Thanks for writing this! I find this vision compelling, but I wonder how far away we are from it. As Gregory Lewis mentions in another comment, 5,000 donors giving $20,000 is ambitious in the short term (under 10,000 people have signed the GWWC pledge, for example). To get a slightly more concrete view of the tractability here: In the case of Rethink, what portion of donations would need to come from small/âmedium-sized donors before it had appreciable effect on Rethinkâs ability to:
worry less about what specific people in power think, and respond more to what the community at large thinks, and to rely more on their own on-the-ground judgment of the best way to do their work.
(PS- no worries if youâd rather not share your opinions on your employer specifically, I only mention them because you bring them up in the body of the post).
I think that one thing I reflect on is how much money has been spent on EA community building over the last 5 years or so. Iâm guessing it is several 10s of millions of dollars. My impression (which might not be totally right) is that little of that went to promoting earning to give. So it seems possible that in a different world, where a much larger fraction was used on E2G outreach, we could have seen a substantial increase. The GWWC numbers are hard to interpret, because I donât think anything like massive, multi-million dollar E2G outreach has been tried, at least as far as I know.
I think broadly, it would be healthy for any organization of RPâs size to not have a single funder giving over 40% of their funding, and ideally less. I assume the realistic version of this that might be possible is something like an $10M org. having $4M from one funder, maybe a couple of $500k-$1M donors, a few more $20k-$500k donors, and a pretty wide base of <$20k donors. So in that world, Iâm guessing an organization would want to be generating something like 15%-20% of itâs revenue from these mid-size donors? So definitely still a huge lift.
But, I think one thing worth considering is that while ideally there might be tens of thousands of $20k donors in EA, doing the outreach to get tens of thousands of $20k donors, if successful, will probably also bring in hundreds of <$100k donors, and maybe some handful of <$1M donors. This might not meet the ideal situation I laid out above, but on the margin seems very good.
Thanks, this makes sense. I also have the impression that E2G was deprioritised. In some cases, Iâve seen it actively spoken against (in the vein of âI guess that could be good, but it is almost no oneâs most impactful optionâ), mostly as pushback to the media impression that EA=E2G. I also see the point that more diversified funding seems good on the margin- to give organisations more autonomy and security.
One thing that isnât mentioned in this piece is the risks that come from relying on a broader base of donors. If the EA community would need to be much, much larger in order to support the current organisations with more diversified funding, how would this change the way the organisations acted? In order to keep a wider range of funders happy, would there be pressures to appeal to a common denominator? Would it in fact become harder to service and maintain relations with a wider range of donors? I presume that the ideal is closer to the portfolio you sketch for an organisation like RP in this comment.
The GWWC numbers are hard to interpret, because I donât think anything like massive, multi-million dollar E2G outreach has been tried, at least as far as I know.
Iâm pretty sure that GWWC, Founders Pledge, Longview and Effective Giving all have operating costs of over $1M per year. It seems like quite a lot of effort has gone into testing the e2g growth hypothesis.
That doesnât seem quite right to meâLongview and EG donât strike me as being earning to give outreach, though they definitely bring funds into the community. And Founders Pledge is clearly only targeting very large donors. I guess maybe to be more specific, nothing like massive, multi-million dollar E2G outreach has been tried for mid-sized /â every day earning to give, as youâre definitely right that effort has gone into bringing in large donors.
I guess I donât really know what you have in mind. Iâm particularly confused as to what definition of outreach youâre using if it excludes Longview.
Gwwc almost certainly has an annual budget of over $1m per year and is also pretty clearly investing in e2g.
I donât think thereâs much e2g as a career stuff since 80k pivoted away from that messageâbut thatâs obviously much narrower than e2g outreach.
Longview is interested in courting those who are already interested in donating at least seven figures annually. Their primary goal is to provide guidance to those who are already committed to donating on how they can use that money to do the most good.
An ETG outreach organization would be looking to get people to A. donate a significant portion of their money that they are not already giving to effective charities and/âor B. start making career decisions that enable them to make more money so that they can ETG.
So there are organisations spending more than $1m per year who have encouraged people to donate a significant fraction of their income (for example founders pledge, GWWC and OFTW though Iâm not sure of OFTWs budget).
80k hours have also looked into which careers pay the best (e.g. writing about quant trading and being an early startup employee) - I think they have a budget of around $5m/âyear. So it sounds like the ETG outreach organisation would need to do both of these things and focus on e2g rather than other things. âHow do I optimise my career make moneyâ is a pretty common question and I think you should be somewhat sceptical of EAs ability to beat non-EA resources.
Itâs worth noting that there arenât any multimillion dollar organisations that Iâm aware of that do the equivalent thing (outreach + career advice) for solely AI safety, biosecurity or global health.
Thanks for writing this!
I find this vision compelling, but I wonder how far away we are from it. As Gregory Lewis mentions in another comment, 5,000 donors giving $20,000 is ambitious in the short term (under 10,000 people have signed the GWWC pledge, for example).
To get a slightly more concrete view of the tractability here: In the case of Rethink, what portion of donations would need to come from small/âmedium-sized donors before it had appreciable effect on Rethinkâs ability to:
(PS- no worries if youâd rather not share your opinions on your employer specifically, I only mention them because you bring them up in the body of the post).
I think that one thing I reflect on is how much money has been spent on EA community building over the last 5 years or so. Iâm guessing it is several 10s of millions of dollars. My impression (which might not be totally right) is that little of that went to promoting earning to give. So it seems possible that in a different world, where a much larger fraction was used on E2G outreach, we could have seen a substantial increase. The GWWC numbers are hard to interpret, because I donât think anything like massive, multi-million dollar E2G outreach has been tried, at least as far as I know.
I think broadly, it would be healthy for any organization of RPâs size to not have a single funder giving over 40% of their funding, and ideally less. I assume the realistic version of this that might be possible is something like an $10M org. having $4M from one funder, maybe a couple of $500k-$1M donors, a few more $20k-$500k donors, and a pretty wide base of <$20k donors. So in that world, Iâm guessing an organization would want to be generating something like 15%-20% of itâs revenue from these mid-size donors? So definitely still a huge lift.
But, I think one thing worth considering is that while ideally there might be tens of thousands of $20k donors in EA, doing the outreach to get tens of thousands of $20k donors, if successful, will probably also bring in hundreds of <$100k donors, and maybe some handful of <$1M donors. This might not meet the ideal situation I laid out above, but on the margin seems very good.
Thanks, this makes sense. I also have the impression that E2G was deprioritised. In some cases, Iâve seen it actively spoken against (in the vein of âI guess that could be good, but it is almost no oneâs most impactful optionâ), mostly as pushback to the media impression that EA=E2G. I also see the point that more diversified funding seems good on the margin- to give organisations more autonomy and security.
One thing that isnât mentioned in this piece is the risks that come from relying on a broader base of donors. If the EA community would need to be much, much larger in order to support the current organisations with more diversified funding, how would this change the way the organisations acted? In order to keep a wider range of funders happy, would there be pressures to appeal to a common denominator? Would it in fact become harder to service and maintain relations with a wider range of donors? I presume that the ideal is closer to the portfolio you sketch for an organisation like RP in this comment.
Iâm pretty sure that GWWC, Founders Pledge, Longview and Effective Giving all have operating costs of over $1M per year. It seems like quite a lot of effort has gone into testing the e2g growth hypothesis.
That doesnât seem quite right to meâLongview and EG donât strike me as being earning to give outreach, though they definitely bring funds into the community. And Founders Pledge is clearly only targeting very large donors. I guess maybe to be more specific, nothing like massive, multi-million dollar E2G outreach has been tried for mid-sized /â every day earning to give, as youâre definitely right that effort has gone into bringing in large donors.
I guess I donât really know what you have in mind. Iâm particularly confused as to what definition of outreach youâre using if it excludes Longview.
Gwwc almost certainly has an annual budget of over $1m per year and is also pretty clearly investing in e2g.
I donât think thereâs much e2g as a career stuff since 80k pivoted away from that messageâbut thatâs obviously much narrower than e2g outreach.
Longview is interested in courting those who are already interested in donating at least seven figures annually. Their primary goal is to provide guidance to those who are already committed to donating on how they can use that money to do the most good.
An ETG outreach organization would be looking to get people to A. donate a significant portion of their money that they are not already giving to effective charities and/âor B. start making career decisions that enable them to make more money so that they can ETG.
So there are organisations spending more than $1m per year who have encouraged people to donate a significant fraction of their income (for example founders pledge, GWWC and OFTW though Iâm not sure of OFTWs budget).
80k hours have also looked into which careers pay the best (e.g. writing about quant trading and being an early startup employee) - I think they have a budget of around $5m/âyear. So it sounds like the ETG outreach organisation would need to do both of these things and focus on e2g rather than other things. âHow do I optimise my career make moneyâ is a pretty common question and I think you should be somewhat sceptical of EAs ability to beat non-EA resources.
Itâs worth noting that there arenât any multimillion dollar organisations that Iâm aware of that do the equivalent thing (outreach + career advice) for solely AI safety, biosecurity or global health.