I wasn’t an enormous fan of the LTFF/OP 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/OP relationship here would be far too much, but within that context, a very rough summary of the LTFF/OP 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 doesn’t 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 didn’t 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 isn’t 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 “fair share” of the LTFF contributions, by agreeing on a relative funding split in advance (whereas otherwise you might have donor-chicken problems where donors don’t 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 wasn’t 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.
I wasn’t an enormous fan of the LTFF/OP 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/OP relationship here would be far too much, but within that context, a very rough summary of the LTFF/OP 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 doesn’t 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 didn’t 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 isn’t 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 “fair share” of the LTFF contributions, by agreeing on a relative funding split in advance (whereas otherwise you might have donor-chicken problems where donors don’t 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 wasn’t 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.