I have just published an article about effective donations on the online newspaper of my former university. I have already shared it in some groups, but was wondering about how cost-effective would it be to promote it via personal messages. As I could not find much information about this topic, I decided to share some thought here.
Cost-effectiveness considerations:
- Writing personalised messages tends to increase the impact per message, but increases the cost (time) per message.
- Thinking about the people to which sending the messages could be more impactful increases the impact per message, but also increases the cost per message.
- Intuitively, I would expect most of the impact to come from a minority of people who would not be easy to identify a priori.
- Consequently, cost-effectively selecting the targets seems hard.
- What does a good standardised message look like?
- If the same standardised message is sent to most people, writing a longer message does not significantly increase the cost.
- It seems possible that the cost-effectiveness is maximised for some degree of personalisation.
- Organisations looking for applications often send emails which contain the name of the recipient.
Example of impact required per message:
- I estimated (via testing it) that I could send standardised Facebook messages at a speed of about 10 per minute, i.e. 600 per hour.
- This means that, if I value my time at 6 € of effective donations per hour, the expected impact per message should be at least 0.01 € for sending messages to be effective.
- An expected impact of 0.01 € per message could be thought of as the recipients of the personal messages having:
- Probability (p(V)) of 10 % of viewing the article.
- Probability (p(P|V)) of 1 % of being persuaded to make effective donations given that they view the article.
- Expected donation (D) of 10 € given that they are persuaded to make effective donations.
- No expected counterfactual donation (CD) if they had not received the personal message.
- (A Monte Carlo simulation might be useful to model the effect of these factors.)
- It is unclear to me whether this is feasible.
- I published an article about the book "The Life You Can Save" on the same online newspaper about 1 year ago. Based on the results of a linked questionnaire, from the people who viewed the article:
- 2 % (17/800) said they would make a donation to an organisation recommended by The Life You Can Save or GiveWell.
- 2 % (19/800) said they would establish a monthly donation to an organisation recommended by The Life You Can Save or GiveWell.
- I expect these results to overestimate the impact of the article.
- I think people tend to overestimate their future altruistic intentions.
- I guess p(P|V) and D (see above) would be smaller for the recipients of my personal messages than for the people who viewed the article about TLYCS.
- People who viewed the article about TLYCS had some interest in it.
Any comments would be welcome!
