Hey Sam, I am curious about your estimates of (a) CEA’s overhead, (b) grantmakers’ overhead for an average grant.
For the context in April Oliver Habryka of EA LTFF wrote:
A rough fermi I made a few days ago suggests that each grant we make comes with about $2000 of overhead from CEA for making the grants in terms of labor cost plus some other risks (this is my own number, not CEAs estimate).
I am also curious about this. I have since updated that the overhead is lower than I thought and I now think it’s closer to $1k, since CEA has been able to handle a greater volume of grants than I thought they would.
Good question. My very rough Fermi estimate puts this at around $750/grant (based on something like $90k worth of staff costs directly related to grantmaking and ~120 grants/year). It’s hard to say how this scales, but we’ve continued to improve our grant processing pipeline, and I’d expect that we can continue to accommodate a relatively high number of grants per year. This is also only the average cost – I’d expect the marginal cost for each grant to be lower than this.
I don’t have a great sense of grantmaker overhead per individual grant, but I’d estimate the time cost something in the range of $500-$1000 per grant recommendation per Fund team member, or $2000-$4000 for a typical ~4-person team (noting of course that Fund management team members donate their spare time to work on the project).
Hey Sam, I am curious about your estimates of (a) CEA’s overhead, (b) grantmakers’ overhead for an average grant.
For the context in April Oliver Habryka of EA LTFF wrote:
I am also curious about this. I have since updated that the overhead is lower than I thought and I now think it’s closer to $1k, since CEA has been able to handle a greater volume of grants than I thought they would.
Good question. My very rough Fermi estimate puts this at around $750/grant (based on something like $90k worth of staff costs directly related to grantmaking and ~120 grants/year). It’s hard to say how this scales, but we’ve continued to improve our grant processing pipeline, and I’d expect that we can continue to accommodate a relatively high number of grants per year. This is also only the average cost – I’d expect the marginal cost for each grant to be lower than this.
I don’t have a great sense of grantmaker overhead per individual grant, but I’d estimate the time cost something in the range of $500-$1000 per grant recommendation per Fund team member, or $2000-$4000 for a typical ~4-person team (noting of course that Fund management team members donate their spare time to work on the project).