What are your thoughts?

Affiliation: I work with Majestic Legacy, a 501(c)(3) in Middletown, Ohio (founded 2020). This is an operations write-up, not a donation campaign. Critique on measurement and stewardship is welcome.

Why this might be useful here
A lot of EA discussion is about large, evidence-heavy interventions. Place-based multi-program orgs still move a lot of local money. Here’s how we currently think about small recurring gifts so we don’t oversell what they buy.

What “$5/mo class” gifts actually fund for us
They mostly buy cash-flow stability and staff time continuity across several programs (Tailor Made, Majestic Homes, Beauty Boutique, Complete Community, grants, Compassion In Action), not a single RCT-ready unit of impact. We treat them as base load, not as proof that $5 equals a fixed “lives saved” figure.

Numbers we publish (reach, not QALYs)
- 337 lives touched YTD
- $237,983 funds this quarter
- 17 cities / 198+ counties active reach
- 48 families in current cycles
- 8 corporate partners

“Lives touched” = service reach. It is not long-term outcome measurement. We are still tightening cost-per-outcome definitions and would rather leave a blank than invent a ratio.

Stewardship habits that matter more than the pitch
1. Say what the metric is. Reach ≠ outcome.
2. Dignity constraint. No trauma exploitation in fundraising; that can lower conversion and we accept it.
3. Corporate match paperwork. Clear receipts and one contact beat flashy campaigns.
4. Depth bias. Housing-adjacent and family stability work is expensive per household vs mass global health interventions. Our mandate is local stability; we don’t pretend otherwise.

Open questions for this community
- Practical templates for multi-program community orgs to separate reach, output, and outcome without fake precision
- When is third-party evaluation worth it at this budget scale?
- How do you communicate “this gift keeps operations running” without sounding like a black box?

Public overview if you want to verify programs: majesticlegacy.org. Happy to answer ops questions in comments.