It seems that a central bottleneck for the fund is that a few key people are decision-makers, and they are very busy, which makes it hard to operate quickly at scale and be transparent.
most senior/expert people helped at key moments, but were mostly consultative
mid-level people (i.e. fairly experienced but non-expert) actively reviewed applications, including have a call with applicants (we actually did two rounds of calls, which might have been overkill)
junior people attended calls, wrote up notes, helped with putting the content into an accessible format for senior people to review, but also contributed thoughts and opinions
In many ways, this structure seemed to work well, since it allowed for the following:
call with applicants: having a video call as well as the application form was often genuinely additive and helped with decision-making; I’m therefore more positive about the quality of our grant-making
feedback: we were able to provide feedback to all applicants, which many applicants stated that they appreciated
transparency: we were able to exhibit a good level of transparency about our process and the outcomes of the process
effects on talent pool: the junior and even mid-level people involved in the process largely felt like it was a great opportunity to learn, and got a lot out of it (which might not be true of the experienced fund manager at the LTFF)
better aligned with key considerations: we generally found that lots of our decisions could be made based on junior input alone; i.e. common sense + general awareness of EA thinking + fresh perspective was often sufficient to highlight weaknesses in an application. Senior involvement was still needed in case something was missed, but often if a junior person was inclined to reject an application, it was rare for someone senior to suggest that we should resurrect the application. This meant that the way time was used was better aligned to the people involved, and there were significant time savings for senior people.
Here are some potential downsides:
speed: there are more steps involved in the process; this makes it hard to have a quick turnaround time. I suspect this could be surmountable.
costs: there are more people involved, which means there are more costs incurred; however arguably the most important consideration is the opportunity cost of people’s time, and those with high opportunity cost are spending less time, and more junior people feel like it’s a great opportunity for them to learn.
dependent on junior staff: if the junior staff were not performing well, this would be problematic. In our experience, this was not a problem. I think this reflects the fact that there are lots of very bright, motivated people who are keen to get relevant experience. However it does mean that care is needed with the selection process.
management capability: in order for this to work, senior and mid-level people need to be effective at managing more junior people. This did not seem to be much of a problem for us, but SoGive has experience supporting junior people (mostly volunteers) for many years.
I’m not trying to say that EA Funds should definitely do something like this, more that if it’s useful to explore what happened when someone tried something different, I’d be happy to discuss.
>It seems that a central bottleneck for the fund is that a few key people are decision-makers, and they are very busy, which makes it hard to operate quickly at scale and be transparent.
I think this is at least somewhat true. We have tried out having more junior managers on the fund with mixed success. The EAIF currently has “assistant fund managers” which I think was a good experiment for us to run, and I think it’s generally gone well.
My impression is that SoGive gave out something like $300k and had 26 applicants so it doesn’t seem super comparable to me to the LTFF (I think last year we had ~1000 applications), and I’d guess that your methods don’t scale particularly well to the kind of grantmaking the LTFF does (but I could be wrong).
I also somewhat disagree with Asya re our transparency, I think that we are falling short of where I’d like us to be, but if you compare us to other grantmaking programs that have existed for more than 1 year I think we look pretty good transparency wise (e.g. Longview, Effective Giving, Open Phil) though plausibly they don’t need to be as transparent as they are raising less from the public.
It seems that a central bottleneck for the fund is that a few key people are decision-makers, and they are very busy, which makes it hard to operate quickly at scale and be transparent.
When SoGive ran its grants programme last year, we tackled these problems by getting more junior people to help.
I.e. the structure was:
most senior/expert people helped at key moments, but were mostly consultative
mid-level people (i.e. fairly experienced but non-expert) actively reviewed applications, including have a call with applicants (we actually did two rounds of calls, which might have been overkill)
junior people attended calls, wrote up notes, helped with putting the content into an accessible format for senior people to review, but also contributed thoughts and opinions
In many ways, this structure seemed to work well, since it allowed for the following:
call with applicants: having a video call as well as the application form was often genuinely additive and helped with decision-making; I’m therefore more positive about the quality of our grant-making
feedback: we were able to provide feedback to all applicants, which many applicants stated that they appreciated
transparency: we were able to exhibit a good level of transparency about our process and the outcomes of the process
effects on talent pool: the junior and even mid-level people involved in the process largely felt like it was a great opportunity to learn, and got a lot out of it (which might not be true of the experienced fund manager at the LTFF)
better aligned with key considerations: we generally found that lots of our decisions could be made based on junior input alone; i.e. common sense + general awareness of EA thinking + fresh perspective was often sufficient to highlight weaknesses in an application. Senior involvement was still needed in case something was missed, but often if a junior person was inclined to reject an application, it was rare for someone senior to suggest that we should resurrect the application. This meant that the way time was used was better aligned to the people involved, and there were significant time savings for senior people.
Here are some potential downsides:
speed: there are more steps involved in the process; this makes it hard to have a quick turnaround time. I suspect this could be surmountable.
costs: there are more people involved, which means there are more costs incurred; however arguably the most important consideration is the opportunity cost of people’s time, and those with high opportunity cost are spending less time, and more junior people feel like it’s a great opportunity for them to learn.
dependent on junior staff: if the junior staff were not performing well, this would be problematic. In our experience, this was not a problem. I think this reflects the fact that there are lots of very bright, motivated people who are keen to get relevant experience. However it does mean that care is needed with the selection process.
management capability: in order for this to work, senior and mid-level people need to be effective at managing more junior people. This did not seem to be much of a problem for us, but SoGive has experience supporting junior people (mostly volunteers) for many years.
I’m not trying to say that EA Funds should definitely do something like this, more that if it’s useful to explore what happened when someone tried something different, I’d be happy to discuss.
>It seems that a central bottleneck for the fund is that a few key people are decision-makers, and they are very busy, which makes it hard to operate quickly at scale and be transparent.
I think this is at least somewhat true. We have tried out having more junior managers on the fund with mixed success. The EAIF currently has “assistant fund managers” which I think was a good experiment for us to run, and I think it’s generally gone well.
My impression is that SoGive gave out something like $300k and had 26 applicants so it doesn’t seem super comparable to me to the LTFF (I think last year we had ~1000 applications), and I’d guess that your methods don’t scale particularly well to the kind of grantmaking the LTFF does (but I could be wrong).
I also somewhat disagree with Asya re our transparency, I think that we are falling short of where I’d like us to be, but if you compare us to other grantmaking programs that have existed for more than 1 year I think we look pretty good transparency wise (e.g. Longview, Effective Giving, Open Phil) though plausibly they don’t need to be as transparent as they are raising less from the public.