If you design, report on, or rely on counterfactual impact estimates, one of the key questions you need to answer is how much of those donations are genuinely additional versus ones that would have happened anyway - and this session will help you get a clearer answer.
Join us on Thursday, August 27 at 10 AM ET / 3 PM BST / 4 PM CEST for the next RP Strategic Webinar in partnership with Coefficient Giving: "Measuring Counterfactual Impact in Effective Giving" to learn the methodology behind a more standardized, comparable way to measure it!
Register hereAbout: Organizations whose theory of change relies, in part or entirely, on informing donors about effective giving opportunities often report their impact as "money moved," the total amount donated through their platform or thanks to their advice. But that headline number can overstate the real contribution. If a donor would have given the same amount to an equally effective charity anyway, the organization didn't cause that impact; it just happened to be in the room. What matters is how much of the money moved is genuinely additional, and how much would have happened regardless.
Most organizations try to answer this with short donor surveys, but survey designs vary widely, and the resulting estimates aren't directly comparable from one organization to the next. So when two organizations report very different counterfactual numbers, it's hard to know whether that reflects a real difference in their donors or just a difference in how they did the math.
A new Rethink Priorities report tackles this problem head-on. Drawing on counterfactual impact data voluntarily shared by 22 effective giving organizations across more than ten countries (2022 to 2026), it re-expresses every organization's estimate on a common methodological basis, separating genuine differences between donor populations from artifacts of measurement. The headline finding: among organizations that use roughly similar types of surveys, around 60% of the apparent difference in reported counterfactual estimates comes down to methodology, not real differences in their donors' motivations. The report also challenges the common assumption that donors from the effective altruism community would have given anyway, and offers concrete, standardized guidance any organization can adopt.
Dr. Melanie Basnak, Senior Program Officer at Coefficient Giving, will open the session with a few words on why this work matters for funders and practitioners in the effective giving space.
Dr. Samara Mendez, Senior Economist at Rethink Priorities and the report's author, will then walk through:
- What "counterfactual share" means and why it's the right thing to measure
- What the cross-organization data revealed
- Practical recommendations, including what to ask donors and how to weight results
Whether you design, report on, or rely on counterfactual impact estimates for money moved from retail donors, or you're a funder or researcher interested in how the sector measures its own effectiveness, this session will leave you with a clearer picture of what good measurement looks like and how to move toward it.
Speakers:
- Dr. Melanie Basnak is a Senior Program Officer at Coefficient Giving, where she supports their Effective Giving and Careers program.
- Dr. Samara Mendez is a Senior Economist at Rethink Priorities and the author of the report Measuring Counterfactual Impact in Effective Giving: Methods Review and Recommendations.
Format: We'll start with a brief introduction, followed by a 15- to 20-minute talk, and then an extended Q&A session.
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