Thanks for this. Asking people “how much would you have pledged?” is of course only a semi-reliable method of ascertaining how much someone actually would have pledged. Some people—like yourself—might neglect that fact that they would have been convinced by the same arguments from other sources; others might be overoptimistic about how their future self would live up to their youthful ideals. We try to be as conservative as reasonable with our assumptions in this area: we take the data and then err on the side of caution. We assumed that 54% of the pledged donations would have happened anyway, that 25% of donations would have gone to comparably good charities, and that we have a dropout rate amortized over time equivalent to 50% of people dropping out immediately. It’s possible that these assumptions still aren’t conservative enough.
Perhaps it would also be useful to work backwards? That is, figure out exactly how conservative the assumptions need to be to put the value of a donation below the break-even point.
Thanks for this. Asking people “how much would you have pledged?” is of course only a semi-reliable method of ascertaining how much someone actually would have pledged. Some people—like yourself—might neglect that fact that they would have been convinced by the same arguments from other sources; others might be overoptimistic about how their future self would live up to their youthful ideals. We try to be as conservative as reasonable with our assumptions in this area: we take the data and then err on the side of caution. We assumed that 54% of the pledged donations would have happened anyway, that 25% of donations would have gone to comparably good charities, and that we have a dropout rate amortized over time equivalent to 50% of people dropping out immediately. It’s possible that these assumptions still aren’t conservative enough.
Perhaps it would also be useful to work backwards? That is, figure out exactly how conservative the assumptions need to be to put the value of a donation below the break-even point.
Excellent. That sounds pretty reasonable, and that’s pretty impressive leveraging given those assumptions.