In July, One for the World hired its first full time member of staff, following a generous grant from the Open Philanthropy Project and a private donor, on the recommendation of GiveWell. I posted about that on the EA forum here. We just posted an update on our website about our growth in the first 6 months since our first hire, from July-Dec 2018.
The headline figures from this report are copied below:
- The 'annual donations in the pipeline' recruited so far this academic year is up ~500% relative to the same time last year ($404k vs $70k). However, ~40% of the new dollars recruited will only become active after 1-3 years, which presents challenges in limiting donor churn. Taking this delay and historical rates of churn into account, we estimate that the expected present discounted value of these pledges is about $1.1m.
- We think that this step change in growth is a direct result of increasing our capacity by hiring Evan in July 2018, which has allowed us to expand the number of chapters we have, improve chapter management and focus on improving OFTW's donation infrastructure.
- Our members have donated ~$110k to our charities in the first half of the year (July - Dec 2018), compared to ~$67k in the same period last year (July - Dec 2017).
We think this strong growth in pledged donations is a direct result of hiring full time staff, and are now looking to transition from our current volunteer leadership team to one or more full time founding executive directors to help scale the organisation. We're looking for people interested in taking on this project on a full time basis, and taking OFTW to the next level. If this interests you, please check out more details of what we're looking for here.
Hi Aaaron,
I'm currently the chair of OFTW's volunteer group so hopefully can help answer this. I'll take your questions together as they're related.
On the current giving as % of income rate: There's a chart of our progress on this over time about half way down the post. This year, about half of donors are giving at least 0.9% of their income.
On average all time the proportion would be lower than this. This is an area where we're making progress by a) better understanding our donor base (what makes them resistant to giving more?) b) better training / equipping our campus leaders to ask their classmates to make a larger pledge (our chapter leader training has materially improved on this front) and c) improving our donation platform settings and defaults.
We have a small (single digit) number of donors who have given meaningfully more than this as a result of OFTW. We've done some small experiments aimed at getting existing donors to increase their pledges, but haven't had much success and haven't prioritized this as much as we have training new chapter leaders and increasing our penetration rates in existing chapters.
Ultimately getting people acculturated to thoughtful, effective giving is the near term goal, because if we build that habit it gives us a platform for bigger asks. If you think about the long term there are two potential prizes: 1) get a generation of people to give to effective causes and to give more, earlier than they otherwise would, and 2) get people to give more effectively on the path they would've otherwise followed (e.g. once someone is mid career and would normally give to their alma mater, give to AMF). Clearly 1) is a much bigger, more valuable change, and we want to work out how to do it. But preserving a relationship and building affinity over time also keeps 2) alive as an option, which is valuable.
Steve