Consider thanking whoever helped you

TL;DR: If a (meta) org had a meaningful impact on you (in line with what they hope to achieve), you should probably tell them. It is essential for their impact reporting, which is essential for them to continue operating. You are likely underestimating just how valuable your story is to them. It could be thousands of dollars worth.

Thanks to Toby Tremlett, Lauren Mee and Sofia Balderson for reviewing a draft version of this post. All mistakes are my own.

1. Many organisations shaped my career — yet I usually only shared my story when prompted. In reflecting on my career journey, I was reminded of all the organizations who led me to where I am. I believe I reported their counterfactual contribution back to them, but this was not usually by my own doing. In two cases, I was personally reached out to - in one case, I was involved in the impact reporting in the corresponding year.

2. Leading impact evaluation at Hive taught me a key challenge: people rarely report back. Last year, I started leading Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) efforts at Hive, where I myself became the person to reach out to community members and check in about our impact on them. I have often, internally and externally, remarked how big of a problem it is for our impact reporting that people just don’t tell us whether/what happened as a result of our work. But I couldn’t be all that frustrated about it, knowing that I, myself, am guilty of this - especially if the impact is indirect^[1], long ago^[2] or scattered.^[3]

3. This lack of reporting makes it hard to measure meta org impact — which can affect their funding and future impact for you and others.

I couldn’t say this better than @OllieBase in their post Consider donating to whoever helped you, in short:

“Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world and this process [typical Meta org MEL] is imperfect, largely because information is hard to gather and communicate. If only 10% of community members respond to a survey (heaven forbid!), Community Builders (CBs) and funders need to do a lot of guessing and extrapolation to figure out which CB efforts are impactful and who they’re impacting.

But community members have this information. They (usually) know exactly which person they met, which blog they read or which event they went to that helped them have more impact, by their own lights.”

4. Instead of/in addition to donating, thank and update the organisations that helped you. The post suggests donating to whoever helped you, which can be a reasonable step for community members, but it also has been challenged quite well in the comments. I believe a less costly but not necessarily less impactful ask for all of us is to be more proactive in thanking and reporting back to the organizations who helped us. And don’t just do it once; check in from time to time with new updates, so your impact isn’t forgotten.

5. Your story might be worth far more than you realize. I believe this can be more important and impactful than you may initially think. I noticed a few misconceptions I had, which led me to underestimate the value of “my story.”

• I believed that there was much more (and better) extrapolation going on behind the scenes, so I thought my story doesn’t add much to the total count. However, due to general modesty and such, I have found that meta orgs in EA often only report the impact they know they have caused, and extrapolation is almost a bit frowned upon (?) or at least difficult to get right, due to various biases at play.^[4]

• I thought the total “count of impact” per meta org was just really really high, because (1) the aforementioned extrapolation and (2) I thought surely most other people have more straightforward stories than I do and thus are more likely to report back to the relevant orgs. I have learned that for significant impacts such as job placements, we are rarely talking about numbers beyond even 100 within a year (my expectation being in the thousands for established organizations - making my individual story relatively more important).

• I had no conceptualization of how valuable any impact caused on me actually is - it’s not necessarily that I thought I knew how much my story “was worth” (to the movement, and by extension to the impact that the relevant orgs report) and underestimated it - but rather that I hadn’t thought about it at all. But had I known that, for example, a (fully counterfactual) job placement is estimated to be worth ~$40,000-$150,000^[5] to the movement, and thus my story in similar dimensions,^[6] I most definitely would have been more proactive.

6. So, please, take a couple of minutes and reach out to some key organizations that supported you in your journey in a counterfactually relevant way.

You often won’t even have to have your story locked and ready, in my experience, they are happy to “interview” you! Perhaps just send a message to them saying thank you and that you will gladly provide details of how they impacted you, if they tell you what they would benefit from tracking. Some types of organizations you may want to consider:

• Career organizations - e.g., if you have gotten a job because of their job boards, resources, advice or other content/program.
• Effective giving organizations - e.g., if you have counterfactually increased your donations or changed your donation beneficiary.
• Research organizations - e.g., if you have changed your strategy or otherwise improved your work based on their research.
• Skill-specific capacity builders - e.g., if you have gotten notably more productive/effective/saved time or surmounted a notable challenge thanks to their support.
• Community spaces/community building organizations - these can sometimes a bit “one size fits all” -  the right connection can lead to a job placement, but also just to general movement retention, more impactful choices, new collaborations started or time/efforts saved. It’s best to check in with them directly!
  • This includes the EA Forum, which is actually running a survey now!

1. ^{^}

   E.g., the Animal Advocacy Careers intro course was a core part of my onboarding journey into the effective animal advocacy movement. Many steps later, I am now at my current position, and while I can’t tell for sure where I would be without the course, I feel fairly confident in saying that it would be nowhere near where I am.

2. ^{^}

   E.g., without EA Austria, I would probably not have gotten properly involved with the effective altruism movement - three years ago.

3. ^{^}

   E.g., Hive offered multiple touchpoints of support for projects I was working on, none of which were gamechanging individually, but very much so collectively.

^{^}

E.g., the people who respond to your story are more likely to have benefitted than your average target audience member, so you can’t easily extrapolate your survey results to your whole population.

^{^}

Estimate shared with me by Lauren from Animal Advocacy Careers, based on their ICAP methodology: 1 ICAP (Importance- and Counterfactual-Adjusted Placements) = Average number of years the candidate will continue working in the movement * Average salary of a candidate * Percentage better the candidate is than the next best candidate. For a more detailed analysis of the ICAP methodology (albeit with outdated numbers), see here!

^{^}

I’d guess, the value of your story to the org is roughly the value to the movement divided by the org’s multiplier; so if an org transforms every $1 of cost to $3 of value to the movement (3x multiplier), and only uses the impact that is reported to them in their assessment, your job placement story could be worth up to $13,333 - $50,000 to them (if it’s fully counterfactual, on average perhaps a bit less than half of that).

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