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.
The quoted claim was in the blog post “Why fundraising”. It was intended to talk about why fundraising as a meta-activity is quantified vs other more speculative meta-activities. You’re very correct that it is also massively important to have quantified charities as this ultimately dictates the impact we have. That being said we use Givewell’s estimates of lives saved as well as keep track of our counterfactual money moved and get a fairly quantified estimate of how much good we are doing.
All this being said I agree that its unclear what the paragraph is referring to and we will improve it.
Disclaimer: I am the Co-ED of Effective 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.
The quoted claim was in the blog post “Why fundraising”. It was intended to talk about why fundraising as a meta-activity is quantified vs other more speculative meta-activities. You’re very correct that it is also massively important to have quantified charities as this ultimately dictates the impact we have. That being said we use Givewell’s estimates of lives saved as well as keep track of our counterfactual money moved and get a fairly quantified estimate of how much good we are doing.
All this being said I agree that its unclear what the paragraph is referring to and we will improve it.
Disclaimer: I am the Co-ED of Effective Fundraising.
That makes sense—I guess you need to clarify that fundraising is more quantifiable than recruiting or development of technology (a la Leverage).
Also more quickly quantifiable then movement building (my previous EA plan) or getting pledges (Life You Can Save or GWWC).