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. I’m 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 don’t 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 RP’s 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, I’m guessing an organization would want to be generating something like 15%-20% of it’s 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, I’ve seen it actively spoken against (in the vein of “I guess that could be good, but it is almost no one’s most impactful option”), 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 isn’t 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 don’t think anything like massive, multi-million dollar E2G outreach has been tried, at least as far as I know.
I’m 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 doesn’t seem quite right to me—Longview and EG don’t 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 / every day earning to give, as you’re definitely right that effort has gone into bringing in large donors.
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/or 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 I’m 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/year. So it sounds like the ETG outreach organisation would need to do both of these things and focus on e2g rather than other things. “How do I optimise my career make money” is a pretty common question and I think you should be somewhat sceptical of EAs ability to beat non-EA resources.
It’s worth noting that there aren’t any multimillion dollar organisations that I’m aware of that do the equivalent thing (outreach + career advice) for solely AI safety, biosecurity or global health.
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. I’m 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 don’t 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 RP’s 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, I’m guessing an organization would want to be generating something like 15%-20% of it’s 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, I’ve seen it actively spoken against (in the vein of “I guess that could be good, but it is almost no one’s most impactful option”), 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 isn’t 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.
I’m 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 doesn’t seem quite right to me—Longview and EG don’t 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 / every day earning to give, as you’re definitely right that effort has gone into bringing in large donors.
I guess I don’t really know what you have in mind. I’m particularly confused as to what definition of outreach you’re 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 don’t think there’s much e2g as a career stuff since 80k pivoted away from that message—but that’s 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/or 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 I’m 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/year. So it sounds like the ETG outreach organisation would need to do both of these things and focus on e2g rather than other things. “How do I optimise my career make money” is a pretty common question and I think you should be somewhat sceptical of EAs ability to beat non-EA resources.
It’s worth noting that there aren’t any multimillion dollar organisations that I’m aware of that do the equivalent thing (outreach + career advice) for solely AI safety, biosecurity or global health.