Summary of our annual review May 2015
NOTE: This piece is now out of date. More current information on our plans and impact can be found on our Evaluations page.
We’ve just published our annual review for the period ending April 2015.
In case you’re new to 80,000 Hours, this is what we do: we advise talented graduates on how to maximise the social impact of their careers. Currently, we do this through our online guide and one-on-one coaching. We help graduates find the meaningful careers they want, while moving more talent to the world’s most pressing problems.
The key documents in the review are:
- Our review of progress
- Our plans for the next year
- An update on our progress while in Y Combinator since May
In brief, this year we made major improvements to our online guide, leading to 400% growth in the monthly rate of significant plan changes (our key impact metric). Our President wrote a book that Steve Levitt described as “required reading for anyone interested in making the world better,” we quickly met our fundraising stretch target, and we were admitted to the world’s top startup accelerator, Y Combinator. We did all this despite a smaller budget and two staff with long-term illness.
We also made plenty of mistakes.
In total, to date we’ve caused 188 significant plan changes. As a result of our help, these people:
- Have founded five professional non-profits that likely wouldn’t exist without us.
- Have entered careers such as research and politics.
- Intend to donate at least an extra £6.9m to high-impact charities within the next three years.
We’ve achieved this having only spent £300,000 since we were founded.
Due to increasing and improved evidence of our impact this year, we’ve become convinced that our programs work, so now the challenge is to scale them up. Our target is to go from about ten significant plan changes per month to fifty by October 2016. Initially, we’ll focus on improving our online career guide, and driving more traffic to it by writing new content, using the promotion of Will’s book and direct outreach to students.
If you’d like to see more detail on our performance and metrics, see the review of program performance
The full list of supporting documents is as follows:
- Update to number of significant plan changes
- Update on the level of donations by our community
- 10 new organisations founded in part due to us
- Finance report
- We’ve changed how we define significant plan changes
A huge thank you to everyone who has contributed and made 80,000 Hours possible!