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SHIC has released an Interim report detailing our progress through 2016. Read the Executive Summary below, or view the full report here.
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This report comes following the close of our first semester of operation, four months after the organization secured target funding to continue testing pilot programs through to 2017. Since the soft launch in March 2016, we have seen encouraging levels of uptake and largely positive feedback about the influence of our program. While more pilot testing is necessary in order to make definitive judgements on SHIC as a whole, we feel that we have gathered enough data to guide strategic changes to this exceedingly novel project.
As of December 2016, approximately 750 students have participated in 1500 program hours. More than 200 students have completed the entire SHIC pilot, and the program prompted just over $1500 USD to high-impact charity in its first fundraising cycle. An estimated 50 operations volunteers have put in 3,300 hours of work into bringing SHIC to students worldwide.
The majority of qualitative responses and self-reported interim survey data indicated notable changes in perspective and intended behavior among SHIC leaders and operations volunteers. This bodes well for our ‘volunteering as outreach’ strategy. Any trends we’ve observed, however, are not yet backed to a meaningful degree of statistical significance. Early data from the before-after participant survey are encouraging and provide an added level of quantitative rigor.
We achieved our outreach goals, underestimated program exposure, overestimated potential fundraising totals, stalled on school accreditation, and postponed plans for revenue generation. The novelty of SHIC made for tricky forecasting, and while we feel the program outperformed in many ways, missing some of our metrics warrants a reevaluation.
Quantitative and qualitative feedback has informed several strategic adjustments. We’re implementing a more coherent framework for volunteer engagement, restructuring the entire curriculum development process, and weighting direct outreach strategies differently than before.
The apparent demand for SHIC worldwide has been encouraging thus far. SHIC is currently represented by students in more than a dozen countries, and we’ve collected survey data that indicates further demand for this program elsewhere. Roughly half of ambassadors and operations volunteers found out about SHIC through volunteer websites unrelated to the effective altruism community, which speaks to the program’s broad appeal.
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Read the rest of the report here. Feedback and questions are welcome! Thanks to the EA community for helping us get this far!
[minor] In the sentence, "While more pilot testing is necessary in order to make definitive judgements on SHIC as a whole, we feel that we have gathered enough data to guide strategic changes to this exceedingly novel project." "exceedingly novel" seems like a substantial exaggeration to me. There have been EA student groups, and LEAN, before (as you know), as well as inter-school groups for many different causes.
I see where you're coming from. When we wrote this I think we were referring to the fact that there don't seem to be any clubs or programs at the high school level that have the same goals as SHIC, and that we're feeling like we're in uncharted territory as we've been reaching out to these institutions, teachers and students, mainly because building a curriculum into the network seems like a new approach.
In any case, that's not well explained in the document, and I don't think that sentence gives off the message we want it to, so I'll strongly consider editing. Thanks!