Giving What We Can recently celebrated its 5th birthday. It's not much of a party if no-one external congratulates you, so here we go: Happy Birthday, GWWC!
It's pretty impressive how much GWWC has grown since those early days. Here's a chart of total membership, which I've put together from GWWC emails and liberal use of the internet archive. I'm sure they have better data (without gaps!) internally, but I've never seen this chart before. Notably, growth seems to have picked up since the fall of 2013. Did GWWC change their strategy at that point? (or their membership-counting-methodology?)
Putting the same chart on a log scale, we can see that GWWC have actually done a reasonably good job of sustaining exponential growth.
Fitting a line of best fit to the chart, I estimate GWWC's membership is growing 73.1% a year. Assuming 2% population growth, it will take just 30.25 years before all the world's population are GWWC members. Taking over the world by the time I'm 58 sounds like pretty good going!
Happy Birthday, Giving What We Can!
edit: formatting of links
A couple of reasons for thinking that having full-time staff had this delayed effect are that we were trying out a variety of strategies, and that our ‘ask’ is quite large, and hence it can take a while from people first hearing about us to actually wanting to join. For the first few months of having staff, we were working on a redo of the website, particularly branding and introducing a blog. When we launched that, web-traffic doubled. We then focused on a media push, which led to us being on NPR, BBC and mass media in January. That led to quite a bump in web-traffic, but not an increase in membership. At that point we pivoted to being more focused on the pathway to membership – to try to increase the number of people getting from initially hearing about us and reading the website to actually joining. This involved a number of things – for example improving the pathway through the website and trying out different ways of reaching out to people. It seems likely that the increasing rate in 2013 was (at least to some degree) a confluence of our focus on increased first contacts in late 2012, and on conversions in early 2013.
As someone who was heavily involved in GWWC over that period, I think the explanation that we got much better at converting staff hours into new members is a large part of the explanation for membership growth suddenly rising much faster from mid-2013.
The package of things we were working on before that wasn't so effective at getting people all the way to joining.
The other contributing factor is probably a growing general interest in effective altruism (for which GWWC can claim some but certainly not all of the credit).