July - Monthly Report

“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.”

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 staff and volunteers are putting in.

Time Information

We had around 260 hours of work which is lower than our average month. This was due to some personal and organizational factors. Although this month did not feel particularly productive our outputs were better than normal. We think this is due to slowly building up networks and receiving the first donations for the Charity Science walk.

Money Information

Staff cost is approximately $2,000 per month. Our current financial cost outside of staff cost is very low (~$55 this month). Costs are mostly fees from going to events and website hosting costs. We did not even feel it was worth the time to make the chart for this small a sum of money. 

Outputs

We track many different outputs but generally prefer the ones that are more directly connected to doing good (e.g. dollars donated to effective charities is better than website traffic). We feel this month we did much better overall than our average month. 

Below are the outputs we tracked:

Money moved to evidence based charities: $1800+ (not including match)

• We count money moved to effective charities only if we are extremely confident that the money was donated due to activities done by Charity Science.
  
• 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: 1 new volunteer, 10 total. 
Events: 11 attended, 1 hosted

• We attended far more events due to our new location
  

Website traffic: ~820 sessions

• Even though we did not get featured in any large blog, our traffic remained as high as last month. 
  

Other

• We coordinated with Peter H to make a page on birthday fundraisers
  
• We advised on a research project on corporate giving.
  
• We sent in the paperwork for nonprofit status (different from charitable status)
  
• We successfully acquired some of the operations funding we were seeking

Improvements

Last month

• Gain some more funding for our personal expenses. We contacted funders and were able to acquire $7,000 of the $12,000 we were seeking. We also have a contact who will donate a sum at a later date (that we hope will cover most of our remaining needs.)
• All charity paperwork has been sent off and is pending.
  
• We have confirmed the data and charity for our event (September 14th and Evidence Action!)

This month

• Set up a way to track where people go when they leave our website (specifically to determine how many go to GiveWell/proven charities)
  
• Write up some blog posts on what we've learned about networking
• Get 20+ people to join the Charity Science Walk
• Set up our mailing list so volunteers can sign up to the volunteer email list automatically