Judging by the stats page LTFF currently has 2M in the bank, which is an evidence against being funding constrained. If LTFF have distributed ~all the funds and managers put up a post saying e.g. : “here are 20 more grants totalling 10M we’d really like to see funded”, the argument would have sounded more persuasive, and i would predict the funding gap could get closed relatively quickly by some crypto magnate.
I appreciate the author starting this conversation and would really love to see comment from LTFF here
We consider LTFF to be funding constrained because we’re still giving out more in grants monthly than we’re receiving in donations, despite having raising our internal bar twice since November 2022 (the first time because of an assessment of changes in the LT funding landscape overall, the second time due to worries about our own liquidity constraints).
If you’re interested, you might like my new post on marginal grants at different levels of funding here, which might help you get a useful sense of whether donations to LTFF are valuable relative to your best counterfactual use of money elsewhere.
Re: “2M in the bank,” I think it is literally true that we have 1.8M in the bank, but the number listed is a lagging indicator, because we have a number of grants that were promised or effectively promised but not actually paid out.
In this appendix, I also wrote some notes on our current approach to how much we save/donation smoothing (mostly we don’t do it that much).
Thank you for pointing me to this post, now I better understand the situation. I hope you’ll figure out how to distribute approved grants faster, and also how raise more funds—I’d love to see most net-positive longtermist grants funded, and believe it’s achievable.
I think you laid out a very compelling reason to donate to LTFF and I’m sorry I didn’t see it earlier. Am I unusual in this regard? What share of current LTFF donors do you think are up to date on this?
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)
Based on donations over the past few months, I estimate that each fund will receive (by default) roughly $120k per month (720K over the next six months), which will be matched at a 2:1 rate, by Open Philanthropy to give us a total of $360k/month.
This means we expect to be unable to fund around $640k/month of projects we believe should be funded.
This could be filled by an additional $213k in public donations each month (or $1.27M over the next six months).
On the other hand, the LTFF might still not be funding constrained if the above gap is expected to be easily filled thanks to its announcement.
On the other hand, the LTFF might still not be funding constrained if the above gap is expected to be easily filled thanks to its announcement.
I definitely hope so! On the other hand, we at least haven’t received sufficiently high donations in the last week. But of course it’s very possible/likely that people very reasonably need to take a while to decide whether donating to us is worth it, so the situation will look less scary in the coming weeks.
Judging by the stats page LTFF currently has 2M in the bank, which is an evidence against being funding constrained. If LTFF have distributed ~all the funds and managers put up a post saying e.g. : “here are 20 more grants totalling 10M we’d really like to see funded”, the argument would have sounded more persuasive, and i would predict the funding gap could get closed relatively quickly by some crypto magnate.
I appreciate the author starting this conversation and would really love to see comment from LTFF here
Hi Mckiev!
We consider LTFF to be funding constrained because we’re still giving out more in grants monthly than we’re receiving in donations, despite having raising our internal bar twice since November 2022 (the first time because of an assessment of changes in the LT funding landscape overall, the second time due to worries about our own liquidity constraints).
If you’re interested, you might like my new post on marginal grants at different levels of funding here, which might help you get a useful sense of whether donations to LTFF are valuable relative to your best counterfactual use of money elsewhere.
Re: “2M in the bank,” I think it is literally true that we have 1.8M in the bank, but the number listed is a lagging indicator, because we have a number of grants that were promised or effectively promised but not actually paid out.
In this appendix, I also wrote some notes on our current approach to how much we save/donation smoothing (mostly we don’t do it that much).
Thank you for pointing me to this post, now I better understand the situation. I hope you’ll figure out how to distribute approved grants faster, and also how raise more funds—I’d love to see most net-positive longtermist grants funded, and believe it’s achievable.
I think you laid out a very compelling reason to donate to LTFF and I’m sorry I didn’t see it earlier. Am I unusual in this regard? What share of current LTFF donors do you think are up to date on this?
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)
Hi Anton,
Trusting what Caleb Parikh said 1 week or so ago, it looks like the LTFF is funding constrained:
On the other hand, the LTFF might still not be funding constrained if the above gap is expected to be easily filled thanks to its announcement.
I definitely hope so! On the other hand, we at least haven’t received sufficiently high donations in the last week. But of course it’s very possible/likely that people very reasonably need to take a while to decide whether donating to us is worth it, so the situation will look less scary in the coming weeks.