April

“We monitor our progress closely using a variety of different metrics which we will publicly report on monthly. Additionally we plan on having an internal review of effectiveness every six months, and an external review done every year. This will help us both evaluate our impact and set new goals for the following year. For more information you can contact us and ask specific questions.”


This is our first monthly report under our new name, Charity Science. We summarize our monthly work into three categories: Costs, Outputs, and future improvements we aim to make.

Costs

The major costs of any organization are time and money. The breakdown of our use of time and money are shown below.

Our major cost in running Charity Science is the time our unpaid staff and volunteers are putting in (~343 hours). This has an estimated opportunity cost of between $4,000-$8,000.

As we are a new organization we spent significant time on both networking and operations. In future months we expect they will both take substantially less time. Networking time will likely go down substantially as the staff of Charity Science are moving to a more central location that will reduce travel time to the events. Major operations time was spent setting up the website, registering as a charity, and other one-time logistics that will not happen month to month. 

We expect to see an increase in time spent on events as we are planning a large event in the near future. Next month we expect to spend more time on communications, which includes time spent giving presentations, and coordinating with volunteers. Time spent on emails was not filed exclusively under communications because we currently use an email based task management software which means a large amount of time spent on “emails” is actually a wide range of tasks.

Given that we are currently using only volunteers and unpaid full-time workers, our current financial cost is very low ($98 this month). Depending on our impact in the future we may hire our currently unpaid staff (who will only be able to work a limited time without pay) which will increase this cost substantially. Other costs are mostly fees from going to events and website hosting costs.

Outputs

We track a lot of different outputs but generally prefer the ones that are more directly connected to doing good (e.g. dollars donated to effective charities is better then website traffic).

Below are the outputs we tracked:

Money moved to evidence based charities: $1,080 this month

• We count money moved to effective charities only if we are extremely confident the money was donated due to activities done by Charity Science or our unpaid charity science staff and would not have been donated to evidence based charities otherwise. 
  
• We expect this number to trend upwards in the future particularly after our fundraising event.
  
• We view this as our most important metric

Number of new volunteers: 2 new volunteers, 9 total. 

• We expect to slowly and consistently increase our total number of volunteers

Events: 11 attended, 0 hosted

• We expect to host more events in the future (between 1-5 a month)

Website traffic: ~150 views

• As our website was not public we got virtually no views, just some from people we individually linked our website to.

Information gained: Events, Copyright

• We learned substantially more about running fundraising events via talking to experts, and about which events are best to attend to meet like-minded people via trial and error. 
  
• We learned somewhat more about copyrighting when creating our new website.

Other:

• We made progress on planning our event.
  
• We applied for tax deductible charity status.
  
• We set up both a website, social accounts, and a branding for our private foundation, and for Charity Science.
  
• We set up new time tracking tags and labels.
  
• We tested and rejected several different task management and CRM systems.
  

Improvements

• Coordinate volunteers better, specifically setting up a weekly volunteer day.
  
• Getting more value out of our time spent networking.
  
• Running and recording at least one presentation next month to test out both our brand, and our presentation style.
  
• Publishing more content that we have already written up in the form of blog posts.
  
• Efficiently use a CRM system or spreadsheet equivalent.