May - 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 unpaid staff and volunteers are putting in (~280 hours). This has an estimated opportunity cost of between $4,000 and $8,000. 

Our major time costs were communications, networking, and operations. Communications involved making and giving presentations, writing blog posts, and working on building our email list. Networking involves attending events to meet like-minded people who become volunteers, donors, and supporters. Operations involves website building, budgeting, setting up time tracking systems, writing this report, and several other things.

Given that we are currently only using volunteers and unpaid employees our current financial cost is very low ($80 this month). Costs are mostly fees from going to events and website hosting costs. 

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 was less effective overall than last month. Two major factors that affected this were 1) that a sickness took out almost a full week each of work time from our two staff and 2) that our staff moved this month (largely to be closer to fundraising opportunities). Both of these took considerable time and energy and affected our work hours.

Below are the outputs we tracked:

1. Money moved to evidence based charities: $0 this month

• 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 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.
  

2. Number of new volunteers: 0 new volunteers, 9 total. 
3. Events: 3 attended, 2 hosted

• We attended far fewer events, because this was the final month in which we would be living very far away from most of them. This meant that it would be much more effective to attend events after our move.
  
• We hosted two weekly volunteering sessions.
  

4. Website traffic: ~2,000 unique views

• We suspect this number is overstated (as it was much higher than we expected) and have switched to a more accurate tracking system for future months.
  

5. Information gained: Events

• We learned substantially more about running fundraising events via volunteering at a very successful fundraising walk.
  

6. Other

• We got a match of $70,000 that will double funds raised by Charity Science to top charities. This will also allow us to track our impact better.
  
• We made progress on building our email list.

Improvements

Last month's

• Coordinate volunteers better, specifically setting up a weekly volunteer day. (Complete)
  
• Getting more value out of our time spent networking. (Completed via moving closer)
  
• Running and recording at least one presentation next month to test out both our brand, and our presentation style. (Incomplete but arranged for the first week of next month)
  
• Publishing more content that we have already written up in the form of blog posts. (Lots of content edited but not yet published)
  
• Efficiently use a CRM system or spreadsheet equivalent (Moved to next month)
  

Next month's

• Set up a clear way of tracking task progress (similar to the grants tracking sheet we used when writing grants)
  
• This will help us share more information in an easy way about our progress in various tasks.
  
• Efficiently use a CRM system or spreadsheet equivalent
  
• Determine if volunteer days would be better or worse than more general socials.