EA - GWWC's 2020–2022 Impact evaluation (executive summary) by Michael Townsend

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: GWWC's 2020–2022 Impact evaluation (executive summary), published by Michael Townsend on March 31, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Giving What We Can (GWWC) is on a mission to create a world in which giving effectively and significantly is a cultural norm. Our research recommendations and donation platform help people find and donate to effective charities, and our community — in particular, our pledgers — help foster a culture that inspires others to give.In this impact evaluation, we examine GWWC's cost-effectiveness from 2020 to 2022 in terms of how much money is directed to highly effective charities due to our work.We have several reasons for doing this:To provide potential donors with information about our past cost-effectiveness.To hold ourselves accountable and ensure that our activities are providing enough value to others.To determine which of our activities are most successful, so we can make more informed strategic decisions about where we should focus our efforts.To provide an example impact evaluation framework which other effective giving organisations can draw from for their own evaluations.This evaluation reflects two months of work by the GWWC research team, including conducting multiple surveys and analysing the data in our existing database. There are several limitations to our approach — some of which we discuss below. We did not aim for a comprehensive or “academically” correct answer to the question of “What is Giving What We Can’s impact?” Rather, in our analyses we are aiming for usefulness, justifiability, and transparency: we aim to practise what we preach and for this evaluation to meet the same standards of cost-effectiveness as we have for our other activities.Below, we share our key results, some guidance and caveats on how to interpret them, and our own takeaways from this evaluation. GWWC has historically derived a lot of value from our community’s feedback and input, so we invite readers to share any comments or takeaways they may have on the basis of reviewing this evaluation and its results, either by directly commenting or by reaching out to [email protected] resultsOur primary goal was to identify our overall cost-effectiveness as a giving multiplier — the ratio of our net benefits (additional money directed to highly effective charities, accounting for the opportunity costs of GWWC staff) compared to our operating costs.We estimate our giving multiplier for 2020–2022 is 30x, and that we counterfactually generated $62 million of value for highly effective charities.We were also particularly interested in the average lifetime value that GWWC contributes per pledge, as this can inform our future priorities.We estimate we counterfactually generate $22,000 of value for highly effective charities per GWWC Pledge, and $2,000 per Trial Pledge.We used these estimates to help inform our answer to the following question: In 2020–2022, did we generate more value through our pledges or through our non-pledge work?We estimate that pledgers donated $26 million in 2020–2022 because of GWWC. We also estimate GWWC will have caused $83 million of value from the new pledges taken in 2020–2022.We estimate GWWC caused $19 million in donations to highly effective charities from non-pledge donors in 2020–2022.These key results are arrived at through dozens of constituent estimates, many of which are independently interesting and inform our takeaways below. We also provide alternative conservative estimates for each of our best-guess estimates.How to interpret our resultsThis section provides several high-level caveats to help readers better understand what the results of our impact evaluation do and don’t communicate about our impact.We generally looked at average rather than marginal cost-effectivenessMost of our ...