If there’s not enough money to pay for all the things they’re now considering cancelling, and you think they’re making a mistake, shouldn’t you bring up ideas for where else to save money rather than argue that some things are “cost effective”? “Cost effective” is relative to how much money you have available – if the money were extremely thin then all but the very best spending opportunities have to be cancelled!
I also was surprised to see meals being one of the places to cut, for similar reasons to Buck (but with more emphasis on “if you don’t cater, the attendees have to spend money on dinner themselves”).
If grant funding isn’t enough to cover food, the natural place to make this up is in the event pricing, which is already a sliding scale.
Catering can often be a lot more than $30 USD per person per meal. And it’s also sometimes necessary to go with a certain catering company and meet a minimum in order to book a venue.
And—ask your lawyer/accountant—but at least in the US I think you could give attendees a certain amount of cash for meals without requiring receipting or generating taxable income. This would be pointless since you could just lower the entry fee instead -- except to the extent someone’s entry fee was already zero due to limited income and you were worried about making their attendance unaffordable by eliminating catering.
Is there a viable version of non-catering where the organizers promise nothing but also invite a bunch of food trucks to camp by the venue? Perhaps that could help at least some of the attendees have fast and affordable food options.
We’ve looked into this very briefly for EAG, and my understanding is that there aren’t many (large) venues for which this would work well. Most of our venues require us to spend a minimum amount of money on food and beverage, there often isn’t a clear location where food trucks would park, and most venues don’t let you bring in outside food into the venue (meaning that if it’s raining for example, attendees would have to eat their food truck lunches outside).
These aren’t slam down points, mostly because I’m not 100% confident how food trucks would work, and this has prompted me to investigate food trucks more deeply now, so thanks for that!
For EAG Bay Area 2023, we didn’t do dinners on the Saturday and Sunday night (to save money) and it worked well-ish because there were lots of restaurants nearby. I do think it meant that most attendees left at ~6pm and didn’t come back (whereas when we’ve provided dinner, lots of people stay until the 10pm closing time). This tells me that not providing dinner did come at some cost (reduced networking time), though I still think the decision to not provide these dinners was worth it given their potential financial cost.
I don’t think we should think of EA as having “not enough money to pay for all the things they’re now considering cancelling”. Open Phil has enough money for at least a decade of longtermist spending at current rates; the fact that they aren’t spending all their money right now means that they think that there will be grant opportunities in the future that are better than grant opportunities that they choose not to make now.
Decisions to cut back on spending on a community-wide level shouldn’t be made from the perspective of short-term budgetary constraints, they should be made by thinking about what opportunities we’ll have over the long term.
(That said, for practical reasons it does make sense for funders to give organizations budgets and then have those organizations try to optimize their spending subject to the budget constraint, instead of just giving all organizations a blank check and saying “please only spend money that is better than our last dollar”. But this is not the frame we should use when we’re deciding e.g. how much total funding EAGs should have.)
Your first comment sounded like you’re criticizing CEA for their allocation of resources. Your second reply now sounds more like you’re criticzing funders (like Open Phil) for not increasing CEA’s budget. (Or maybe CEA for not asking for a funding increase more aggressively.) I guess the main thing you’re saying is that you find it hard to believe everyone is acting optimally if we have to cut back on EAGs in these ways, given that money isn’t that tight in the EA movement as a whole.
Agree, the FTX loss in particular is not just “short-term budgetary constraints.” It would seem either that the EA movement was underfunding EAGs prior to these financial changes, or that reductions in funding are warranted now given the significant loss of expected money in the ecosystem.
Open Phil has enough money for at least a decade of longtermist spending at current rates; the fact that they aren’t spending all their money right now means that they think that there will be grant opportunities in the future that are better than grant opportunities that they choose not to make now.
This doesn’t match my model of philanthropic portfolio investment management. One key problem is that there is a lot of value in ongoing funding of organizations and projects, and having a donor who can fund you for a decade is easily >20x as valuable as one who will fund a bunch of work all at once, then disappear—and giving an organization a decade worth of funding all at once is far less useful than monitoring and calibrating to the organization’s success and needs.
If there’s not enough money to pay for all the things they’re now considering cancelling, and you think they’re making a mistake, shouldn’t you bring up ideas for where else to save money rather than argue that some things are “cost effective”? “Cost effective” is relative to how much money you have available – if the money were extremely thin then all but the very best spending opportunities have to be cancelled!
I also was surprised to see meals being one of the places to cut, for similar reasons to Buck (but with more emphasis on “if you don’t cater, the attendees have to spend money on dinner themselves”).
If grant funding isn’t enough to cover food, the natural place to make this up is in the event pricing, which is already a sliding scale.
Catering can often be a lot more than $30 USD per person per meal. And it’s also sometimes necessary to go with a certain catering company and meet a minimum in order to book a venue.
And—ask your lawyer/accountant—but at least in the US I think you could give attendees a certain amount of cash for meals without requiring receipting or generating taxable income. This would be pointless since you could just lower the entry fee instead -- except to the extent someone’s entry fee was already zero due to limited income and you were worried about making their attendance unaffordable by eliminating catering.
Is there a viable version of non-catering where the organizers promise nothing but also invite a bunch of food trucks to camp by the venue? Perhaps that could help at least some of the attendees have fast and affordable food options.
We’ve looked into this very briefly for EAG, and my understanding is that there aren’t many (large) venues for which this would work well. Most of our venues require us to spend a minimum amount of money on food and beverage, there often isn’t a clear location where food trucks would park, and most venues don’t let you bring in outside food into the venue (meaning that if it’s raining for example, attendees would have to eat their food truck lunches outside).
These aren’t slam down points, mostly because I’m not 100% confident how food trucks would work, and this has prompted me to investigate food trucks more deeply now, so thanks for that!
For EAG Bay Area 2023, we didn’t do dinners on the Saturday and Sunday night (to save money) and it worked well-ish because there were lots of restaurants nearby. I do think it meant that most attendees left at ~6pm and didn’t come back (whereas when we’ve provided dinner, lots of people stay until the 10pm closing time). This tells me that not providing dinner did come at some cost (reduced networking time), though I still think the decision to not provide these dinners was worth it given their potential financial cost.
I don’t think we should think of EA as having “not enough money to pay for all the things they’re now considering cancelling”. Open Phil has enough money for at least a decade of longtermist spending at current rates; the fact that they aren’t spending all their money right now means that they think that there will be grant opportunities in the future that are better than grant opportunities that they choose not to make now.
Decisions to cut back on spending on a community-wide level shouldn’t be made from the perspective of short-term budgetary constraints, they should be made by thinking about what opportunities we’ll have over the long term.
(That said, for practical reasons it does make sense for funders to give organizations budgets and then have those organizations try to optimize their spending subject to the budget constraint, instead of just giving all organizations a blank check and saying “please only spend money that is better than our last dollar”. But this is not the frame we should use when we’re deciding e.g. how much total funding EAGs should have.)
Your first comment sounded like you’re criticizing CEA for their allocation of resources. Your second reply now sounds more like you’re criticzing funders (like Open Phil) for not increasing CEA’s budget. (Or maybe CEA for not asking for a funding increase more aggressively.) I guess the main thing you’re saying is that you find it hard to believe everyone is acting optimally if we have to cut back on EAGs in these ways, given that money isn’t that tight in the EA movement as a whole.
Agree, the FTX loss in particular is not just “short-term budgetary constraints.” It would seem either that the EA movement was underfunding EAGs prior to these financial changes, or that reductions in funding are warranted now given the significant loss of expected money in the ecosystem.
This doesn’t match my model of philanthropic portfolio investment management. One key problem is that there is a lot of value in ongoing funding of organizations and projects, and having a donor who can fund you for a decade is easily >20x as valuable as one who will fund a bunch of work all at once, then disappear—and giving an organization a decade worth of funding all at once is far less useful than monitoring and calibrating to the organization’s success and needs.