I’ve forwarded this data to the team—thanks for sharing it, I missed it when it went up on the forum.
How to take data like this into account is an interesting and tricky question. I can have a go at a few points that seem relevant:
I’d rather see opportunities as projects and funding gaps rather than asking ‘who received what funding already?’. Point made only to clarify, I realise this isn’t what you were suggesting.
EA Meta as a cause area does have a larger requirement for funding than is currently available. The only two donors to meta orgs I know of that are not already donating at their own full capacity are my employer and Open Phil. However, both are deploying capital as fast as they can limited by other restrictions (risk, talent, appetite of principal etc). Certain key groups have performed particularly well and fundraised well so they are making decisions based not on maximising their ‘impact per dollar donated’ but on maximising their absolute impact given some other bottleneck/s. It does not necessarily follow that an org in the latter category is lower impact per dollar donated than an org that isn’t. I think some more simply expressed version of the above would be more useful than discussing whether orgs / cause areas are funding constrained (outside of evaluating counterfactuals when making career decisions).
The operations of some orgs are also far more scalable than others and in general I want to reward this. While we mostly speak about relative returns (impact per dollar) we should also keep in mind absolute returns. In particular, it’s worth nothing that reaching a certain size and scale of operation opens an org up to large grants from large foundations, accessing capital that otherwise wouldn’t have gone into the cause area. An adage used in venture capital is that it “takes founders just as long to raise $100k as it takes to raise $1m”. This does seem to hold true for non-profits as well so long as there is enough mid-stage and late-stage capital available.
The general approach I take is to only challenge an orgs declared room for funding if it seems surprisingly large, small or poorly justified. Potentially, given that in many cases funds one org receives come at the cost of those same funds going to another org, room for funding and budget declarations should be more heavily scrutinised. i.e., It’s OK to stretch a high return business model slightly into it’s diminishing returns so long as it remains more effective than smaller marginal groups whose funding they might be restricting. In other words: we should probably be encouraging EA meta orgs to avoid being wasteful with their resources.
This said, funding is only zero sum for some donor segments. Some donors are restricted by , for example, Open Phil’s rough 50% rule or a donor’s limited time and confidence requirements causing them to prioritise larger capital deployments.
I have seen at least two examples of larger orgs directly taking into account the flexibility of donor capital that they receive and spending some time trying to replace that donor with someone less flexible with lower opportunity cost. To me this seems highly commendable.
How a group have used previous funding plays an important role in evaluating their likelihood of using new funding well.
Some orgs are a cluster of valuable projects that could just as easily be evaluated project-by-project and we wouldn’t want to be guilty of something akin to gerrymandering.
It seems like where orgs are a collection of projects, ideally we would be able to evaluate each of those projects individually, as well as evaluating the group as a whole. It would be helpful if these cluster orgs were better able to track the progress of their projects individually. 80k are particularly good at this.
I’ve forwarded this data to the team—thanks for sharing it, I missed it when it went up on the forum.
How to take data like this into account is an interesting and tricky question. I can have a go at a few points that seem relevant:
I’d rather see opportunities as projects and funding gaps rather than asking ‘who received what funding already?’. Point made only to clarify, I realise this isn’t what you were suggesting.
EA Meta as a cause area does have a larger requirement for funding than is currently available. The only two donors to meta orgs I know of that are not already donating at their own full capacity are my employer and Open Phil. However, both are deploying capital as fast as they can limited by other restrictions (risk, talent, appetite of principal etc). Certain key groups have performed particularly well and fundraised well so they are making decisions based not on maximising their ‘impact per dollar donated’ but on maximising their absolute impact given some other bottleneck/s. It does not necessarily follow that an org in the latter category is lower impact per dollar donated than an org that isn’t. I think some more simply expressed version of the above would be more useful than discussing whether orgs / cause areas are funding constrained (outside of evaluating counterfactuals when making career decisions).
The operations of some orgs are also far more scalable than others and in general I want to reward this. While we mostly speak about relative returns (impact per dollar) we should also keep in mind absolute returns. In particular, it’s worth nothing that reaching a certain size and scale of operation opens an org up to large grants from large foundations, accessing capital that otherwise wouldn’t have gone into the cause area. An adage used in venture capital is that it “takes founders just as long to raise $100k as it takes to raise $1m”. This does seem to hold true for non-profits as well so long as there is enough mid-stage and late-stage capital available.
The general approach I take is to only challenge an orgs declared room for funding if it seems surprisingly large, small or poorly justified. Potentially, given that in many cases funds one org receives come at the cost of those same funds going to another org, room for funding and budget declarations should be more heavily scrutinised. i.e., It’s OK to stretch a high return business model slightly into it’s diminishing returns so long as it remains more effective than smaller marginal groups whose funding they might be restricting. In other words: we should probably be encouraging EA meta orgs to avoid being wasteful with their resources.
This said, funding is only zero sum for some donor segments. Some donors are restricted by , for example, Open Phil’s rough 50% rule or a donor’s limited time and confidence requirements causing them to prioritise larger capital deployments.
I have seen at least two examples of larger orgs directly taking into account the flexibility of donor capital that they receive and spending some time trying to replace that donor with someone less flexible with lower opportunity cost. To me this seems highly commendable.
How a group have used previous funding plays an important role in evaluating their likelihood of using new funding well.
Some orgs are a cluster of valuable projects that could just as easily be evaluated project-by-project and we wouldn’t want to be guilty of something akin to gerrymandering.
It seems like where orgs are a collection of projects, ideally we would be able to evaluate each of those projects individually, as well as evaluating the group as a whole. It would be helpful if these cluster orgs were better able to track the progress of their projects individually. 80k are particularly good at this.