A question I genuinely donât know the answer to, for the anti-donation-match people: why wasnât any of this criticism directed at Open Phil or EA funds when they did a large donation match?
I have mixed feelings on donation matching. But I feel strongly that it is not tenable to have a general community norm against something your most influential actors are doing without pushback, and checking the comments on the linked post Iâm not seeing that pushback.
Relatedly, I didnât like the assertion that the increased number of matches comes from the âfundraisingâ people not the âcommunity-building and epistemicsâ people. I really donât know who the latter refers to if not Open Phil /â EAF.
I wasnât an enormous fan of the LTFF/âOP matching campaign, but I felt it was actually a reasonable mechanism for the exact kind of dynamic that was going on between the LTFF and Open Phil.
The key component that for me was at stake in the relationship between the LTFF and OP was to reduce Open Phil influence on the LTFF. Thinking through the game theory of donations that are made on the basis of future impact and how that affects power dynamics is very messy, and going into all my thoughts on the LTFF/âOP relationship here would be far too much, but within that context, a very rough summary of the LTFF/âOP relationship could be described as such:
The LTFF would have liked money from OP that was not conditional on the LTFF making specific grants that OP wanted to make (because the LTFF doesnât want to be used for reputation-washing of Open Phil donations, and also wants to have intellectual independence in how it thinks about grants and wants to be able to make grants that OP thinks are bad). Previously the way the LTFF received Open Phil funding was often dependent on them giving us money for specific grants or specific classes of grants they thought were exciting, but that involved a very tight integration of the LTFF and OP that I think was overall harmful, especially in the post-FTX low-diversity funding landscape.
OP was pretty into this and also wanted the LTFF to become more independent, but my sense is also didnât really want to just trust the LTFF with a giant pot of unconditional money. And given the LTFFs preferred independence from OP and OPs preferred distancing from the LTFF, OP really wanted the LTFF to put more effort into its own fundraising.
So the arrangement that ultimately happened is that OP agreed to fund us, if enough other people thought we were worth funding, and if it seemed like the LTFF would be capable of being an ongoing concern with its current infrastructure and effort put into it, even without OP funding. This was achieved by doing a matching thing. This isnât the ideal mechanism for this, but it is a mechanism that lots of people understand and is easy to communicate to others, and was a good enough fit.
Matching was a decent fit because:
It forces the LTFF to put effort into fundraising and as such prevents the LTFF from (in some sense) holding the LTFF applications hostage by asking for more money from OP to fund them after the money was spent, without putting effort into fundraising until then
It forces the rest of the ecosystem to contribute their âfair shareâ of the LTFF contributions, by agreeing on a relative funding split in advance (whereas otherwise you might have donor-chicken problems where donors donât want to give to the LTFF because they expect it would just funge 1-1 with OP donations)
I think in-general, matching campaigns for fair-split reasons are pretty reasonable. There are definitely many projects where I am happy to contribute 10% of their funding, if others filled the remaining 90%, but that I would not like to fund if I had no assurance from others that they would do so.
A lot of this stuff can also be solved with kickstarter-like mechanisms, though my guess is an LTFF kickstarter would have been worse, or would have needed to include a bunch of distinct funding levels in ways that would have made it more complicated.
In as much as people donated to the LTFF because they saw it as a substantial multiplier on their giving, I think that was sad and should have been fixed in communications. I think the right relationship was to see the multiplier that OP made as basically a determination from them on what their fair share for that year of LTFF funding was, and then to decide whether an LTFF funded at that ratio of OP to non-OP funding was reasonable, and if they thought it was unreasonable to consider that as a reason to not donate (or to get annoyed at OP in some other way for committing to an unfair funding split).
All that said, this is just my personal perspective on the matching campaign. I was quite busy during that time and wasnât super involved with fundraising, and other people on the LTFF might have a very different story of what happened.
I made a reasonably large donation to LTFF at the time of the match, and it felt very clear to me exactly what the situation was, that the matching funds were questionably counterfactual, and felt like just a small bonus to me. I thought the comms there were good.
As Michael says, there was discussion of it, but it was in a different thread and I did push back in one small place against what I saw as misleading phrasing by an EA fund manager. I donât fully remember what I was thinking at the time, so anything else I say here is a bit speculative.
Overall, I would have preferred that OP + EA Funds had instead done a fixed-size exit grant. This would have required much less donor reasoning about how to balance OP having more funding available for other priorities vs these two EA funds having more to work with. How I feel about this situation (on which people can choose to put whatever weight they wishâjust illustrating how I think about this) does depend a lot on who was driving the donation matching decision:
If the EA Funds managers proposed it, I would prefer they hadnât.
If OP proposed it, I would prefer EA Funds had tried to convince them to give a fixed-size grant instead. If they did and OP was firm in wanting to do a matching approach, then I think it was on balance ok for EA Funds to accept as long as they communicated the situation well. And EA Funds was prettytransparent about key questions like how much money was left and whether they thought they would hit the total. I think their advice EA Funds gave on what would happen to the money otherwise wasnât so good but Iâm pretty sure I didnât see it at the time (because I donât remember it and apparently didnât vote on it). The guidance OP gave, however, was quite clear.
One thing that would have made pushing back at the time tricky is not knowing who was driving the decision to do the match.
But I also think this donation matching situation is significantly less of an issue than ones aimed at the general public, like GiveWellâs, GivingMultiplierâs, and FarmKindâs. The EA community is relatively sophisticated about these issues, and looking back I see people asking the right questions and discussing them well, collaborating on trying to figure out what the actual impact was. I think a majority of people whose behavior changed here would still endorse their behavior change if they fully understood how it moved money between organizations. Whereas I think the general public is much more likely to take match claims at face value and assume theyâre literally having a larger impact by the stated amount, and would not endorse their behavior change if they fully understood the effect.
Also, Jeff hinted at the issue there, too, and seemed to have gotten downvotes, although still net positive karma (3 karma with 8 votes, at the time of writing this comment).
But I feel strongly that it is not tenable to have a general community norm against something your most influential actors are doing without pushback, and checking the comments on the linked post Iâm not seeing that pushback.
I hear this as âyou canât complain about FarmKind, because you didnât complain about OpenPhilâ. But:
Jeff didnât complain about the GiveWell match at the time it was offered, because he didnât notice it. I donât think we can draw too much adverse inference from any specific person not commenting on any specific situation.
A big part of my motivation to leave a comment on the FarmKind post was anticipating that they might not have heard about common objections to donation matching, whereas I think Claire Zabel probably has heard of them.
Similarly, one might have differing expectations about how much one vs. the other organisation would be interested in your feedback, or likely to change path based on feedback (I donât really have a considered view on how FarmKind vs. OpenPhil score here)
idk, sometimes I feel like leaving comments and sometimes I donât?
I think itâs better to focus on the actual question of whether matches are good or bad, or what the essential features are for a match to be honest or not. Based on that question, we can decide âit was a mistake not to push back more on OpenPhilâ or âwhat OpenPhil did was fineâ if we think thatâs still worth adjudicating.
Iâm sorry you hear it that way, but thatâs not what it says; Iâm making an empirical claim about how norms work /â donât work. If you think the situation I describe is tenable, feel free to disagree.
But if we agree it is not tenable, then we need a (much?) narrower community norm than âno donation matchingâ, such as âno donation matching without communication around counterfactualsâ, or Open Phil /â EAF needs to take significantly more flak than I think they did.
I hoped pointing that out might help focus minds, since the discussion so far had focused on the weak players not the powerful ones.
But if we agree it is not tenable, then we need a (much?) narrower community norm than âno donation matchingâ, such as âno donation matching without communication around counterfactualsâ, or Open Phil /â EAF needs to take significantly more flak than I think they did.
While I think a norm of âno donation matchingâ is where we should be, I think the best weâre likely to get is âno donation matching without donors understanding the counterfactual impactâ. So while Iâve tried to argue for the former Iâve limited my criticism of campaigns to ones that donât meet the latter.
If youâre just saying âthis other case might inform whether and when we think donation matches are OKâ, then sure, that seems reasonable, although Iâm really more interested in people saying something like âthis other case is not bad, so we should draw the distinction in this wayâ or âthis other case is also bad, so we should make sure to include that tooâ, rather than just âthis other case existsâ.
If youâre saying âwe have to be consistent, going forward, with how we treated OpenPhil /â EA Funds in the pastâ, then surely no: at a minimum we also have the option of deciding it was a mistake to let them off so lightly, and then we can think about whether we need to do anything now to redress that omission. Maybe now is the time we start having the norm, having accepted we didnât have it before?
FWIW having read the post a couple of times I mostly donât understand why using a match seemed helpful to them. I think how bad it was depends partly on how EA Funds communicated to donors about the match: if they said âthis match will multiply your impact!â uncritically then I think thatâs misleading and bad, if they said âOpenPhil decided to structure our offramp funding in this particular way in order to push us to fundraise more, mostly you should not worry about it when donatingâ, that seems fine, I guess. I looked through my e-mails (though not very exhaustively) but didnât find communications from them that explicitly mentioned the match, so idk.
In support of this view: There was a lot going on with the Open Phil EAIF/âLTFF funding drawdown & short-term match announcement. Those funds losing a lot of their funding was of significant import to the relevant ecosystems, and likely of personal import to some commenters who expected to seek EAIF/âLTFF funding in the future. The short-term matching program was only a part of the larger news story (as it were). So commenter attention on that post was fragmented in a way that was not the case with FarmKindâs post.
In non-support of this view: Given AIMâs involvement with FarmKindâs launch, I would be really surprised if its founders were unaware of the critiques that had been levied against donation-matching programs over the past 10-15 years in EA. It is also unclear how much FarmKind could change course based on feedback (other than giving up and shutting down); matching is core to what it does in a way that isnât true of Open Phil.
Other than giving up and shutting down, they could have put offsetting front and center. I think it might be psychologically compelling to some who donât want to give up meat to be able to undo some of their contributions to the factory farming system. I actually became aware of their calculator from your quick take, as currently it is pretty hard to find.
An interesting idea! I think an offset-based strategy has some challenges, but Iâd be interested in seeing how it went. It tries to sell a different affective good than most traditional efforts (guilt reduction, rather than warm fuzzies), and a fundraising org probably has to choose between the two.
On the plus side, it probably appeals to a different set of donors. On the down side, youâd find it hard to collect more than the full-offset amount from any donor.
(Working out the ethics of quilting oneâs prospective donors is too complex for a comment written on commuter rail....)
Someone could not just eliminate their contribution to FF but be part of the solution if their contribution is a greater than one multiple of the offset. I think people might like a 1.5 to 2X offset potentially for the warm fuzzies.
It is also unclear how much FarmKind could change course based on feedback (other than giving up and shutting down)
There are lots of options helping animals (through raising money or otherwise) that donât involve this kind of competition around the impact of donations. Itâs common for startups to pivot if their first product doesnât work out.
Itâs common for startups to pivot if their first product doesnât work out.
I think FarmKind would be constrained by the need to keep faith with its donors, though. I agree about pivoting when there has been a material change in facts or circumstances. Thatâs an understood part of the deal when you donate to a charity. But I donât see any evidence of the product on which FarmKind raised its seed funding was not âwork[ing] outâ in practice. It had just launched its platform. The critiques you and Ben offered were not novel or previously unknown to FarmKind (e.g., their launch info cites Giving Multiplier as a sort of inspiration).
It is of course good to change your mind when you realize that you made an error. But from the seed donor perspective, changing paradigms so early would look an awful lot like a bait and switch in effect if not in intent. If an organization fundraises based on X and then promptly decides to do something significantly different for reasons within the organizationâs control without giving X a serious try, I think it should generally offer people who donated for X idea to have their donations regranted elsewhere. Whether its donors would chose that is unknown to me.
Independently, itâs not clear that a pivot would be practically feasible for FarmKind (or most other CE incubatees a few months after launch). It launched on a $133K seed grant with two staff members about three months ago (not including time spent in the CE program). Even assuming they could get 100% donor consent for repurposing funds, they would still be going almost back to square one. Itâs not clear to me that it could come up with a new idea, spend the time to develop that, relaunch, and show results to get funding for the rest of year 1 and beyond (which has been a big challenge for many CE-incubated orgs).
Given those constraints, I think it is fair to say that the extent to which FarmKind could realistically change course in response to criticism (other than winding down) remains unclear.
Yeah, in retrospect maybe it was kind of doomed to expect that I might influence FarmKindâs behaviour directly, and maybe the best I could hope for is influencing the audience to prefer other methods of promoting effective giving.
Thatâs a good question, and certainly the identity of the matching donor may have played a role in the absence of criticism. However, I do find some differences there that are fairly material to me.
Given that the target for the EA Funds match was EAs, potential donors were presumably on notice that the money in the match pool was pre-committed to charity and would likely be spent on similar types of endeavors if not deployed in the match. Therefore, thereâs little reason to think donors would have believed that their participation would have changed the aggregate amounts going toward the long-term future /â EA infrastructure. Thatâs unclear with FarmKind and most classical matches.
Based on this, standard donors would have understood that the sweetener they were offered was a degree of influence over Open Philâs allocation decisions. That sweetener is also present in the FarmKind offer. It is often not present in classical matching situations, where we assume that the bonus donor would have probably given the same amount to the same charity anyway.
The OP match offer feels less . . . contrived? OP had pre-committed to at least sharply reducing the amount it was giving to LTFF/âEAIF, and explained those reasons legibly enough to establish that it would not be making up the difference anyway. It seems clear to me that OPâs sharp reduction in LTFF/âEAIF funding was not motivated by a desire to influence third-party spending though then offering a one-time matching mechanism.
Even OPâs decision to offer donor matching has a potential justification other than a desire to influence third-party donations. Specifically, OP (like other big funders) is known to not want to fund too much of an organization, and that desire would be especially strong where OP was planning to cut funding in the near future. If OPâs main goal were to influence other donors, they frankly could have done a lot better job than advertising to the community of people who were already giving to LTFF/âEAIF, matching at 2:1, not requiring that the match-eligible funding be from a new/âincreased donor, etc.[1] In contrast, FarmKindâs expressed purpose (and predominant reason for existence) is to influence third-party donations toward more effective charities.
Another possibly relevant difference is that the OP matching offer was time-limited and atypical, while FarmKindâs offer is perpetual. Iâm not sure why this is intuitively of some relevance to me. Is it that Iâm more willing to defer to the judgment of an organization that rarely matches, that this particular scenario warrants it? Is it that I think time-limited and atypical match offers are more likely to be counterfactual? Or is this a reaction to me finding a perpetual match to be gimmicky?
Finally, I sense that OP and the expected standard donors in the LTFF/âEAIF match are significantly more aligned than FarmKind and its expected standard donors. Apparently any 501(c)(3) can be a donor-selected âfavoriteâ charity there. Even if we think the median FarmKind donor is picking something like a cat/âdog shelter, thereâs still much less alignment between the donorsâ expressed favorite and FarmKindâs objectives in offering the match.
So the OP situation seems directionally closer to a group of funders who are already on the same page trying to cooperate on a joint project, while the FarmKind situation seems more like an effort to divert money from standard donors who arenât already aligned. Perhaps the clearest indicator here is FarmKindâs request, on the Forum and on its website, that people who were already on board with farmed-animal welfare not made standard donations! So I would expect OP to have acted in closer alignment to its expected standard donorsâ interests than FarnKind, merely because it was already aligned with them.
The structure was also quite open to donors merely accelerating donations they were going to make to LTFF/âEAIF anyway. And I expect EAs were quite likely to pick up on this.
A question I genuinely donât know the answer to, for the anti-donation-match people: why wasnât any of this criticism directed at Open Phil or EA funds when they did a large donation match?
I have mixed feelings on donation matching. But I feel strongly that it is not tenable to have a general community norm against something your most influential actors are doing without pushback, and checking the comments on the linked post Iâm not seeing that pushback.
Relatedly, I didnât like the assertion that the increased number of matches comes from the âfundraisingâ people not the âcommunity-building and epistemicsâ people. I really donât know who the latter refers to if not Open Phil /â EAF.
https://ââforum.effectivealtruism.org/ââposts/ââzt6MsCCDStm74HFwo/ââea-funds-organisational-update-open-philanthropy-matching
I wasnât an enormous fan of the LTFF/âOP matching campaign, but I felt it was actually a reasonable mechanism for the exact kind of dynamic that was going on between the LTFF and Open Phil.
The key component that for me was at stake in the relationship between the LTFF and OP was to reduce Open Phil influence on the LTFF. Thinking through the game theory of donations that are made on the basis of future impact and how that affects power dynamics is very messy, and going into all my thoughts on the LTFF/âOP relationship here would be far too much, but within that context, a very rough summary of the LTFF/âOP relationship could be described as such:
The LTFF would have liked money from OP that was not conditional on the LTFF making specific grants that OP wanted to make (because the LTFF doesnât want to be used for reputation-washing of Open Phil donations, and also wants to have intellectual independence in how it thinks about grants and wants to be able to make grants that OP thinks are bad). Previously the way the LTFF received Open Phil funding was often dependent on them giving us money for specific grants or specific classes of grants they thought were exciting, but that involved a very tight integration of the LTFF and OP that I think was overall harmful, especially in the post-FTX low-diversity funding landscape.
OP was pretty into this and also wanted the LTFF to become more independent, but my sense is also didnât really want to just trust the LTFF with a giant pot of unconditional money. And given the LTFFs preferred independence from OP and OPs preferred distancing from the LTFF, OP really wanted the LTFF to put more effort into its own fundraising.
So the arrangement that ultimately happened is that OP agreed to fund us, if enough other people thought we were worth funding, and if it seemed like the LTFF would be capable of being an ongoing concern with its current infrastructure and effort put into it, even without OP funding. This was achieved by doing a matching thing. This isnât the ideal mechanism for this, but it is a mechanism that lots of people understand and is easy to communicate to others, and was a good enough fit.
Matching was a decent fit because:
It forces the LTFF to put effort into fundraising and as such prevents the LTFF from (in some sense) holding the LTFF applications hostage by asking for more money from OP to fund them after the money was spent, without putting effort into fundraising until then
It forces the rest of the ecosystem to contribute their âfair shareâ of the LTFF contributions, by agreeing on a relative funding split in advance (whereas otherwise you might have donor-chicken problems where donors donât want to give to the LTFF because they expect it would just funge 1-1 with OP donations)
I think in-general, matching campaigns for fair-split reasons are pretty reasonable. There are definitely many projects where I am happy to contribute 10% of their funding, if others filled the remaining 90%, but that I would not like to fund if I had no assurance from others that they would do so.
A lot of this stuff can also be solved with kickstarter-like mechanisms, though my guess is an LTFF kickstarter would have been worse, or would have needed to include a bunch of distinct funding levels in ways that would have made it more complicated.
In as much as people donated to the LTFF because they saw it as a substantial multiplier on their giving, I think that was sad and should have been fixed in communications. I think the right relationship was to see the multiplier that OP made as basically a determination from them on what their fair share for that year of LTFF funding was, and then to decide whether an LTFF funded at that ratio of OP to non-OP funding was reasonable, and if they thought it was unreasonable to consider that as a reason to not donate (or to get annoyed at OP in some other way for committing to an unfair funding split).
All that said, this is just my personal perspective on the matching campaign. I was quite busy during that time and wasnât super involved with fundraising, and other people on the LTFF might have a very different story of what happened.
I made a reasonably large donation to LTFF at the time of the match, and it felt very clear to me exactly what the situation was, that the matching funds were questionably counterfactual, and felt like just a small bonus to me. I thought the comms there were good.
As Michael says, there was discussion of it, but it was in a different thread and I did push back in one small place against what I saw as misleading phrasing by an EA fund manager. I donât fully remember what I was thinking at the time, so anything else I say here is a bit speculative.
Overall, I would have preferred that OP + EA Funds had instead done a fixed-size exit grant. This would have required much less donor reasoning about how to balance OP having more funding available for other priorities vs these two EA funds having more to work with. How I feel about this situation (on which people can choose to put whatever weight they wishâjust illustrating how I think about this) does depend a lot on who was driving the donation matching decision:
If the EA Funds managers proposed it, I would prefer they hadnât.
If OP proposed it, I would prefer EA Funds had tried to convince them to give a fixed-size grant instead. If they did and OP was firm in wanting to do a matching approach, then I think it was on balance ok for EA Funds to accept as long as they communicated the situation well. And EA Funds was pretty transparent about key questions like how much money was left and whether they thought they would hit the total. I think their advice EA Funds gave on what would happen to the money otherwise wasnât so good but Iâm pretty sure I didnât see it at the time (because I donât remember it and apparently didnât vote on it). The guidance OP gave, however, was quite clear.
One thing that would have made pushing back at the time tricky is not knowing who was driving the decision to do the match.
But I also think this donation matching situation is significantly less of an issue than ones aimed at the general public, like GiveWellâs, GivingMultiplierâs, and FarmKindâs. The EA community is relatively sophisticated about these issues, and looking back I see people asking the right questions and discussing them well, collaborating on trying to figure out what the actual impact was. I think a majority of people whose behavior changed here would still endorse their behavior change if they fully understood how it moved money between organizations. Whereas I think the general public is much more likely to take match claims at face value and assume theyâre literally having a larger impact by the stated amount, and would not endorse their behavior change if they fully understood the effect.
FWIW, I had started a thread on the EA Funds fundraising post here about Open Philâs counterfactuals, because there was no discussion of it.
Iâm not in the anti-donation-match camp, though.
Also, Jeff hinted at the issue there, too, and seemed to have gotten downvotes, although still net positive karma (3 karma with 8 votes, at the time of writing this comment).
I hear this as âyou canât complain about FarmKind, because you didnât complain about OpenPhilâ. But:
Jeff didnât complain about the GiveWell match at the time it was offered, because he didnât notice it. I donât think we can draw too much adverse inference from any specific person not commenting on any specific situation.
A big part of my motivation to leave a comment on the FarmKind post was anticipating that they might not have heard about common objections to donation matching, whereas I think Claire Zabel probably has heard of them.
Similarly, one might have differing expectations about how much one vs. the other organisation would be interested in your feedback, or likely to change path based on feedback (I donât really have a considered view on how FarmKind vs. OpenPhil score here)
idk, sometimes I feel like leaving comments and sometimes I donât?
I think itâs better to focus on the actual question of whether matches are good or bad, or what the essential features are for a match to be honest or not. Based on that question, we can decide âit was a mistake not to push back more on OpenPhilâ or âwhat OpenPhil did was fineâ if we think thatâs still worth adjudicating.
Iâm sorry you hear it that way, but thatâs not what it says; Iâm making an empirical claim about how norms work /â donât work. If you think the situation I describe is tenable, feel free to disagree.
But if we agree it is not tenable, then we need a (much?) narrower community norm than âno donation matchingâ, such as âno donation matching without communication around counterfactualsâ, or Open Phil /â EAF needs to take significantly more flak than I think they did.
I hoped pointing that out might help focus minds, since the discussion so far had focused on the weak players not the powerful ones.
While I think a norm of âno donation matchingâ is where we should be, I think the best weâre likely to get is âno donation matching without donors understanding the counterfactual impactâ. So while Iâve tried to argue for the former Iâve limited my criticism of campaigns to ones that donât meet the latter.
If youâre just saying âthis other case might inform whether and when we think donation matches are OKâ, then sure, that seems reasonable, although Iâm really more interested in people saying something like âthis other case is not bad, so we should draw the distinction in this wayâ or âthis other case is also bad, so we should make sure to include that tooâ, rather than just âthis other case existsâ.
If youâre saying âwe have to be consistent, going forward, with how we treated OpenPhil /â EA Funds in the pastâ, then surely no: at a minimum we also have the option of deciding it was a mistake to let them off so lightly, and then we can think about whether we need to do anything now to redress that omission. Maybe now is the time we start having the norm, having accepted we didnât have it before?
FWIW having read the post a couple of times I mostly donât understand why using a match seemed helpful to them. I think how bad it was depends partly on how EA Funds communicated to donors about the match: if they said âthis match will multiply your impact!â uncritically then I think thatâs misleading and bad, if they said âOpenPhil decided to structure our offramp funding in this particular way in order to push us to fundraise more, mostly you should not worry about it when donatingâ, that seems fine, I guess. I looked through my e-mails (though not very exhaustively) but didnât find communications from them that explicitly mentioned the match, so idk.
In support of this view: There was a lot going on with the Open Phil EAIF/âLTFF funding drawdown & short-term match announcement. Those funds losing a lot of their funding was of significant import to the relevant ecosystems, and likely of personal import to some commenters who expected to seek EAIF/âLTFF funding in the future. The short-term matching program was only a part of the larger news story (as it were). So commenter attention on that post was fragmented in a way that was not the case with FarmKindâs post.
In non-support of this view: Given AIMâs involvement with FarmKindâs launch, I would be really surprised if its founders were unaware of the critiques that had been levied against donation-matching programs over the past 10-15 years in EA. It is also unclear how much FarmKind could change course based on feedback (other than giving up and shutting down); matching is core to what it does in a way that isnât true of Open Phil.
Other than giving up and shutting down, they could have put offsetting front and center. I think it might be psychologically compelling to some who donât want to give up meat to be able to undo some of their contributions to the factory farming system. I actually became aware of their calculator from your quick take, as currently it is pretty hard to find.
An interesting idea! I think an offset-based strategy has some challenges, but Iâd be interested in seeing how it went. It tries to sell a different affective good than most traditional efforts (guilt reduction, rather than warm fuzzies), and a fundraising org probably has to choose between the two.
On the plus side, it probably appeals to a different set of donors. On the down side, youâd find it hard to collect more than the full-offset amount from any donor.
(Working out the ethics of quilting oneâs prospective donors is too complex for a comment written on commuter rail....)
Someone could not just eliminate their contribution to FF but be part of the solution if their contribution is a greater than one multiple of the offset. I think people might like a 1.5 to 2X offset potentially for the warm fuzzies.
There are lots of options helping animals (through raising money or otherwise) that donât involve this kind of competition around the impact of donations. Itâs common for startups to pivot if their first product doesnât work out.
I think FarmKind would be constrained by the need to keep faith with its donors, though. I agree about pivoting when there has been a material change in facts or circumstances. Thatâs an understood part of the deal when you donate to a charity. But I donât see any evidence of the product on which FarmKind raised its seed funding was not âwork[ing] outâ in practice. It had just launched its platform. The critiques you and Ben offered were not novel or previously unknown to FarmKind (e.g., their launch info cites Giving Multiplier as a sort of inspiration).
It is of course good to change your mind when you realize that you made an error. But from the seed donor perspective, changing paradigms so early would look an awful lot like a bait and switch in effect if not in intent. If an organization fundraises based on X and then promptly decides to do something significantly different for reasons within the organizationâs control without giving X a serious try, I think it should generally offer people who donated for X idea to have their donations regranted elsewhere. Whether its donors would chose that is unknown to me.
Independently, itâs not clear that a pivot would be practically feasible for FarmKind (or most other CE incubatees a few months after launch). It launched on a $133K seed grant with two staff members about three months ago (not including time spent in the CE program). Even assuming they could get 100% donor consent for repurposing funds, they would still be going almost back to square one. Itâs not clear to me that it could come up with a new idea, spend the time to develop that, relaunch, and show results to get funding for the rest of year 1 and beyond (which has been a big challenge for many CE-incubated orgs).
Given those constraints, I think it is fair to say that the extent to which FarmKind could realistically change course in response to criticism (other than winding down) remains unclear.
Yeah, in retrospect maybe it was kind of doomed to expect that I might influence FarmKindâs behaviour directly, and maybe the best I could hope for is influencing the audience to prefer other methods of promoting effective giving.
Thatâs a good question, and certainly the identity of the matching donor may have played a role in the absence of criticism. However, I do find some differences there that are fairly material to me.
Given that the target for the EA Funds match was EAs, potential donors were presumably on notice that the money in the match pool was pre-committed to charity and would likely be spent on similar types of endeavors if not deployed in the match. Therefore, thereâs little reason to think donors would have believed that their participation would have changed the aggregate amounts going toward the long-term future /â EA infrastructure. Thatâs unclear with FarmKind and most classical matches.
Based on this, standard donors would have understood that the sweetener they were offered was a degree of influence over Open Philâs allocation decisions. That sweetener is also present in the FarmKind offer. It is often not present in classical matching situations, where we assume that the bonus donor would have probably given the same amount to the same charity anyway.
The OP match offer feels less . . . contrived? OP had pre-committed to at least sharply reducing the amount it was giving to LTFF/âEAIF, and explained those reasons legibly enough to establish that it would not be making up the difference anyway. It seems clear to me that OPâs sharp reduction in LTFF/âEAIF funding was not motivated by a desire to influence third-party spending though then offering a one-time matching mechanism.
Even OPâs decision to offer donor matching has a potential justification other than a desire to influence third-party donations. Specifically, OP (like other big funders) is known to not want to fund too much of an organization, and that desire would be especially strong where OP was planning to cut funding in the near future. If OPâs main goal were to influence other donors, they frankly could have done a lot better job than advertising to the community of people who were already giving to LTFF/âEAIF, matching at 2:1, not requiring that the match-eligible funding be from a new/âincreased donor, etc.[1] In contrast, FarmKindâs expressed purpose (and predominant reason for existence) is to influence third-party donations toward more effective charities.
Another possibly relevant difference is that the OP matching offer was time-limited and atypical, while FarmKindâs offer is perpetual. Iâm not sure why this is intuitively of some relevance to me. Is it that Iâm more willing to defer to the judgment of an organization that rarely matches, that this particular scenario warrants it? Is it that I think time-limited and atypical match offers are more likely to be counterfactual? Or is this a reaction to me finding a perpetual match to be gimmicky?
Finally, I sense that OP and the expected standard donors in the LTFF/âEAIF match are significantly more aligned than FarmKind and its expected standard donors. Apparently any 501(c)(3) can be a donor-selected âfavoriteâ charity there. Even if we think the median FarmKind donor is picking something like a cat/âdog shelter, thereâs still much less alignment between the donorsâ expressed favorite and FarmKindâs objectives in offering the match.
So the OP situation seems directionally closer to a group of funders who are already on the same page trying to cooperate on a joint project, while the FarmKind situation seems more like an effort to divert money from standard donors who arenât already aligned. Perhaps the clearest indicator here is FarmKindâs request, on the Forum and on its website, that people who were already on board with farmed-animal welfare not made standard donations! So I would expect OP to have acted in closer alignment to its expected standard donorsâ interests than FarnKind, merely because it was already aligned with them.
The structure was also quite open to donors merely accelerating donations they were going to make to LTFF/âEAIF anyway. And I expect EAs were quite likely to pick up on this.