Project Update:

My report on this project

Detailed Questions
1. How much money have you spent so far? Have you gotten more funding from other sources? Do you need more funding?

In total, I spent about $320 on this project, including the $250 received from the original grantors. This money was spent purchasing advertising as described in the complete project report, but some was also spent evaluating approaches to quantifying this project's impact. I provided all the other funding used in this project,

2. How is the project going? (a few paragraphs)

This project is complete! You can see my results and thoughts in detail at the link: above, but I've adopted the content here as well:

This project is part of a set of three related projects with two goals:

1. Testing the use of targeted advertising to disseminate forecasts to audiences when and where they are most useful.

2. Using the impact market funding process to identify and fund forecasts that would be useful to disseminate more widely.

This particular project focused on disseminating forecasts of future earthquake risk to residents of coastal Humboldt County, California, which was struck by an earthquake in December 2022.

The ads I launched generated 9,398 impressions, and reached 5,304 distinct accounts. The audience selected for these ads was 20-to-60-year-olds living in north coastal California, in a 20 mile radius circle centered on Eureka, CA. 145 of the accounts reached through this ad went on to visit forecasts of their future earthquake risk provided by the state of California, which also provided information for people interested in mitigating their risk.

Unfortunately, attempts to quantify the impact of this project through surveys didn't work well, so I had to use an alternative approach for my impact calculation.

Impact Calculation

The value of this project is dependent on whether the being informed about forecasts of future earthquake risk makes people more likely to take actions to mitigate those risks. Based on my personal experience with other Californians, I think that while such a relationship exists, providing additional information about earthquake risk has only a minimal impact on individual preparedness for an earthquake. I put a rough value of approximately $5 per visit induced, for a total project value of $725.

3. How well has your project gone compared to where you expected it to be at this point? (Score from 1-10, 10 = Better than expected)

I would rate this project at around a 4-out-of-10. Mechanically, the project ran well, but I don't think the impact was worth the investment. I'd focus future resources on other projects rather than this one.

4. Are there any remaining ways you need help, besides more funding?

Not at the moment - I consider this project to be complete for now.

5. Any other thoughts or feedback?

Not on this project - though my feedback from other projects applies here as well.

Project Update:

My report on this project

Detailed Questions
1. How much money have you spent so far? Have you gotten more funding from other sources? Do you need more funding?

In total, I spent about $300 on this project, including the $250 received from the original grantors. This money was spent purchasing advertising as described in the complete project report, but some was also spent evaluating approaches to quantifying this project's impact. I provided all the other funding used in this project

2. How is the project going? (a few paragraphs)

This project is complete! You can see my results and thoughts in detail at the link: above, but I've adopted the content here as well:

This project is part of a set of three related projects with two goals:

1. Testing the use of targeted advertising to disseminate forecasts to audiences when and where they are most useful.

2. Using the impact market funding process to identify and fund forecasts that would be useful to disseminate more widely.

This particular project focused on disseminating forecasts of hurricane risk to people living in areas with high future risk, but which hadn't recently experienced a major storm.

To do this, I purchased advertising directing people to forecasts of future hurricane risks and information on how to prepare. When I decided to purchase these ads in early August, hurricane activity had been low up to that point in the year, so I decided to serve advertisements to people in an area that I thought had relatively high risk of future hurricanes, but which hadn't been severely affected by one in a few decades. By coincidence, the area I selected - Tampa, Florida - is currently (as I write this) in the path of the most severe hurricane to make landfall in that area since 1921.

The ads I launched generated 16,283 impressions and reached 10,150 distinct accounts. These advertisements were served to 30-to-60-year-olds physically located in Tampa, Florida. The ads ran for roughly one week in early August, 2023.

129 of the accounts reached through this ad went on to visit forecasts of hurricane risk.

Impact Calculation

The impact of this project depends on whether people informed of forecasts of future hurricane risks change their behaviour to reduce their future risk, and reduce the damage incurred by the storm. To get a sense of the potential scope of improvement, the last major Hurricane to hit Florida, Hurricane Wilma, caused about $19 billion in damage across the state (https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/news/UpdatedCostliest.pdf), or about $1,065 per resident at the time. If we assume a similar amount of damage per capita due to the hurricane currently hitting Tampa, and that the average person informed of hurricane risk was able to reduce the damage by about 1%, the value of this project is about $1,374.

3. How well has your project gone compared to where you expected it to be at this point? (Score from 1-10, 10 = Better than expected)

I would rate this project at around a 7-out-of-10. I think that disseminating additional information on hurricane forecasts has fairly low value most of the time, but that I got lucky by spending money to get this information in front of people a few weeks before a major storm.

4. Are there any remaining ways you need help, besides more funding?

Not at the moment - I consider this project to be complete for now.

5. Any other thoughts or feedback?

Not on this project - though my feedback from other projects should apply here as well.

Project Update:

My report on this project

Detailed Questions
1. How much money have you spent so far? Have you gotten more funding from other sources? Do you need more funding?

In total, I spent about $400 on this project, including the $300 received from the original grantors. This money was spent purchasing advertising as described in the complete project report, but some was also spent evaluating approaches to quantifying this project's impact.

2. How is the project going? (a few paragraphs)

The project has now been completed! You can see my results and thoughts in detail at the links above, but I've adopted the content here as well:

This project is part of a set of three related projects with two goals:
1. Testing the use of targeted advertising to disseminate forecasts to audiences when and where they are most useful.
2. Using the impact market funding process to identify and fund forecasts that would be useful to disseminate more widely.
This particular mini-market project focused on disseminating forecasts that would be useful to new undergraduates making decisions on how to spend their time in college.

To do this, I purchased advertising for 80,000 Hours' guidance for college students, served to students attending UC Merced's new student orientation in summer 2023. This group of students was selected because UC Merced is geographically distinct from the surrounding community and located in the middle of an agricultural area, making it easier to advertise exclusively to students on campus. An example ad can be seen here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CvS4pYmSuxe

The ads I launched generated 39,324 impressions, and reached 6,712 distinct accounts. The audience selected for these ads was 18-to-20-year-olds physically located on UC Merced's campus. Based on these metrics, I believe that I was able to reach a significant portion of new students attending orientation this past summer.
187 of the accounts reached through this ad visited 80,000 Hours' advice for college students - a cost of about $1.34 per visitor.

Impact estimate

If being exposed to to effective altruism and related ideas early in one's college career leads to long-term changes in attitude, this project could be quite valuable - but it's difficult to calculate long-run impact based on just a few ads.

A optimistic and high-uncertainty attempt to estimate this: the average US BA degree holder earns about $2.8 million over their course of their lifetime. Of the 187 people who were intrigued enough by the ad to visit the website, perhaps 1% of them were influenced in one way or another to take the article's advice on their future career, and for this 1% of visitors, being exposed to the advice in this forecast was enough to increase the "social value" of their future earnings by about a tenth of a percent. Under these assumptions and with a 5% discount rate, the net present value of this project is about $2,246.

This project also formed a useful test case for my work on improving reporting for retro funders in impact markets.

3. How well has your project gone compared to where you expected it to be at this point? (Score from 1-10, 10 = Better than expected)

I would rate this project at around a 7-out-of-10. I think that my impact was greater than expected, but my attempts to quantify it more precisely through surveys didn't work that well. To adapt to this, I used other approaches to estimating this project's impact. Overall, I do think it's "philanthropically cost-effective" to use advertising as a way to promote certain forecasts, particularly when well targeted at certain populations who are likely to find them useful.

4. Are there any remaining ways you need help, besides more funding?

Not at the moment - I consider this project to be complete for now.

5. Any other thoughts or feedback?

I think these forecasting mini-market projects have highlighted the challenges of quantifying the impact of these projects to present to retro funders. I think that one future approach might be to define a limited number of impact "endpoints" (metrics that the retro funder finds important), then have all projects up for retro funding try to quantify their impact in terms of those endpoints.

Project Update:

My report on this project

Results of my research

Detailed Questions
1. How much money have you spent so far? Have you gotten more funding from other sources? Do you need more funding?

I spent about 30 hours working on this project, conducting research and testing my approaches to impact market reporting with my other projects as test cases. This project did not directly use the funds allocated from investors, so no other funding was used or necessary.

2. How is the project going? (a few paragraphs)

The project went well and is now complete! You can see my results and thoughts in detail at the links above, but I've adopted them here as well:

My work on this project is intended to speed the growth of future impact markets by developing a standardized system for grantees to report on their impact, making retro funding decisions easier and encouraging future market participation. 

In order to achieve this, I conducted research on different markets, their evolution, and how their associated technologies and norms that affected their growth. Specifically, I looked at:
1. The growth of bond trading during the 70s and 80s
2. How markets for carbon offsets operate, and how their reporting standards are gamed by some particpants
3. How Hawala brokers operate in parallel to the established financial system.

From this research, I developed a standardized template for reporting impact market results, which I then used to report results from my related forecast dissemination projects. I've published an essay with my findings here: http://ryankupyn.com/tools-for-impact-market-reporting/

This essay also includes the standardized template for other impact market participants to use, as well as examples of this template used in practice.

I think that the valuation of this project is largely dependent on two questions:
1. Whether you think my approach to reporting is easier for retro funders to work with than the current status quo.
2. Whether you think this approach will be adopted for impact markets, and if so, whether this adoption with encourage future impact market growth.

If this work is both an improvement and likely to make future impact markets more successful, I think the value would be high! Otherwise, I would assign a lower value.

The "impact" of this project in a societal sense is also dependent on how much better impact markets might perform than a the current prospective funding approach to philanthropy. If markets are much more effective, even a small increase to their likelihood and rate of adoption will have large societal benefits.

3. How well has your project gone compared to where you expected it to be at this point? (Score from 1-10, 10 = Better than expected)

I would rate this project at around a 8-out-of-10. I think there's a lot more work that could be done to develop useful infrastructure for future impact markets, but I think this project has already led to some useful tools for future impact markets to use. I found them to be very helpful when reporting on my other projects, and I hope that the information I present in them is useful for retro funders in making their decisions.

4. Are there any remaining ways you need help, besides more funding?

Not at the moment - I consider this project to be complete for now.

5. Any other thoughts or feedback?

Not on this project specifically, but I also published my thoughts on challenges impact markets face and how to adapt to them at the link above.

Thanks Austin! Here are my answers to both of your questions (I'm going to try to add the pitch deck to the project descriptions as well):

How did you settle on these three areas (college students, earthquakes, and hurricane forecasts?)

I’m specifically selecting areas where I think there are lots of people making decisions that would benefit from having a forecast available. This particular set of areas is selected to maximize the contrast in impact durations (better hurricane information helps outcomes immediately, while most of the impact of choosing a college major happens years in the future).

For a project with $500 to spend on ads, how many people would you expect to reach?

After pricing out a few options, I expect to get around 5,000 impressions per $100 spent (this isn’t an exact number and will depend on the exact demographic targeted among other factors). I’m planning to use a portion of the money to do a second round of ads for a survey to estimate impact, so a good estimate would be around 20k impressions for $500.

Hi folks!

I'm holding a 30-minute pitch call for my projects this Thursday at 5:00 pm Pacific time. This call will include more information on the work I plan to do and why I think it's important, as well as an opportunity for direct Q&A.

You can send any questions you'd like me to address to impact@ryankupyn.com (or ask them here of course).

Meeting link:

https://meet.google.com/rpv-yymq-pvj

Hi folks!

I'm holding a 30-minute pitch call for my projects this Thursday at 5:00 pm Pacific time. This call will include more information on the work I plan to do and why I think it's important, as well as an opportunity for direct Q&A.

You can send any questions you'd like me to address to impact@ryankupyn.com (or ask them here of course).

Meeting link:

https://meet.google.com/rpv-yymq-pvj

Hi folks!

I'm holding a 30-minute pitch call for my projects this Thursday at 5:00 pm Pacific time. This call will include more information on the work I plan to do and why I think it's important, as well as an opportunity for direct Q&A.

You can send any questions you'd like me to address to impact@ryankupyn.com (or ask them here of course).

Meeting link:

https://meet.google.com/rpv-yymq-pvj

Hi folks!

I'm holding a 30-minute pitch call for my projects this Thursday at 5:00 pm Pacific time. This call will include more information on the work I plan to do and why I think it's important, as well as an opportunity for direct Q&A.

You can send any questions you'd like me to address to impact@ryankupyn.com (or ask them here of course).

Meeting link:

https://meet.google.com/rpv-yymq-pvj