Introducing Effective Fundraising, a New EA Org

I was unable to quickly find the details of how the UK Institute of Fundraising's studies were conducted. Are there more details somewhere? I'd want to check for survivorship bias, etc.

Also, can I get a page number for the claim pulled from Achieving Excellence in Fundraising?

A great website, but I'd like to quickly point out that one of the core claims on this website doesn't make sense at all - "It is a hard task to make the world a better place and many of the best possible things to do are unmeasured and unquantified. This means we can take guesses at how much impact we are having, but it is quite difficult to know for sure. We’re walking forward with blindfolds. A huge benefit of fundraising is that it is one of the easiest fields to quantify with a quick feedback loop and a clear metric of success - money moved. We can take off the blindfolds and see where we’re going."

You can see how much money you're raising, which is important, but you can't see what the impact of the funds raised are, so you still don't know where you're going. Probably the target of your donation - even within a category like global health and development, or animal welfare - is much more important than the amount of money donated. The effect of a fivefold increase due to efficient fundraising could be dwarfed by this effect. This is even more the case when you talk about comparison between categories eg development vs x-risk.

Saying that fundraising takes off the blindfold because you can evaluate how much money you're making is like saying that a speedometer takes off the blindfold when you're driving, because you can tell how much you're accelerating.

I still love this charity and the idea of effective fundraising, but this claim should be fixed.

FYI: There has been a discussion on 80,000 Hours (started by me) about the value of this project and how to maximise it.

Does anyone at Effective Fundraising have experience with grant-writing or HNW fundraising? If the fundraising ROI numbers are correct, I suspect they're from a sample of fundraisers who have a fair amount of experience with these two types of fundraising.

I would have sworn (although despite that, this may be a false memory) that you were not listed on the About Us page at [link removed] the first time I went to it, but were listed the second time, in which case I suppose I should say "Congratulations on being accepted as a volunteer, so shortly after you posted about them: You should update your post to reflect that, since most people would consider that both material (you are now working with the organization you are discussing), and neat (You talked about them and they they accepted you as a volunteer so soon)"

That being said, it does feel sort of unlikely that it would update with your name literally as I am browsing it, so I suppose I might just be suffering a memory gap and you were there the whole time, and I just hadn't noticed it until I had looked over your post and their site enough to see the "Peter Hurford" in both places, and I am just confabulating by assuming you had only been added just now.

Edit: Link became outdated.

Are we worried whether the compartmentalized accounting of mission and fundraising related financial activity via outsourcing to a different organization can incur PR costs as well? If an organization is worried about "look[ing] bad" because some of their funds are being employed for fundraising, thus lowering their effective percentage, would they be susceptible to minor "scandals" that put to question the validity of GiveWell's metrics by, say, an investigative journalist that misinterprets the outsourced fundraising as misrepresentation of effective charity? If I found out an organization reported a return of $15 on every $1, but in fact received a lot of money from outsourced fundraising which returned only $3 on every $1, their "true rate," when the clever accounting becomes opaque, may be significantly lower than $15, say $5 or $8. If I am a candidate donor that made his decision through an organization like Givewell, and my primary metric is ROI, I may feel cheated, even if that feeling is misplaced.

I suspect the above consideration is not very likely to be a big issue, but I did want to bring it to our attention as to give pre-emptive awareness. In the unlikely case it is worth thinking about, it may point to the different issue of measuring charity effectiveness by pure monetary ROI being equivalent to measuring the effectiveness of software by lines of code. If that is the case, perhaps a hybrid measure of monetary ROI and non-monetary but quantitive mission-related metrics can be employed by Givewell. Looking through their full reports, however, I sense this may already be the case. Anyway, this shows one has to be very careful when employing any one-dimensional metric.