EA - Fundraising Campaigns at Your Organization: A Reliable Path to Counterfactual Impact by High Impact Professionals

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Fundraising Campaigns at Your Organization: A Reliable Path to Counterfactual Impact, published by High Impact Professionals on September 7, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. TL;DR Running a fundraising campaign at your workplace can be a highly effective way to multiply your impact. In 2021, High Impact Professionals (“HIP”) supported EAs in organizing 8 fundraising campaigns at 8 different companies, counterfactually raising 240,000 USD for effective charities. The average amount raised per event was about 30,000 USD (median 3,900 USD), with most donations coming from a few events. On average, it took about 25 hours to organize and run a campaign (20 hours by organizers and 5 hours by HIP). The events generated an average of 786 USD per hour of counterfactual donations to effective charities. This makes fundraising campaigns a very cost effective means of counterfactual impact; as a comparison, direct work that generates 1,000,000 USD of impact equivalent per year equates to around 500 USD per hour. If you’re interested in exploring what a fundraising campaign could look like at your organization, please contact us and check out our step-by-step fundraising guide. If you’re interested in learning more about the 2021 campaigns’ data and methodology, please keep reading. We would love to get feedback on our data and methodology, so don’t hesitate to reach out here or in the comments. Intro Running a fundraising campaign at your workplace can be a highly effective way to multiply your impact as a working professional. Getting colleagues to donate money to effective charities not only increases your donation leverage but also has the potential to get others involved in the EA movement. It can also help you build relevant EA career capital. During the 2021 giving season, HIP supported EAs in organizing 8 fundraising campaigns at 8 different companies. Essentially, the workplace campaigns encouraged those EAs’ colleagues to donate to effective charities. The results detailed below point to these events being a strong way to enhance one’s impact. Results In total, the 8 campaigns counterfactually raised about 240,000 USD for effective charities. The average amount raised per event was about 30,000 USD, with a 90% Confidence Interval (“CI”) of 80 USD to 140,000 USD. The graph below shows the distribution in logarithmic scale. The main cost of the initiative is the time taken to organize the campaign. On average, organizers spent 20 hours on their events (CI 6 hours to 42 hours) and received 5 hours of support from HIP (CI 2 hours to 10 hours). The distributions are shown below. Computing the ratio of money raised to time spent, we arrive at an average of 786 USD per hour (CI 7 USD to 3,100 USD). To put this into perspective, let’s assume that direct work generates between 100,000 USD and 1,000,000 USD of impact equivalent per year and that people work between 1,800 and 2,200 hours per year. This computes to an average of 290 USD per hour (CI 57 USD to 530 USD), which means that organizing fundraising campaigns can be about 2.7x as effective as direct work on an hourly basis. Of course, we are not saying that people should stop considering direct work and do fundraising events instead since, for example, the impact of doing fundraising campaign work year-round may not scale as well. Still, strategically timed campaigns (e.g., around giving season, your organization’s raise/bonus season, or another liquidity event) could be a very high impact seasonal side gig. Heavy Tail One could raise a fair argument that the donation distribution above is quite heavily tailed, and because of the limited data points, the result may be anomalous. Though we have already been quite conservative in the estimation of the counterfactual impact of the events, we could take an even more conse...