I think you laid out a very compelling reason to donate to LTFF and I’m sorry I didn’t see it earlier.
Thanks for your kind words! And as for being sorry, hardly your fault, given that the relevant public writings are between a few days and 2 weeks old!
Am I unusual in this regard? What share of current LTFF donors do you think are up to date on this?
I’m not sure. We’ve always been low on grantmaking capacity at least since I’ve joined in early 2022, and the relative capacity: applications ratio has gotten even worse this year. This resulted in us prioritizing our limited LTFF time on grant evaluations rather than donor engagement or big picture strategic calls. It has also resulted in a number of other deficiencies in LTFF like lack of reliability in responding to time-sensitive applications, see some of Asya’s reflections here.
We’ve onboarded a few more guest fund managers (grantmakers) so hopefully the grant evals will be faster. I’ve also decided recently to devote a significantly higher percentage of time on EA Funds/LTFF rather than my historical “day job” at Rethink Priorities, at least until the situation is a bit more stable.
Anyway, one of my bigger priorities in the upcoming weeks/months is to understand donor concerns, communicate with donors and the EA public more, possibly pitch specific donors about our funding needs, etc. Hopefully this will give us more clarity into whether my tentative assessment (that LTFF’s current marginal grant is equal to or better than other marginal longtermist expenditures) is accurate, vs donors are correctly responding to changes in the funding landscape by prioritizing other, better, longtermist donation opportunities.
Glad to hear that you are increasing capacity!
In regards to understanding donor concerns and pitching them: seems like it should be relatively easy to hire someone for this role (unlike hiring a grant evaluator)
Thanks for your kind words! And as for being sorry, hardly your fault, given that the relevant public writings are between a few days and 2 weeks old!
I’m not sure. We’ve always been low on grantmaking capacity at least since I’ve joined in early 2022, and the relative capacity: applications ratio has gotten even worse this year. This resulted in us prioritizing our limited LTFF time on grant evaluations rather than donor engagement or big picture strategic calls. It has also resulted in a number of other deficiencies in LTFF like lack of reliability in responding to time-sensitive applications, see some of Asya’s reflections here.
We’ve onboarded a few more guest fund managers (grantmakers) so hopefully the grant evals will be faster. I’ve also decided recently to devote a significantly higher percentage of time on EA Funds/LTFF rather than my historical “day job” at Rethink Priorities, at least until the situation is a bit more stable.
Anyway, one of my bigger priorities in the upcoming weeks/months is to understand donor concerns, communicate with donors and the EA public more, possibly pitch specific donors about our funding needs, etc. Hopefully this will give us more clarity into whether my tentative assessment (that LTFF’s current marginal grant is equal to or better than other marginal longtermist expenditures) is accurate, vs donors are correctly responding to changes in the funding landscape by prioritizing other, better, longtermist donation opportunities.
Glad to hear that you are increasing capacity! In regards to understanding donor concerns and pitching them: seems like it should be relatively easy to hire someone for this role (unlike hiring a grant evaluator)