessions by returning visitors to the website

20,000

25,000


% sessions are returning visitors

18.60%

13.30%


Number of new Facebook page likes

813

1084


Total facebook likes

6081

7165

C) Inspiring people to want to get involved

Number of new people signed up to the Trust

117

439


Number of My Giving dashboard signups

77

90

D) Encouraging people to become a part of Giving What We Can

Number of new members

147

224


Number of new try givers

85

128

E) Supporting people to remain long-term active members

Proportion of members who kept their pledge




Number of new members Skyped

36

42


Proportion of new members Skyped

22%

24%

A few other metrics that might be of interest can be found here (please note that this, like many other docs linked to in this post, is primarily intended as an internal document, so is rather rough!)

Activities:

A) Making people aware of Giving What We Can and effective giving

Chapter seeding: Our chapter seeding strategy seemed successful in terms of chapters starting up. Although the overall plan was for us to collaborate with LEAN and EAF to reach out to 500 places, only around 250 places were contacted: we ended up getting less engagement from our collaborators than we expected, as well as falling short on our own goal. A full review of this can be found here. The rate of chapters starting as a result was a bit higher than expected (our expectation was 1 in 10). We are currently in the process of producing a review of how the chapters that were set up using this method did over their first term. How promising we think chapter seeding is as a method will depend on the results of that review.

Our planned method for doing chapter seeding has evolved in a few ways: it seems that it works best if we reach out to professors, rather than ‘student leaders’ (people like Student body presidents), and in future we would likely focus more on reaching out through our networks than to strangers. The chapter mentorship program got fewer volunteers than we had hoped it would, but we were also slower to follow up than we should have been. We are going to continue trying with this for a couple more months, though we may end up pivoting towards having a chapter staff member in personal contact with all the chapters.

Our draft chapter plan for 2016 can be found here.

B)    Generating interest in hearing more

Website: Over September to December, Sam rebuilt the majority of our website, moving it from Drupal to a static site. In addition to being more responsive and less likely to go down, it is easier to manipulate, and easy to A/B and multivariate test in. He has also overhauled the look of the website to a large degree. We seem to have gotten positive feedback about the new look. The changeover took around 3 times the length of time originally forecast – although coding projects seem peculiarly prone to planning fallacy, so the error bars on the original estimate were large. Over the next few weeks, Sam will be continuing to work on increasing the features of the website (for example: adding back the newsletter sign-up bar, adding a twitter/Facebook feed, putting the chapter page into the new form, improving the research layout) and trying out different changes to the content (for example, changing the main menu layout). After that, he will be changing over the remainder of the website – the parts that interface with our crm – and changing our crm from Civicrm to Salesforce. This is expected to be at least as large a job as the original changeover.


Social media has not been a big focus for us, but Larissa Rowe has been doing updating our Facebook and Twitter feeds on a volunteer basis. She has done an outstanding job of it, and has very much grown our reach and engagement.

C)    Inspiring people to want to get involved

Marinella has been working on ways to encourage members to reach out to friends who might be interested in effective giving and Giving What We Can, since they are our most promising champions. Her plan for what we are currently referring to as ‘activating membership’ can be found here.

D)    Encouraging people to become a part of Giving What We Can

Individual outreach: Marinella has been reaching out individually to people via Facebook who have shown interest in effective giving or effective altruism more generally, in some cases through having attended EA Global and in others through engaging with Giving What We Can’s Facebook page. 100 hours of such outreach resulted in 9 new pledges, 1 Try Giver and 13 newsletter sign-ups. This seems to be a reasonable baseline in terms of the effectiveness of our activities: solidly worth it, but likely not the best we could do. We will continue to do some of this, while simultaneously trying out riskier but potentially higher reward activities.

Going forward, Alison is going to lead the individual outreach team, which both Marinella and Larissa will be on. She will manage both those staff, and will take the lead on figuring out the best ways to nudge people along the pathway to joining. She is in a good position to do this because her engagement with members (through skyping them and being in charge of data gathering / the giving review) means she has a good picture of what things have led people to join or acted as barriers in the past. She doesn’t have previous management experience, but seems well suited to it by her conscientiousness and how well she gets on with people. Over the past month she has been reading on management in preparation.

Pledge event: Between the 10th of December and the 10th of January, we held a pledge drive, learning from the one held by Cambridge students last year. It was relatively successful, with somewhere between 60 and 90 additional people signing the pledge during that period (as well as resulting in a couple of Try Givers), and potentially a spillover effect leading a few additional people later in January taking the pledge. A number of bloggers with high profiles within effective altruism wrote about it. A couple of high profile journalists joined (Dylan Matthews and Derek Thompson). One problem we had early on was finding someone to lead the drive who hadn’t yet taken the pledge themselves. Linchuan Zhang came forward, and took a leading part in the drive on a volunteer basis. He did an amazing job. There is a more thorough review of the event on the EA forum. Overall, this experience indicated that it is useful for us to hold an annual pledge drive, though we likely can’t expect to be quite as successful as the Cambridge one, since one of its great benefits was reaching out to a new group of people who hadn’t yet been much in contact with Giving What We Can.

80,000 Hours pledge drive: 80k did a number of specific calls to action for people to join Giving What We Can, through their blog and newsletter. Around 23 people joined citing 80,000 Hours as one of the ways they had heard about GWWC, and 12 Try Givers.

E) Supporting people to remain long-term active members

Giving What We Can Trust: We have made automated receipts, as we planned to. We have now completed the audit on the Trust. It was more difficult and time consuming than expected. The Trust is going to be treated as controlled by CEA from now on, as per the advice of the auditors. We are currently considering a number of possible options for future plans with the Trust, including how we might be able to entirely automate the accounting, and whether we should dissolve the Trust and simply use CEA itself for the same purpose.

In the US we are likely to start doing a similar thing to the Trust, but using the registered 501(c)3 CEA US.

In Australia, Peter McIntyre and colleagues have set up a foundation which can disburse money to GW and GWWC recommended charities. We’re currently discussing with them linking it to My Giving (probably just by having a button of ‘would you like to record your donation in My Giving?’). Michelle is going to be on the board of Effective Altruism Australia.


Our giving review describes the money we moved over 2014 and pledge fulfilment rate.

Research: Over November Hauke focused on re-evaluating our charity recommendations (although the recommendations were the same as they were previously). He has produced a research framework, and prioritised research areas accordingly. Over December he worked to update the website in the most necessary ways.

We think a promising avenue for GWWC’s research to pursue is providing somewhat bespoke research for high net worth individuals. We have been exploring this possibility in partnership with the Founders’ Pledge. The latter are an organisation which encourages start-up founders to donate a percentage of their proceeds when they exit. FP would like to encourage their founders to give effectively, but also take into account the preferences of the founders themselves. We have so far produced one report for a founder. This seemed to be well received by both the donor and the FP. It was somewhat time consuming to produce, so we would hope to decrease the time spent. We think this is a promising activity because it increases the effectiveness of the donations (which are significant in size). We also think it is important for us as a community to have a thorough and deep knowledge of different cause areas and the effectiveness of charities in them – if we are to ask people to join our community and trust our recommendations, they have a right to expect this – as well as being lively and producing interesting content. Producing reports for HNWs, as long as we only do it for those at least somewhat interested in effectiveness (for example, we would be unlikely to produce reports focused solely on the developed world), will push us to build up a wide-ranging and thorough knowledge of the effectiveness of different interventions. In order for this to be efficient, we will aim for almost all the research we produce for donors to be suitable to go on our website.

Timeline:

September: Marinella joined us part-time on outreach. We held the September internship.

October: Harry Peto worked with us on chapters, we set up a joint chapter project with EAO, and renewed the plans with LEAN and EAF.

November: re-evaluated our charity recommendations

December: Jon organised a number of people to produce videos to nominate AMF for Project for Awesome (it was one of the winners, getting $25,000), the pledge drive began, we fundraised for our operating budget.

January: James joined us, the pledge drive ended, we finished the Trust audit, member dinner.

February: we will be looking to make a decision on moving offices, Larissa will join us, Alison will take over managing individual Outreach, staff retreat.

March: Marinella will become full-time (doing research as well as outreach), effective altruism conference at St Andrews.

Comments from our advisors:

Our advisory board is made up of: Catriona Mackay (civil servant), Luke Ding (investor), Mark Ding (investor) and Anke Hoeffler (development economist).

As this was an informal meeting rather than our yearly review, Anke was not in attendance.


The advisors were overall very pleased with GWWC’s progress over the last 6 months: with our member growth, how the recruiting and fundraising went, and with the updates to the website.


The advisors were keen that we continue to improve data collection and presentation. They appreciate that our yearly reviews use cost per member as a metric (simply got by dividing our budget by number of new members). Over the last 6 months this number was £270 per new member, which compares to £260 per new member over the previous year and £370 over the year before that. We also discussed a number of other figures, such as what percentage of recorded member donations were to the Centre for Effective Altruism (~14%). The underlying figure we were discussing was how our money moved to effective charities is growing compared to our money spent - something like how our leverage ratio is changing. What the most meaningful way of calculating that ratio is, and how much weight to put on it, is an ongoing challenge for us. Similarly, it is an ongoing challenge to find the best ways to tie together our various sources of data (member giving, giving through the trust, website analytics etc) in order to learn the most from them.


Another issue the advisors brought up was getting a diversity of perspectives, whether amongst our staff, advisors, or network as a whole. Our staff are currently all relatively young and all from rich countries (although they do have a fairly broad range of professional backgrounds - anthropology, politics, consultancy, philosophy, neuroscience and sales). This makes it the more important that we have a broad network from whom we can get advice. It was suggested that we should have someone on our advisory board who was from a country one of our recommended charities worked in. Another suggestion was that we should have a list of people we can ask advice from in major bodies whose work is relevant to ours. Hauke has been gradually growing such a network, but we haven’t previously coordinated as much as we could with other members of CEA - we will try to do so in future.


The advisors also had a number of more specific comments about our operations. For example, they suggested adding a tick box to My Giving which would allow people to indicate that they fulfilled their pledge, as an alternative to having to write down their income and donations. At the moment, we don’t have a complete picture of the extent to which it is a barrier for people to sign into My Giving in the first place, to write down their income due to privacy, or simply a hassle to figure out their exact donations and income. At the moment it is still the case that 45% of members have never signed into My Giving, so we think it might be our top priority right now to try to get some information from those members. One possible way to do that would be to simply send an email asking the question ‘Did you fulfil your pledge last year?’ with clickable links for yes or no.


We’re very grateful to them for the time taken in reading over our plans and reviews, and for their advice!


If you have any questions or comments following from this update or about Giving What We Can more generally, do get in touch!

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This is unusually transparent--it reads more like an internal memo than a public post. It's definitely winning you some points in my eyes.

Have you published writeups like this previously? I couldn't find anything on the GWWC website.

Thanks, it's really useful to know you found this valuable! We've done reviews like this most 6 month periods for the last few years. They're linked to from this page. I've tried out a number of different lengths/contents/styles for them - very much a work in progress as to what's most useful both for us and for readers.

You can have some of my points as well. This was super helpful and interesting to read.

Hi Michelle. I finally got around to reading through all of this and the supporting docs. I agree with Michael Dickens that it is awesome to have such a thoroughly transparent document published publicly. I certainly learned a lot about GWWC I didn't know about and it definitely gives me increased confidence in GWWC that you look at yourselves this thoroughly.

I have some questions based on what I've read, if you don't mind:

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and as we go from having two levels of management to three

My understanding of there being three layers of management is that everyone has a boss and then that boss has a boss, and then that boss's boss has a boss. That seems like a lot of bosses for a nine person organization (though it may certainly be warranted if it's best -- promise I'm not judging negatively...) and I'm having a bit of trouble understanding the reporting structure. My guess is that you're at the top, and Jon, Allison, Sam, and Hauke all report to you, and then Marinella and James report to Allison and Larissa reports to Sam? But this sounds like two levels, not three?

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One problem we had early on was finding someone to lead the drive who hadn’t yet taken the pledge themselves.

Why does the person who lead the drive need to have not taken the pledge? Is it because they're inviting other people to take the pledge with them? This sounds like it poses a big barrier to me for future drives and I don't think the value of the "take the pledge with me" theme outweighs the increasing cost.

-

We will continue to do some of this, while simultaneously trying out riskier but potentially higher reward activities.

Oooh... what activities?

-

She is in a good position to do this because her engagement with members (through skyping them and being in charge of data gathering / the giving review) means she has a good picture of what things have led people to join or acted as barriers in the past.

Curious to hear thoughts on what the causes and barriers of joining are. Any plans to write that up?

-

We also think it is important for us as a community to have a thorough and deep knowledge of different cause areas and the effectiveness of charities in them – if we are to ask people to join our community and trust our recommendations, they have a right to expect this – as well as being lively and producing interesting content.

I certainly sympathize with the need to have in-house expertise and I really like the angle of creating reports for HNWs if you think this is leading them to donate a lot more effectively than they would otherwise. But I am concerned about there being a large potential for overlap with GiveWell and I didn't see this discussed that much in the research prioritization doc.

What do you think of this overlap? Is there a concern of duplication of effort? Has there been any serious cost-benefit analysis of what impacts focusing on research has (e.g., found something cool that GiveWell didn't know about, improving the reputation of GWWC which causes more people to take the pledge) against the costs (it seems to be at least 1/6th of GWWC's budget?).

-

Another suggestion was that we should have a list of people we can ask advice from in major bodies whose work is relevant to ours. Hauke has been gradually growing such a network, but we haven’t previously coordinated as much as we could with other members of CEA - we will try to do so in future.

This sounds really cool. Who would you think of reaching out to?

Since you are both an advocacy and research organization, are you trying to build contacts with both or focusing on building contacts in only one of those two areas?

-

Metrics

It's cool to see GWWC publishing metrics and focusing on cohort analysis. I'm still keen to learn more about the retention rate.

I'm curious if you've given any thought to dollar-weighted attrition, where you look at the total amount of money donated in year N divided by the total amount of money pledged in year N-1 for year N. (It's possible this number could be above 100% if people underestimate how much they'll donate.)

I also think there's still a cool project around trying to predict retention using survival analysis, as I mentioned awhile back (point 7). I'll think more about prioritizing this.

Hey Peter, Very glad you found it useful. I'll answer the things I can quickly now, and get back to others later on.

Management levels

Sorry, mispoke - I meant going from me managing everyone on the team, to me managing managers. The structure is: I manage Alison, Jon, Sam and Hauke; they manage Marinella, James and Larissa.

Pledge drive run by a person who hadn't yet taken the pledge

Agree this isn't a decisive consideration, and we were going ahead with Harri as the main lead (who was already a member). Finding Linch was great in terms of him doing amazing work, and had the additional benefit of him not having taken the pledge yet. I do think typically a framing of 'I'm going to do this thing I'm excited about, would you like to join me' is better than 'you should all be doing this thing, why aren't you yet?', but that might well be harder in future - if it is, that definitely won't hinder future pledge drives. It may not be hard in the future though - we do every now and then chat to people who would like to join, but want to find the most impactful time possible to join - them leading a pledge drive is a pretty compelling answer to that.

Other outreach activities

One example we're working on at the moment is working out how we can support our members to be effective champions of GWWC, and reach out to their friends about joining. Getting this kind of chain going could be a really promising growth model. Our planned outreach activities with our estimated priority ranking is here (supporting our members as champions we've been referring to as 'activating membership').

Causes and barriers to joining

She's written a doc on Insights from member skypes in which she describes these (sections 2b-d) qualitatively, and we have a spreadsheet of what things people cited on the join form as how they heard about us. (Note that the latter was just made for our internal use, so is rough rather than explanatory.) Still working out what the most effective ways to summarise and present these things are.

On the last two points:

People to ask advice from

We’d hope to find advisors in both these areas, but we’re particularly interested in advocacy within development and research (where knowledge is fairly easily transferable – our outreach is a bit more different from what others are doing). For example over the last couple of weeks we added someone to our advisory board whose PhD was on schistosomiasis and is about to take up a position working on a Gates foundation project to eliminate STHs, and connected with the person who runs the Emerging Policy, Innovation and Capability unit for the UK Department of international development.

HNW advising

We’ve started this by supporting a large donor who had previously been assessing projects entirely independently, and by working with the Founders’ Pledge. In the former case, it seems we have fairly good reason to think that we have been of genuine help to the person in determining which of the high impact projects considered were the best. As a HNW donor with good connections, he has various projects open to him that aren’t to other donors, and which smaller and more risk averse donors wouldn’t be interested in. He has said that he has found our advice useful. In the latter case, we produced reports like this one on mental health for donors who want to give partly within restricted areas. This collaboration is in early stages, so we don’t yet know to what extent donors will follow our recommendations. But so far donors have seemed grateful for the recommendations and interested in the research, and it seems likely they will follow them. If that’s the case, it would mean money going to our top recommended charities which otherwise almost certainly wouldn’t have, and money going to more effective charities within particular areas than it would otherwise have. Since these donors are donating substantial amounts, they expect more bespoke reports than simply being pointed towards GW’s research. Currently, the reports are somewhat labour intensive to create, though we estimate they are still worth it since each is moving 10s of thousands of dollars. In the future, we can pull together the reports from research we did previously, so we expect it the cost-effectiveness to increase fairly swiftly. This is something we are monitoring carefully however. One expected benefit of this work is simply presenting research in a form that makes it more likely to be acted on. The Founders’ Pledge know their donors well, and seem to think that the reports we produce are the kind that are likely to be acted on. Another benefit is in understanding the overall health sphere well enough to find particular synergies. People often want to help a particular sphere. Since the charities we recommend are the most cost-effective we could find, and helping in very basic ways, there are often synergies that aren’t immediately obvious. For example, as we write about in our mental health report, it seems that the most cost-effective way to reduce epilepsy incidence is actually to prevent malaria, since cerebral malaria causes in the region of a five-fold increase in chance of epilepsy. A similar example: when we’ve looked into cancer, the most cost-effective treatment to cancer we could find was to prevent Vitamin A deficiency, since that causes stomach cancer. In both these cases, this ignores the other benefits of malaria prevention and Vitamin A supplementation. These kinds of cases aren’t just interesting, they are likely to be persuasive to people who might not otherwise have given to such cost-effective charities. In neither of these cases did the points seem to have been made by others, so it does not appear to be a duplication of effort.

Hi Peter,

Thanks for all of your thoughts on this! I can speak a little to the question about metrics:

I'm curious if you've given any thought to dollar-weighted attrition, where you look at the total amount of money donated in year N divided by the total amount of money pledged in year N-1 for year N. (It's possible this number could be above 100% if people underestimate how much they'll donate.)

This isn't something we've used in our impact evaluations since we're missing donation data from around two fifths of our members (though in future we do hope to fill in some of these gaps by making it easier for members to record their donations at the point of donation). This calculation would therefore give us an estimated lower bound % of pledged money that was donated in a given year, but wouldn't give us information about the expected contributions of members for whom we lack data. For what it's worth, I've had a quick look, and, for 2014, 65% of the donations pledged for the year were recorded in My Giving.

It'd be good to hear more about your ideas for a survival analysis. If you have the time feel free to get in touch (alison[dot]woodman[at]givingwhatwecan.org)

Hi Peter,

Thanks for all of your thoughts on this! I can speak a little to the question about metrics:

I'm curious if you've given any thought to dollar-weighted attrition, where you look at the total amount of money donated in year N divided by the total amount of money pledged in year N-1 for year N. (It's possible this number could be above 100% if people underestimate how much they'll donate.)

This isn't something we've used in our impact evaluations, since we are missing donation data from around two fifths of our members. This calculation would give us a lower bound % of pledged money that was donated in a given year, but wouldn't give us information about the missing data. For what it's worth, I've had a quick look, and for the year 2014, 65% of the donations pledged for the year were recorded in My Giving.

It'd be good to hear more about your ideas for a survival analysis. If you have the time feel free to get in touch (alison[dot]woodman[at]givingwhatwecan.org)

Strongly agree with the bit about My Giving at the end. Do you have any insight into the sign-up rates at all? I have two thoughts that might improve it but seem tangentially relevant for people who have literally never signed in. I'll post them anyway:

  1. Recently I was filling in some donations and noticed a bug in how recurring donations are treated; I didn't know who to contact about this and there's nothing on the page pointing me to a feedback form I can fill in. I then forgot about it until reading this post. AFAIK the bug still exists. Obviously most people will never fill in forms, but it's probably worthwhile for the people who will to have easy access to one?

  2. Having some simple way* of uploading multiple donations would save me personally a ton of time. I already keep my donations in a spreadsheet (technically in the UK higher rate taxpayers have to keep records for several years for tax reasons, although I'm sure many don't). and manually transcribing them is time-consuming and error-prone. I can imagine this is tricky though, so it's probably not worth spending time on if nobody else cares.

Hi! Thanks for those ideas. I wasn't quite sure what you meant about insights into sign-up rates? Around 55% of members have recorded at least some information in My Giving, but were you interested in some other question?

  1. Sorry to hear there was a bug. Could you email me details if you still remember what the issue was? (alison.woodman[at]givingwhatwecan.org) Having some easy way for users to feedback seems very sensible - we'll look into adding this
  2. This could be good, though I imagine it would be somewhat trickier. Will add it to our list of potential web improvements. I doubt you'd be the only person who finds this useful, since I know there are other people who keep track in spreadsheets too. Thanks again :)

"In a typical month over 2015 we got 50 new members. That was up from 30 in a typical month during 2014. The pattern for 2015 was something like – Dec and Jan were way up, Feb and March were down, and after that in a typical month we had around 50.

This year, our daily average doesn’t seem to be down much since the pledge drive has finished (10th of Jan), so we hope that Feb will be at least a typical month. But we don’t yet have good evidence for expecting more members in a typical month than 50, which would leave us ~150 members down on our goal. "

To go into a little more detail, I think the pattern is more like:

-Jan 2015 had a lot of people from the tail end of the Cambridge pledge drive.

-February, March 2015 fell back to 2014 levels. So they weren't down so much as more "normal"

-April-November 2015 mostly had ~50 people, with an odd dip in August.

-December 2015, Jan 2016 had 100+ people each.

Thus, I will anticipate that February 2016 should at least be at a typical "month" in 2015, with a decent chance of another permanent increase on # of new members/month before June 2016.

My projection, that I'm willing to bet on:
-at least a 40% chance of GWWC getting 60 new members in Feb 2016.

-at least a 45% chance that GWWC will have more than 1900 members by July 1st.