EA orgs are trying to fundraise ~$10m - $16m

Many organisations in the effective altruism community (‘EA orgs’) are currently fundraising (see Rob Wiblin’s GDoc “Fundraising and annual review posts on the EA Forum around Dec 2018”).

I’ve created a spreadsheet summing up the fundraising targets of EA orgs. In brief, EA orgs are currently trying to raise roughly $10m - $16m.

Three points:

  1. Some EA orgs seem to be maturing to the point at which they have multi-million dollar budgets.

  2. One concern: Big donors often do not fully fund an organisation and it is good for organisations to diversify funding from different sources. This might lead to a situation where big EA orgs are hovering up donations from many small EA donors. This money is likely to be very valuable counterfactually, because it could be given to smaller EA projects or high-impact non-meta causes. EA orgs might want to try to professionalize their fundraising efforts and diversify their funding by reaching out to more non-traditional EA donors. For instance, like other big non-profits, EA orgs might want to hire institutional fundraisers to tap into larger grants from big foundations other than the usual suspects (e.g. Vox’s Future Perfect has received a $380k grant from the Rockefeller Foundation), or get academic or government grants (e.g. the academic institute GPI at Oxford University wants to hire someone to do “Fundraising, particularly from private donors.”).

  3. These figures might also suggest that the EA community is relatively more funding constrained again. In other words, earning to give might be relatively more effective again (even though the talent vs. funding constraints topic is which is a complex issue).