All of aliwoodman's Comments + Replies

Hi Bernadette,

We’re sorry that our communication on this has not been clear enough. We were waiting on some technical details so that we could infor Trust users of the exact changes and what they needed to do in advance but now I’ll communicate what we can today while Larissa Hesketh-Rowe is also going to email Giving What We Can members to make sure everyone is included.

In terms of the Trust we are moving all of the functionality the Trust had over to EA Funds which we believe will ultimately be a much better platform both for users and for us in terms of... (read more)

Hi Rohin, great question! Since Giving What We Can outreach is now managed by the wider Community and Outreach team at CEA it might make sense to speak in terms of our team as a whole.

Based on the figures we have, it seems reasonable that CEA activities were at least partially responsible for something like 70% of new pledges in September. We experimented with a number of new strategies to get additional pledges in September, including optimising our email and social media campaigns and running a Facebook retargeting campaign. We also tried to reduce the a... (read more)

Thanks for the writeup! Really interesting to get a better picture of this.

Just to add some extra info about the effects of EA Global and 'Doing Good Better' and Singer's TED talk on GWWC member growth. It's true EA Global last year didn't lead to new members straight away, but 2 people joined later in the year citing EA Global as a way they first heard about Giving What We Can. In addition, after following up with participants individually, 7 took the pledge.

'Doing Good Better' has had a much bigger effect. 72 of the members who have signed up since July... (read more)

Hi Peter,

Thanks for all of your thoughts on this! I can speak a little to the question about metrics:

I'm curious if you've given any thought to dollar-weighted attrition, where you look at the total amount of money donated in year N divided by the total amount of money pledged in year N-1 for year N. (It's possible this number could be above 100% if people underestimate how much they'll donate.)

This isn't something we've used in our impact evaluations since we're missing donation data from around two fifths of our members (though in future we do hope t... (read more)

Hi Peter,

Thanks for all of your thoughts on this! I can speak a little to the question about metrics:

I'm curious if you've given any thought to dollar-weighted attrition, where you look at the total amount of money donated in year N divided by the total amount of money pledged in year N-1 for year N. (It's possible this number could be above 100% if people underestimate how much they'll donate.)

This isn't something we've used in our impact evaluations, since we are missing donation data from around two fifths of our members. This calculation would give... (read more)

Hi! Thanks for those ideas. I wasn't quite sure what you meant about insights into sign-up rates? Around 55% of members have recorded at least some information in My Giving, but were you interested in some other question?

1. Sorry to hear there was a bug. Could you email me details if you still remember what the issue was? (alison.woodman[at]givingwhatwecan.org) Having some easy way for users to feedback seems very sensible - we'll look into adding this
2. This could be good, though I imagine it would be somewhat trickier. Will add it to our list of potential w

Hi again! I've now had a look at this - for the cohorts who joined before 2013 it looks like 30% of those who reported meeting their pledge in 2014 had not reported meeting their pledge in 2013. So this shows that just because someone didn't report their donations in 2013 doesn't mean they didn't the following year. I have added a breakdown of this in the 2014 cohort document. (NB I also made some very small corrections to the 2013 cohort info, which slightly increased the numbers for 'people who recorded some income and donation data' and changed the median %'s donated)

Here is the cohort information for 2013

Hi Peter, I don't yet but am working on it: I'll post them here when they're done :)

Hi, Just to add to this, here is a link to a document I made with the sort of data you suggested sharing in the conversation earlier this year about cohort data. (Some of this is already contained in the Giving Review but I've presented it by cohort to hopefully make it easy to read). I agree that it's useful to collect and share, so thank you for the prompt!

Hi Alasdair, The question of whether this group represents a good source of potential members is something we plan to look into in the New Year when we have increased our staff.

However, if it turns out this is not the case, I'm not sure that this should worry us. It could be for instance that they are simply a somewhat different demographic than most of our members meaning they're less likely to feel able to commit 10%, but nevertheless have taken onboard and acted on ideas about charity effectiveness. In any case it seems to make sense that there would o... (read more)

This looks really interesting, thanks for sharing! Does anyone know anything about the UK equivalents? A quick search suggests they're not quite at the same level yet, but I'd be interested in people's views on them.

Hi Evan, I'm afraid I don't know that much about that. I'd imagine it would depend on what types of events they're running, how many people come along to these and how many people within the group have already taken the pledge. I think that EA involves thinking about a lot of different ideas, often quite theoretically, which is great, but for some people it's important to also have some clear call to action/emphasis on things they can do in practice, so talking about the pledge could be valuable.

Nice update! :) Just one small suggestion - It might be nice to have either an explanation or a link somewhere to the post introducing the concept of impact purchasing for anyone who is new to the idea.

You can also 'invite' people to join the group rather than add them straight to it - perhaps a bit less jarring this way, especially with a bit of PM explanation

Thanks for this! Do you know how many respondents there were for each poll?

Hi. I recently joined Giving What We Can as Director of Community and am very happy to answer member-related questions!

Of the 83 people who became members between Dec 2014 - Jan 2015 after clicking 'attend' or 'maybe' on the Facebook event, 7 of these have said upon joining that they intend to give to non-poverty causes. There are an additional 7 members or so who joined during that period (bearing in mind the pledge change happened in early December) who also said they intend to give to non-poverty causes.

So it seems the spike over Dec-Jan is attributabl... (read more)