Networking Experiment
Initial research
Our research shows that networking is one of the most effective ways to meet like-minded people who might be interested in collaborating or financially supporting various projects.
Hypotheses
If we go to a large number of networking events this will:
- Increase the number of people supporting evidence-based charities.
- Connect us to individuals and communities passionate about the same things.
Methodology
We will go to several events, conferences, and meetups and track the amount of time and money we spend.
We suspect measuring the complete impact of these activities will be challenging; however, we will be running a large donation match at the end of the year which we hope will be able to capture some of the impact in terms of dollars donated to effective charities.
We suspect measuring the complete impact of these activities will be challenging; however, we will be running a large donation match at the end of the year which we hope will be able to capture some of the impact in terms of dollars donated to effective charities.
Results
We estimate that we spent around 40%-50% of our time over 6 months on networking, communications related networking, and networking related research, planning etc. This means that it took about 3 months of full time work. In that time we went to around 65 events of all different forms. We hosted around 10 events (excluding the Charity Science Walk) and estimate that we spent around $500-$1,000, not including staff costs, on both hosting (excluding the Charity Science Walk) and attending events (including traveling costs).
Networking raised $9,680, the vast majority of which came from our pre-existing networks. We suspect that the donors will continue to support evidence-based charities, creating a higher net return over time. We also suspect that a large amount of the donations (more than half) raised by our personal birthday fundraisers and the event were due to networking.
Networking raised $9,680, the vast majority of which came from our pre-existing networks. We suspect that the donors will continue to support evidence-based charities, creating a higher net return over time. We also suspect that a large amount of the donations (more than half) raised by our personal birthday fundraisers and the event were due to networking.
Conclusion
We found the results of networking to be highly unpredictable. Overall, while networking showed some promise it was far too slow though it seems plausible that other types of networking could be more efficient. We feel that in the future we would need a more consistent and slightly modified strategy, which connects people to Charity Science rather than us as individuals, and which is substantially more time-effective. Nonetheless, we think that our previous view that networking leads to a wide variety of subtle and scattered benefits is still true.
One benefit of networking was that it allowed us to meet quite a few people who were interested in Charity Science, many of whom later donated during the event and birthday fundraisers. We also gained many side benefits that cannot easily be quantified, such as volunteers, presentation audiences, and guest blog posts.
We found that although our ability to predict which events would have people who were interested in effective giving was quite good, our ability to predict which individuals would give or volunteer was quite poor. Due to this we are more inclined to follow a broader outreach strategy and not focus as much on individuals who seem promising but have not yet made a donation.
You can learn more about what types of events we found most useful here and see a more complete breakdown of our results and conclusions here.
One benefit of networking was that it allowed us to meet quite a few people who were interested in Charity Science, many of whom later donated during the event and birthday fundraisers. We also gained many side benefits that cannot easily be quantified, such as volunteers, presentation audiences, and guest blog posts.
We found that although our ability to predict which events would have people who were interested in effective giving was quite good, our ability to predict which individuals would give or volunteer was quite poor. Due to this we are more inclined to follow a broader outreach strategy and not focus as much on individuals who seem promising but have not yet made a donation.
You can learn more about what types of events we found most useful here and see a more complete breakdown of our results and conclusions here.