WHAT WE DO AND WHY
WHY CHARITY SCIENCE
Multiplier
The reason we started Charity Science was because we could multiply our impact if we fundraised more money than we spent. Historically we have raised $9 for every dollar spent, although we expect that this will vary significantly from experiment to experiment.
Fundraising is neglected because charities fear overheadWe benefit charities because they often dislike spending money on fundraising due to the stigma society associates with overhead. Since we are a separate organization, we boost their fundraising without affecting their overhead ratios, and our own donors are effective altruists (EAs) who care about efficiency, not overhead.
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Learning value
Most information available on fundraising has no evidence behind it, usually lacking even a single supporting anecdote. It also rarely mentions failures, giving a very lopsided view of a method's effectiveness. On top of all that, it does not make comparisons to other fundraising techniques.
This last problem is perhaps the most significant since, most charities cannot employ all fundraising techniques and therefore must prioritize. To remedy this and help the whole EA community, we have done shallow reviews on all of the most promising fundraising techniques, found the most scientific information available for them, and then ranked them. Over 100 pages of free, publicly shared lessonsWe also strive to post all of the lessons we've learned in our monthly reports and board meeting minutes. This way the whole EA community can learn along with us about what works and, just as importantly, what doesn't.
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Flexibility
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Many charities have a brittle model for doing good, but we want to be able to adjust quickly based on new information, so we have structured our organization to maximize robustness. If GiveWell finds new evidence showing that another charity is more cost-effective, Charity Science can simply fundraise for the new charity. This also applies for fundraising techniques. If one method does not raise enough counterfactual money per dollar spent, the organization can easily pivot and experiment with another method.
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HOW WE RUN CHARITY SCIENCE
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Experimental ModelMany organizations invest so much into a project that they become fixated on it and afraid to admit failure, developing rationalisations to claim it as a success. To avoid this we publicly commit to what results would compel us to a) shut down the experiment, b) maintain the experiment, or c) expand the experiment.
We genuinely see shutting down an experiment as a valuable learning experience rather than something to be avoided at all costs. This is why we chose a person to do an external review of Charity Science based on the fact that he had (correctly) criticized us in the past. We hope that he will be able to see things we are doing wrong so that we can correct our course and better help the world.
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TransparentBecause transparency is the source of improvement, we publish:
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Cost-effectiveWe make money go a very long way. In 2014 we spent $16,000 for two full time staff and one part time staff, and in 2015 we had a budget of $57,000 for five full-time staff and one part-time staff. We accomplish this by hiring exceptionally dedicated staff and our president, Joey, not taking a salary.
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* Money moved, ratios, and net money moved for 2015 and 2016 are estimates
Our Time
We track our organization’s time closely so that we can know which experiments take the most time and which are the most effective to work on. Our breakdown of time spent in 2014 and 2015 can be seen below.
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Our Results
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WHO WE ARE
The Founders
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Katherine and Joey Savoie are the co-founders and co-executive directors of Charity Science. They met in 2011 and very quickly discovered that they shared a passion for science and helping the world as much as possible. Subsequently, they worked at 80,000 Hours and Giving What We Can. In their spare time, they initiated, designed, and helped run the first randomized controlled trial in the effective animal rights movement. Afterwards, they started Charity Science. They live in Vancouver in an apartment building filled with effective altruists, eating vegan food, obeying the demands of Beeminder, and watching copious amounts of documentaries.
CHARITY SCIENCE GOING FORWARD
Experiments in the Next Year
Legacy Fundraising
Legacy fundraising involves helping people put charities into their wills. It has the highest fundraising ratios of any technique. The average fundraising ratio for all fundraising techniques is 4:1, grant writing has the second highest ratio at 8:1, and legacy fundraising’s ratio is 22:1. We will make an interactive guide which we will feature prominently in the EA community.
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Niche Marketing
Raising for Effective Giving, which was founded by the EA organization GBS, achieved a ROI of 1054% by appealing to the specific demographic of poker players. Given their success, we want to see if this can apply to other audiences, such as programmers or financiers.
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Online Advertising
We have a Google grant which gives us $120,000 per year in online advertising, and GiveWell has previously said that online advertising has had one of their highest ROIs for outreach. We will experiment with this as a donor acquisition strategy due to its low time and money cost.
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Long Term Goals
Our long term goal is to move one million dollars to effective charities every year and to experiment with all of the most promising fundraising areas, writing detailed reports on what we learn. We hope to do this on a yearly budget of $100,000 (CAD). All money moved numbers past 2014 are estimates, as are all budgets past 2015.
