OFTW strategizes for next phase of growth under funding constraints

By Emma Cameron🔸, Frank Fredericks @ 2024-11-14T16:54 (+10)

One for the World is entering a new period of growth during the second half of the AY2025 fiscal year (July 1, 2024- June 30, 2025), but we have a projected $270k revenue deficit to support us in making that growth a reality.

Open Philanthropy previously supported over 55% of our budget but now covers just 45% of our operating expense budget. We seek to diversify our funding sources and cover our projected revenue shortfall.

We have a new Executive Director, @frankfredericks, who brings a wealth of social entrepreneurship experience, from founding a global nonprofit fighting religious violence to managing a social innovation accelerator. With Frank at the helm, we are working on validating our unique value proposition to direct our growth strategy and have already reoriented ourselves toward our new mission using lean startup methodologies. If we can cover our revenue shortfall, we can more effectively target our unique audience with our value proposition and scale both One for the World and the effective giving movement alongside it.

Our unique audience

One for the World is unique amongst the more established effective giving organizations.

• We have a US-based staff team with the experience and expertise to deliver workplace talks to some of the world's most influential companies.
• We are the only organization that promotes effective giving to university students without an additional focus on other EA cause areas and interventions.
• Our primary staff members live in Wisconsin, New Jersey, and New York, close to some of the largest US metropolitan areas.
• Our new Executive Director has extensive experience delivering hundreds of pitches for his prior organization, World Faith, including a talk at the UN.
• We have previously driven $881k in one-off and recurring donations to GiveWell charities from the results of our workplace talks.

Our unique “on-ramp” for effective giving has resulted in significant results for various communities. Three examples:

• One person heard about OFTW on their college campus and went on to found a new chapter as a law student.
• Another was involved in an MBA chapter before working as a partner at a top consulting firm.
• Another heard about OFTW at a workplace talk and joined us as a volunteer, supporting various projects before moving on to lead chapter efforts at a top business school.

Our value proposition

One for the World is uniquely positioned to introduce people to effective giving who have never heard of the idea, are early in their philanthropic practice, and are unfamiliar with effective altruism more broadly. We see ourselves at the top of the funnel for effective giving, and focused on actively building the market of effective donors. While we are in the process of conducting rigorous problem validation, we do have three key hypotheses about our value proposition:

1. New donors feel overwhelmed by verifying charity impact, so they do less comparative research and give less than they would like to. We answer this by offering an impact-maximizing portfolio to which they can automatically contribute monthly, removing the friction of effective giving.
2. Young donors perceive the world as worsening and feel little power to affect these seemingly negative trends positively. Effective giving offers a way to maximize their sense of agency in an otherwise intractably worsening world.
3. Young professionals, broadly, are suffering from the crisis of loneliness that is so often reported. They hunger for community, and we may be able to meet this need by putting them into a network with others who share their impact-focused values.

Our impact so far

One for the World started as a grassroots organization built by student volunteers in 2014 at the Wharton School of Business. Since then, we have grown to a high point of $1.85m moved annually in AY23, supported by our base of university chapters across the US, Canada, UK, and Australia, and corporate outreach. This was followed by a bounce down to $1.55m moved in AY24. However, we have a growing source of money moved in our focus on company outreach.

Workplace talks have driven substantially more year-on-year effective giving, from $66k in AY21 to $336k in AY24. With a new Executive Director based in New York, in our target market, we are already on track to at least double the number of in-person workplace talks we deliver in AY25. We expect this to contribute to growth in this programming stream towards a vision of corporate ‘ambassadors’ across some of the largest companies in various industries, including consulting, tech, law, and financial firms. To date, we already have an established presence with Microsoft and have delivered or planned to give talks at Bain, BCG, EY, Accenture, Google, Meta, Flatiron Health, Reddit, Bridgewater, and Goldman Sachs, amongst other companies.

Our growth plans

We are currently in the process of developing our growth strategy for the next few years, which includes:

• Identifying, collecting, and analyzing the best metrics, including the cost–per–acquisition, lifetime customer value, and attrition rates, broken down by channel, to guide our strategic decision-making.
• Defining our value proposition, which requires us to work through the problem validation process, where we will figure out who the ideal segment of donors to pursue and what value we can deliver to their donor experience. We will do this through surveys and interviews of current, past, and prospective donors.
• Validating key ways we can solve for our value proposition by validating and invalidating competing growth hypotheses. Our current hypotheses include a donor desire for a community of like-minded people, a more straightforward donation process that makes effective giving accessible and sustainable, and lastly, “agency-maximizing giving,” in which donors give as a way to express their ability to affect change in a world that feels unfixable generally. We are testing these hypotheses in the coming months through community events, exploring new donation platforms, and message testing in direct pledge solicitation marketing.

By the end of the year, we want to have identified our key target segment and primary value proposition with evidence and have an early point of view on what key features in our solution will best meet the donors’ needs.

To this end, we would use marginal funding to:

1. Hire a fourth full-time employee this year who will be primarily focused on implementing our growth strategy, currently under development
2. Expand our corporate workplace events, which is our fastest-growing category of new pledges and money moved
3. Invest in our community and partnership events, which we have identified as a robust prospective growth territory