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 don’t 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 wish—just 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 hadn’t.
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 wasn’t so good but I’m pretty sure I didn’t see it at the time (because I don’t remember it and apparently didn’t 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 GiveWell’s, GivingMultiplier’s, and FarmKind’s. 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 they’re literally having a larger impact by the stated amount, and would not endorse their behavior change if they fully understood the effect.
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 don’t 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 wish—just 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 hadn’t.
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 wasn’t so good but I’m pretty sure I didn’t see it at the time (because I don’t remember it and apparently didn’t 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 GiveWell’s, GivingMultiplier’s, and FarmKind’s. 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 they’re literally having a larger impact by the stated amount, and would not endorse their behavior change if they fully understood the effect.