The highest counterfactual impact comes from working with organisations that could benefit but haven’t budgeted for marketing due to a lack of understanding.
As JS from Good Impressions told us: “Willingness to pay is not as strong a predictor of commitment or perceived value as I thought it would be.”
This creates a chicken-and-egg problem: funders expect clients to pay, but clients lack the means.
This matches our own experience (with the Rethink Priorities, Surveys and Data Analysis team).
I would add that, in our experience, the situation is worse than the chicken-and-egg problem as stated. As you note, funders are often not interested in funding work which is supporting smaller, more peripheral or less established groups (and to be clear, this seems to be a matter of ‘most orgs don’t meet the bar’ rather than ‘all but a few smaller groups do meet the bar’).
But we have also been told by more than one funder that if our work is supporting core, well-resourced orgs, then those orgs ought to fund it themselves, and you shouldn’t need central funding.[1] This creates a real catch-22 situation, where projects of this kind can neither be funded if they are supporting the biggest orgs or if they’re not.
I also find that people often significantly overestimate the ability to pay of even the largest orgs to pay. We often find that orgs are willing to invest tens of staff hours in working with us on a project- implying they value it- but they still have hard limits of whether they can spend $500-1000 on costs for the project.[2]
Perhaps explained by (i) even well-resourced orgs don’t have large amounts of unrestricted funds that they can spend on whatever unforeseen expenses they want (ii) internal approvals for funding being difficult, (iii) needing/wanting to stick to some, pretty low, sense of what reasonable costs for advertising/experiments are.
funders are often not interested in funding work which is supporting smaller, more peripheral or less established groups (and to be clear, this seems to be a matter of ‘most orgs don’t meet the bar’ rather than ‘all but a few smaller groups do meet the bar’)
A small number of small orgs do meet the bar, though! AIS Cape town, EA Philippines, EA & AIS Hungary (probably at least some others) has been funded consistently for years. The bar is really high though for these groups, and I guess funders don’t see enough good opportunities to support to justify investing more resources into them through external services. (Maybe this is what you meant anyway but I wasn’t sure)
we have also been told by more than one funder that if our work is supporting core, well-resourced orgs, then those orgs ought to fund it themselves, and you shouldn’t need central funding.
That’s on point. The notion we have been trying to get across is that by showing orgs the value of marketing, we can nudge them to budget these resources in for future fundraising rounds. Our goal is to make the field self-sustaining over time, but that seems to need external funding for most orgs right now. Hopefully, we can achieve this trajectory change for orgs more and more, but this is a slow process.
Perhaps explained by (i) even well-resourced orgs don’t have large amounts of unrestricted funds that they can spend on whatever unforseen expenses they want
I didn’t think of this explicitly before, but I think this explains a large fraction of orgs we interacted with. Thanks for sharing!
A small number of small orgs do meet the bar, though! AIS Cape town, EA Philippines, EA & AIS Hungary (probably at least some others) has been funded consistently for years. The bar is really high though for these groups, and I guess funders don’t see enough good opportunities to support to justify investing more resources into them through external services. (Maybe this is what you meant anyway but I wasn’t sure)
My claim is actually slightly different (though much closer to your second claim than your first). It’s definitely not that no small groups are funded (obviously untrue), but that funders are often not interested in funding work on the strength of it supporting smaller groups, where “smaller” includes the majority of orgs.
This matches our own experience (with the Rethink Priorities, Surveys and Data Analysis team).
I would add that, in our experience, the situation is worse than the chicken-and-egg problem as stated. As you note, funders are often not interested in funding work which is supporting smaller, more peripheral or less established groups (and to be clear, this seems to be a matter of ‘most orgs don’t meet the bar’ rather than ‘all but a few smaller groups do meet the bar’).
But we have also been told by more than one funder that if our work is supporting core, well-resourced orgs, then those orgs ought to fund it themselves, and you shouldn’t need central funding.[1] This creates a real catch-22 situation, where projects of this kind can neither be funded if they are supporting the biggest orgs or if they’re not.
I also find that people often significantly overestimate the ability to pay of even the largest orgs to pay. We often find that orgs are willing to invest tens of staff hours in working with us on a project- implying they value it- but they still have hard limits of whether they can spend $500-1000 on costs for the project.[2]
I’ve not directly experienced this response recently, as we’ve not been applying for funding on this sort of basis, so YMMV.
Perhaps explained by (i) even well-resourced orgs don’t have large amounts of unrestricted funds that they can spend on whatever unforeseen expenses they want (ii) internal approvals for funding being difficult, (iii) needing/wanting to stick to some, pretty low, sense of what reasonable costs for advertising/experiments are.
Thank you for this thoughtful comment David!
A small number of small orgs do meet the bar, though! AIS Cape town, EA Philippines, EA & AIS Hungary (probably at least some others) has been funded consistently for years. The bar is really high though for these groups, and I guess funders don’t see enough good opportunities to support to justify investing more resources into them through external services. (Maybe this is what you meant anyway but I wasn’t sure)
That’s on point. The notion we have been trying to get across is that by showing orgs the value of marketing, we can nudge them to budget these resources in for future fundraising rounds. Our goal is to make the field self-sustaining over time, but that seems to need external funding for most orgs right now. Hopefully, we can achieve this trajectory change for orgs more and more, but this is a slow process.
I didn’t think of this explicitly before, but I think this explains a large fraction of orgs we interacted with. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks gergo!
My claim is actually slightly different (though much closer to your second claim than your first). It’s definitely not that no small groups are funded (obviously untrue), but that funders are often not interested in funding work on the strength of it supporting smaller groups, where “smaller” includes the majority of orgs.
Gotcha, thanks for clarifying!