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 $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.