The first tally
Rees Calder · 17 April 2026 · 4 min read
The Tally is the part of this publication where we count.
Every quarter, we publish an accounting of what readers actually did because of something written here, and what it measurably changed in the world. Not what we told them. What they did. Not what we hoped it meant. What the numbers say.
This is the first one, written the week we launched. It is small on purpose. It is also, weirdly, the most honest piece of work the site will publish, because there is almost nothing to spin.
What we can count so far
Zero recurring donations have been reallocated, to our knowledge. Zero airline offset subscriptions have been cancelled and redirected. Zero career conversations of the kind Tuesday's article prescribed have been logged. Three articles have been read a total of roughly however many times you have clicked on them this week. We will share the exact number in the Q2 tally.
This is the baseline.
Why we are going to do this publicly
Almost every outlet that writes about doing good has an interesting relationship with its own impact. The best ones are vague about it. The worst ones are shameless. "Our readers collectively have the power to" and "together we can" and "if just one percent of you" all show up in fundraising emails the week before the end of the quarter.
Those sentences are not claims. They are mood music. No one has measured whether any of it is true, because the incentives are bad. Measuring yourself honestly is a way to find out you did less than you said.
So we are going to do it anyway, because the alternative is a publication that talks about evidence and never submits to any. That is not a publication. That is a mood.
How the count will work
Four things will be counted each quarter. Each one has a reasonable read on "did this piece of writing cause the thing."
First, reallocated donations. If a reader cancels one recurring giving relationship and redirects the same amount to an evidence-backed alternative, and tells us about it, that counts. We will ask. Some will not tell us. Fine. We will report the floor, not the ceiling.
Second, career conversations initiated. A reader who follows the rule in last week's piece, two one-hour calls with people working at the frontier of a problem, and emails to say they did it, counts as one. Calls that lead to an actual move will be tracked separately.
Third, subscriptions cancelled and redirected. Airline offset schemes, greenwash charity auto-debits. If a reader turns one of these off and puts the money somewhere the evidence says works, that is a tally item. It is usually the easiest one to do.
Fourth, pieces shared with a specific person. Not a general social post. A specific person, with a sentence or two of why you thought they should read it. These are the only shares that actually move people. We will ask readers to tell us about them in the same quarterly survey.
The request
Here is the deal. At the end of the quarter we will run a short form with four questions that map to the four categories above. You will take three minutes. You will tell us what you actually did, honestly, in the strict sense. We will report the results in aggregate, with no names, and with the caveats that any honest measurement requires.
If the numbers are small, we will publish the small numbers. If they are zero, we will publish zero. That is the deal.
The first form goes out at the end of June. Until then, the tally stays at baseline. One week in, zero reported actions, three articles read some number of times we will count properly next quarter.
Thank you for being on the ground floor. The work of actually changing what changes is slow. We would rather report it truthfully than talk about it beautifully.
Sources used
- GiveWell, reader survey methodology, giving 2020-2024
- The Life You Can Save, annual impact report methodology
- Charity Navigator, "Evaluating self-reported impact in donor-facing publications," 2023