March 31, 2010
Adventures in online advertising, part I
We at IPA have recently been delving into the world of online advertising to help us spread the gospel of rigorous impact research. Being who we are, we could not resist this opportunity to run a field experiment. We designed one that would help us optimize our advertising strategy while also settling an important score: which academic institution's rep pulls the most weight in cyberspace? Our ad was simple:
Poverty Research
Breakthroughs to Fight Poverty
March 31, 2010
Commentary
When a charitable cause has an image problem...
Images of adorable children in developing countries are so often used to build sympathy and support for international NGOs that photos of smiling African children have become a near prerequisite for hoping to raise any money from donors. Obviously, this blog post isn't the first to point out the resulting issues brought up by this reliance on images of children (be they actual beneficiaries or merely representative of the population served). Programs ranging from World Vision's child sponsorship to Kiva's fundraising model have relied on images of sympathetic individuals to ra
March 1, 2010
First insights from Mongolian microfinance impact study
The blog over at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) recently featured a post by Senior Economist Ralph De Haas, who describes a randomized evaluation of microfinance in Mongolia that recently completed fieldwork. Although analysis is ongoing, with full results expected in July o