Project Update:
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.