Agreed! Honestly, it seems strange to me that there aren’t more EA resources dedicated to getting ultra-wealthy people to contribute to EA causes. Perhaps it’s that it isn’t very tractable, or that it requires a highly specific skillset, or maybe even that it’s bad PR with too much potential for backfiring to be so blunt about it—but this seems like a HUGE opportunity that’s currently neglected. EA has been pretty successful from getting buy-in from a decent number of high earners—where “high-earner” is defined relative to the average American income (think tech folks earning to give). And there are a few ultra wealthy folks on board (e.g. the open phil funders). But getting even one or two more ultra-high net worth folks on board could have a monetary impact equivalent to thousands of people earning to give. Are people familiar with EA initiatives working on this? Or am I missing other downsides?
I’d actually say there’s a lot of work done on recruiting HNW donors—it’s just mainly done via one-on-one meetings so not very visible.
That said, Open Philanthropy, Effective Giving, Founder’s Pledge, Longview & Generation Pledge all have it as part of their mission.
There would be even more work on it, but right now the bottleneck seems to be figuring out how to spend the money we already have (we’re only deploying $400m p.a. out of over $40bn+, under 1%). If we had a larger number of big, compelling opportunities, we could likely get more mega donors interested.
(Note: Wrote this before I saw Ben’s comment, so there are some redundancies.)
There are a couple of large (for EA) organizations working on this, but their clientele generally prefer privacy, and they work quietly. Unlike 80,000 Hours or CEA, which have very large potential audiences, an advisory service looking to help ultra-wealthy people isn’t necessarily going to be visible to people outside that category (which creates the common and understandable impression that such orgs don’t exist).
Of course, many ultra-wealthy people who are interested in philanthropy stumble over EA at some point, and I’d guess from my experience around the community that many organizations have one or more donors in this category (though again, these donations are often quiet). For a public example, see Melanie Perkins and GiveDirectly.
You can also see the implicit impact of ultra-wealthy donors in public donation statistics — GiveWell presumably didn’t double their donations in 2020 vs. 2019 without help from some very wealthy people. Likewise, EA Funds’ monthly active donor numbers are rising much more slowly than their monthly donations, implying that a couple of people are donating a lot.
I tend to agree, and I find the world of UHNW individuals quite intriguing (especially because we don’t have many reliable stats on them worldwide). But we do have EAs working for orgs that targeted rich people, like Founder’s Pledge and Generation Pledge.
Agreed! Honestly, it seems strange to me that there aren’t more EA resources dedicated to getting ultra-wealthy people to contribute to EA causes. Perhaps it’s that it isn’t very tractable, or that it requires a highly specific skillset, or maybe even that it’s bad PR with too much potential for backfiring to be so blunt about it—but this seems like a HUGE opportunity that’s currently neglected. EA has been pretty successful from getting buy-in from a decent number of high earners—where “high-earner” is defined relative to the average American income (think tech folks earning to give). And there are a few ultra wealthy folks on board (e.g. the open phil funders). But getting even one or two more ultra-high net worth folks on board could have a monetary impact equivalent to thousands of people earning to give. Are people familiar with EA initiatives working on this? Or am I missing other downsides?
I’d actually say there’s a lot of work done on recruiting HNW donors—it’s just mainly done via one-on-one meetings so not very visible.
That said, Open Philanthropy, Effective Giving, Founder’s Pledge, Longview & Generation Pledge all have it as part of their mission.
There would be even more work on it, but right now the bottleneck seems to be figuring out how to spend the money we already have (we’re only deploying $400m p.a. out of over $40bn+, under 1%). If we had a larger number of big, compelling opportunities, we could likely get more mega donors interested.
(Note: Wrote this before I saw Ben’s comment, so there are some redundancies.)
There are a couple of large (for EA) organizations working on this, but their clientele generally prefer privacy, and they work quietly. Unlike 80,000 Hours or CEA, which have very large potential audiences, an advisory service looking to help ultra-wealthy people isn’t necessarily going to be visible to people outside that category (which creates the common and understandable impression that such orgs don’t exist).
The organizations in question: Effective Giving and Longview Philanthropy.
Of course, many ultra-wealthy people who are interested in philanthropy stumble over EA at some point, and I’d guess from my experience around the community that many organizations have one or more donors in this category (though again, these donations are often quiet). For a public example, see Melanie Perkins and GiveDirectly.
You can also see the implicit impact of ultra-wealthy donors in public donation statistics — GiveWell presumably didn’t double their donations in 2020 vs. 2019 without help from some very wealthy people. Likewise, EA Funds’ monthly active donor numbers are rising much more slowly than their monthly donations, implying that a couple of people are donating a lot.
I tend to agree, and I find the world of UHNW individuals quite intriguing (especially because we don’t have many reliable stats on them worldwide). But we do have EAs working for orgs that targeted rich people, like Founder’s Pledge and Generation Pledge.