Stakeholder Feedback: help Unjournal measure & enhance its impact
We've evaluated 55+ papers/projects across global health, animal welfare, AI governance, environmental risks, and development economics; with more in the pipeline. We've built tools, databases, and partnerships. We’re now focusing on understanding and enhancing our impact — “is this actually useful, who is using it, and how can we make it more useful?”
We're reaching out to funders, NGOs, researchers/ organizations, and practitioners who make evidence-based decisions. Three quick questions:
1. Are you aware of our evaluation content?
Have you seen our work evaluating research on topics like:
Lead exposure and children's learning (work funded by GiveWell)
Water treatment and child mortality (Kremer et al's meta-analysis that influenced GiveWell's $145M+ in water quality grants
If you have seen our work: Was it useful? How could we make it more useful?
2. Could our Pivotal Questions initiative help you?
We're working with organizations like Founders Pledge and Animal Charity Evaluators to identify high-value-of-information questions, evaluate relevant research, elicit beliefs, and synthesize findings. Do you have research questions where better evidence synthesis would affect your funding or policy decisions? (Follow our progress on the EA Forum.)
3. How else can we be more useful?
This feedback will guide what we do next and help with grant applications. Major funders want to see tangible evidence that we're impacting decisions at important organizations and meaningfully improving high-impact research.
Take the 5-10 minute survey (to show we value your time, we'll randomly choose 1 in 10 respondents from relevant organizations to award $50.)
Or schedule a call: https://calendly.com/daaronr
Why this matters:
We commission expert evaluations (median 8 hours per evaluator, ~$400 incentive compensation) to provide rigorous public feedback and assessment focused on credibility and impact. These evaluations include detailed reports, journal-tier predictions, claim-assessment, and multidimensional percentile ratings. This can help authors improve their work, and help research-users understand how where to use and trust its methods and findings — potentially years before a traditional journal publication ‘outcome’.
But we need to know how organizations are actually using this work. Your input shapes where we focus our limited resources.
Previous feedback has been helpful. For example, a GiveWell program officer told us our water treatment evaluation package found useful issues that "should be addressed" and that our work provided reassurance that no "major smoking guns" appeared.
What we're asking:
5-10 minutes of your time
Honest feedback about what works and what doesn't
Ideas about research questions we should tackle
Who should respond:
Funders, NGOs, research organizations, practitioners making evidence-based decisions about global impact interventions. Even if you haven't engaged with our work yet—we'd like to know why not and what would change that.
Contact: contact@unjournal.org
Take the stakeholder survey here.
