Monthly Report - September 2015

​Money Moved Update
Portion of money moved that went through Charity Science’s account: $4000 in the last month (This does not include fundraisers on the AMF platform or in the US or matching funds, among other sources. Counterfactuals are currently very rough approximations and will be updated more precisely at the end of the year.)


Hiring / Training Update

• Marcus (internship) - great as expected
• Luan (Lune) - Offered a permanent position this month
• Armando (VA) - working pretty well so far

External Review Update
Our first choices for reviewers, Ben Kuhn and Jonas M, were too busy and declined.  GiveWell was skeptical that the external review would be worth our time, as it would be hard to find someone who has enough available time and is sufficiently skilled.

Could we get a new hire to do it?  Probably too much bias, since they’d be in a trial and want to get hired.

Could we reach out to the EA community?  Yes, but we might not get someone aligned similarly enough in values. However, this seems like the best next step.

Could Joey do it?  He’s critical, but still too internal and likely biased.

Housing / Office Update
New office/house space that will be 100% office and made up to look like that.

Online Ads Update
Past impact of online advertising was found to be small. Only ~$300 could be traced to it from one person running a P2P event.

Kieran contacted Kyle Scott and got some good ideas. Explored outsourcing and listed a volunteer project on Google’s volunteer network. None of these options came to much.  Kieran is now Adwords Certified.

Click Through rate in Adwords is now over 1%. It was 0.8% and is now ~1.35%.  Other organizations are also around 1%.  We are on track to get the Ad Grants for March of next year. Recently, we had the first ever newsletter sign up from Adwords.

Improving the tracking of online advertising has been stalled. E-commerce tracking requires coding skills that we don’t have at the moment. Switching to Stripe will be time consuming and difficult to set up. There is no point setting it up now if we are just going to switch to Chimp.

Moving forward, Kieran is going to start AB testing on landing pages and otherwise see if there are changes that can be made to our site to optimize it. Kieran is also interested in contacting top charities and/or GW to see if they will let us take a look at their Adwords to help them optimize their accounts.

Legacy Fundraising Update
​Kieran has created basic landing pages for the campaign on our website (see here and here).

He also wrote three posts about the campaign and has created an MVP will software/system that many people have already used.

General promotion will continue.


Niche Marketing Update

1. Chose niche market (skeptics)
   
   
   1. Made a spreadsheet showing all of the strengths and weaknesses of each target market, and weighing how much each consideration mattered. Skeptics came out ahead of everything except income, and even then they were on par with programmers.
      
      
   2. Interviewed multiple programmers, financiers, and skeptics to get a sense of the market.
      
      

1. Started implementation
   
   
   1. Generated potential outreach strategies, ran them by multiple people, then came up with the plan of doing the following strategies in order, as many as capacity allows.
      
      
      1. online blogs - Atheist Republic and Huffington Post
         
         
      2. conference

b) Started making the website. Chose to do lean startup model for ask, where people don’t immediately sign up for monthly donations; we simply get their name, number, and email address so we can do the stewardship experiment. We’ll only set up the monthly donations if enough people sign up for it to be worth our time to make a really nice signup sheet.

c)Secured interview with a prominent skeptic who could potentially be a celebrity to promote the site. He has 169,000 followers on Twitter and often speaks about science-based morality, so he has the potential to help us grow bigger much quicker.

Operation Update
Luan is doing well. It looks like we are on pace to do everything that needs to be done.  

Have recently given a $75K grant to AMF and a $25K grant to SCI.

Experience Poverty update
Total money moved: ~$47K ($25k after some adjusting for counterfactuals)

Changes on the Board
Proposal: Change Peter Hurford’s Title from “Board Coordinator” to “Vice Chair” - Vote passes (6-0)

Process for people applying to join the board (This person wants to join)

• Another idea: Advisory Board
  • Would not come to regular board meetings, but could provide advice
  • Still give people formal connection / affiliation
  • Yearly evaluations
  • Can be voted in or out by normal board

Proposal: Add Marcus Davis to the Board (5 in favor, 1 abstention)

How often to have board meetings? QUARTERLY (6-0)