I found this a very useful post. I would also emphasize how important it is to be specific, whether one’s project involves a grand x-risk moonshot or a narrow incremental improvement.
There are approximately X vegans in America; estimates of how many might suffer from nutritional deficiencies range from Y to Z; this project would...
An improvement in epistemic health on [forum] would potentially affect X readers, which include Y donors who gave at least $Z to [forum] causes last year...
A 1-10% gain in productivity for the following people and organizations who use this platform...
For any project, large or small, even if the actual benefits are hard to quantify, the potential scope of impact can often be bounded and clarified. And that can be useful to grantmakers too. Not everything has to be convertible to “% reduction in x-risk” or “$ saved” or “QALYs gained”, but this shouldn’t stop us from specifying our actual expected impact as thoroughly as we can.
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