FYI: Their website is www.overcome.org.uk
(Sharing it as I had a bit of trouble finding it, it's not linked in the post and not super easy to Google as there are other therapy services have the same name. I derived it from the email you linked.)
This seems valuable and cost-effective, I hope you reached your funding goals!
Executive summary: Overcome is a volunteer-driven mental health intervention that provides cost-effective therapy, primarily for founders and professionals, with extremely low per-client treatment costs and promising results.
Key points:
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We use volunteers to treat mental illnesses and otherwise help people become happier and more productive. We mainly use CBT and ACT. Here's an overview of our results:
On average, people are 2 points out of 10 happier after their first six sessions. Each session costs just $5 to deliver (ALL costs inclusive - marketing, training of coach, supervision, management, etc).
Here are the preliminary results of an RCT we're doing to treat insomnia. I'm showing this to demonstrate our results against a control group. This RCT only cost us $32k (all costs inclusive) to run because almost all the relevant staff were volunteers.
The biggest marginal costs for most charities, by far, are counsellor salaries and client acquisition. We pay neither. We used $120k of free advertising from Google to get started.
And now grow primarily by word-of-mouth:
Volunteers sign up because they need experience to be competitive for paid roles. Within 3 months of completing our programme, the majority go from unemployable to paid employment. We're now getting more and better applicants:
See our cost-effectiveness analysis here. We successfully treat people for ~$45. At the equivalent time point in their history, Strong Minds cost-per-participant was participant for ~$415
Best of all for donors / charity evaluators, you don't have to trust our statistics. Literally anyone can sign up at any time and be seen in days. ~15 EA founders just did that:
A few people have expressed something to the effect of "surely it's only the worst founders, with weak charities, that seek support". Here's some stats:
~80% of founders were AIM-incubated
~30% had Open Philanthropy funding or were rated as top charities by GiveWell / Rethink / Founders Pledge / Animal Charity Evaluators / GWWC
Most had received budget increases compared to previous years
Multiple founders had multi-million dollar annual budgets.
Seeing this, you might think we'd be in a good spot to raise money. We're not. We're too early to get large institutional donors, but fall between the cracks of most early stage-funders.
EA Global health funders don't rate mental health and neither do meta funders. The one funder we align well with is the Mental Health Funding Circle:
We got >1/3 of their total allocation that round; a vote of confidence, but also a sign that raising more from them is going to tough.
Sounds impossibly low given that we have pathetic economies of scale? Consider this - The four biggest costs of running a psychotherapy intervention are: marketing, coach salaries, management salaries, and training costs. Our costs for each are tiny.
Here's a detailed Cost-Effectiveness Analysis. Most CEAs showing a figure this good are speculative. Ours is concrete - we have internal data to back up almost every number used, and those numbers are about what you'd expect from the literature anyway (for example, CEARCH did a BOTEC based on our model and found it was 10x cash transfers in expectation (see page 42))
I suspect this is ~10x higher EV than donating to GiveWell top-rated charities. Here's a cost-effectiveness model which lets you change the values and come up with your own estimate. It also justifies our numbers. It's more expensive because we pay the very best coaches. We think each founder treated becomes ~10-25% more productive as a result.
We could be a LOT pickier about who we let in. We're sure about the doubling because we've tested it
I volunteer full-time at Overcome and work on the side to pay bills. This amount would let me focus exclusively on Overcome. My funders did allocate money for me to take a salary, but I've never been able to justify taking it.
If we could just get 20 new or old customers to buy each month, we could fund our entire charity. We'd just need one additional team member to handle the marketing and project management. We're doing a pilot at the moment - people seem happy to pay $70 per session and buy six at a time. Lead generation is the limiting factor, ~7 of the ~10 signups agreed to buy. If you'd like to try us out, email me.
We'd train <180 coaches who'd successfully treat <1200 people, run <2 small RCTs which could result in millions in subsequent funding, and treat ~150 EA founders.
To donate, email me with the amount and your preferred payment method. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or would like to see a more detailed proposal.
If interested, email me.
I’m one of the founders on those stats and Overcome has been essential to my mental health this year. We had a lot of changes this year and I had to learn a lot, which was tough at times. As a result of my sessions with Overcome I’m thriving even though I’m increasingly doing much more challenging work, my charity is doing very well and I do think a lot can be attributed to Overcome’s support. I think their services should be accessible to the whole EA and adjacent community. I was so happy with my sessions we promoted it to whole Hive community and over 100 farmed animal advocates signed up, which says something. Mental health is the foundation of impactful work! Thank you John and the team!!!