Giving What We Can's 6 monthly update

By Michelle_Hutchinson @ 2016-02-09T20:19 (+15)

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:

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!