The plan seemed good, but I had no way of assessing the applicant without investing significant amounts of time that I had not available (which is likely why you see a skew towards people the granting team had some past interactions with in the grants above)
I’m pretty concerned about this. I appreciate that there will always be reasonable limits to how long someone can spend vetting grant applications, but I think EA funds should not be hiring fund managers who don’t have sufficient time to vet applications from people they don’t already know—being able to do this should be a requirement of the job, IMO. Seconding Peter’s question below, I’d be keen to hear if there are any plans to make progress on this.
If you really don’t have time to vet applicants, then maybe grant decisions should be made blind, purely on the basis of the quality of the proposal. Another option would be to have a more structured/systematic approach to vetting applicants themselves, which could be anonymous-ish: based on past achievements and some answers to questions that seem relevant and important.
but I think EA funds should not be hiring fund managers who don’t have sufficient time to vet applications from people they don’t already know
To be clear, we did invest time into vetting applications from people we didn’t know, we just obviously have limits to how much time we can invest. I expect this will be a limiting factor for any grant body.
My guess is that if you don’t have any information besides the application info, and the plan requires a significant level of skill (as the vast majority of grants do), you have to invest at least an additional 5, often 10, hours of effort into reaching out to them, performing interviews, getting testimonials, analyzing their case, etc. If you don’t do this, I expect the average grant to be net negative.
Our review period lasted about one month. At 100 applications, assuming that you create an anonymous review process, this would have resulted in around 250-500 hours of additional work, which would have made this the full-time job for 2-3 of the 5 people on the grant board, plus the already existing ~80 hours of overhead this grant round required from the board. You likely would have filtered out about 50 of them at an earlier stage, so you can maybe cut that in half, resulting in ~2 full-time staff for that review period.
I don’t think that level of time-investment is possible for the EA Funds, and if you make it a requirement for being on an EA Fund board, the quality of your grant decisions will go down drastically because there are very few people who have a track record of good judgement in this domain, who are not also holding other full-time jobs. That level of commitment would not be compatible with holding another full-time job, especially not in a leadership position.
I do think that at our current grant volume, we should invest more resources into building infrastructure for vetting grant applications. I think it might make sense for us to hire a part-time staff to help with evaluations and do background research as well as interviews for us, but it’s currently unclear to me how such a person would be managed and whether their salary would be worth the benefit, but it seems like plausibly the correct choice.
Thanks for your detailed response Ollie. I appreciate there are tradeoffs here, but based on what you’ve said I do think that more time needs to be going into these grant reviews.
It don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that it should require 2 people full time for a month to distribute nearly $1,o00,000 in grant funding, especially if the aim is to find the most effective ways of doing good/influencing the long-term future. (though I recognise that this decision isn’t your responsibility personally!) Maybe it is very difficult for CEA to find people with the relevant expertise who can do that job. But if that’s the case, then I think there’s a bigger problem (the job isn’t being paid well enough, or being valued highly enough by the community), and maybe we should question the case for EA funds distributing so much money.
I strongly agree that I would like there to be more people who have the competencies and resources necessary to assess grants like this. With the Open Philanthropy Project having access to ~10 billion dollars, the case for needing more people with that expertise is pretty clear, and my current sense is that there is a broad consensus in EA that finding more people for those roles is among, if not the, top priority.
I think giving less money to EA Funds would not clearly improve this situation from this perspective at all, since most other granting bodies that exist in the EA space have an even higher (funds-distributed)/staff ratio than this.
The Open Philanthropy Project has about 15-20 people assessing grants, and gives out at least 100 million dollars a year, and likely aims to give closer to a $1 billion dollars a year given their reserves.
BERI has maybe 2 people working full-time on grant assessment, and my current guess is that they give out about $5 million dollars of grants a year
My guess is that GiveWell also has about 10 staff assessing grants full-time, making grants of about $20 million dollars
I think at the current level of team-member-involvement, and since I do think there is a significant judgement-component to evaluating grants which allows the average LTF-Fund team member to act with higher leverage, plus the time that anyone involved in the LTF-landscape has to invest to build models and keep up to speed with recent developments, I actually think that the LTF-Fund team is able to make more comprehensive grant assessments per dollar granted than almost any other granting body in the space.
I do think that having more people who can assess grants and help distribute resources like this is key, and think that investing in training and recruiting those people should be one of the top priorities for the community at large.
BERI has maybe 2 people working full-time on grant assessment, and my current guess is that they give out about $5 million dollars of grants a year
Note that BERI has only existed for a little over 2 years, and their grant-making has been pretty lumpy, so I don’t think they’ve yet reached any equilibrium grant-making rate (one which could be believably expressed in terms of $X dollars / year).
I agree. Though I think I expect the ratio of funds-distributed/staff to roughly stay the same, at least for a bit, and probably go up a bit.
I think older and larger organizations will have smaller funds-distributed/staff ratios, but I think that’s mostly because coordinating people is hard and marginal productiveness of a hire goes down a lot after the initial founders, so you need to hire a lot more people to produce the same quality of output.
I would be in favour of this fund using ~5% of its money to pay for staff costs, including a permanent secretariat. The secretariat would probably decrease pressure on grantmakers a little, and improve grant/feedback quality a little, which makes the costs seem worth it. (I know you’ve already considered this and I want to encourage it!)
I imagine the secretariat would:
-Handle the admin of opening and advertising a funding round
-Respond to many questions on the Forum, Facebook, and by email, and direct more difficult questions to the correct person
-Coordinate the writing of Forum posts like this
-Take notes on what additional information grantmakers would like from applicants, contact applicants with follow-up questions, and suggest iterations of the application form
-(potentially) Manage handover to new grantmakers when current members step down
-(potentially) Sift through applications and remove those which are obviously inappropriate for the Long Term Future Fund
-(potentially) Provide a couple of lines of fairly generic but private feedback for applicants
This strikes me as a great, concrete suggestion. As I tell a lot of people, great suggestions in EA only go somewhere if someone is done with them. I would strongly encourage you to develop this suggestion into its own article on the EA Forum about how the EA Funds can be improved. Please let me know if you are interested in doing so, and I can help out. If you don’t think you’ll have time to develop this suggestion, please let me know, as I would be interested in doing that myself if you don’t have the time.
The way the management of the EA Funds is structured to me makes sense within the goals set for the EA Funds. So I think the situation in which 2 people are paid full-time for one month to evaluate EA Funds applications makes sense is one where 2 of the 4 volunteer fund managers took a month off from their other positions to evaluate the applications. Finding 2 people from out of the blue to evaluate applications for one month without continuity with how the LTF Fund has been managed seems like it’d be too difficult to effectively accomplish in the timeframe of a few months.
In general, one issue the EA Funds face other granting bodies in EA don’t face is the donations come from many different donors. This consequently means how much the EA Funds receive and distribute, and how it’s distributed, is much more complicated than ones the CEA or a similar organization typically faces.
One issue with this is the fund managers are unpaid volunteers who have other full-time jobs, so being a fund manager isn’t a “job” in the most typical sense. Of course a lot of people think it should be treated like one though. When this came up in past discussions regarding how the EA Funds could be structured better, suggestions like hiring a full-time fund manager came up against trade-offs against other priorities for the EA Funds, like not spending too much overheard on them, or having the diversity of perspectives that comes with multiple volunteer fund managers.
I’m pretty concerned about this. I appreciate that there will always be reasonable limits to how long someone can spend vetting grant applications, but I think EA funds should not be hiring fund managers who don’t have sufficient time to vet applications from people they don’t already know—being able to do this should be a requirement of the job, IMO. Seconding Peter’s question below, I’d be keen to hear if there are any plans to make progress on this.
If you really don’t have time to vet applicants, then maybe grant decisions should be made blind, purely on the basis of the quality of the proposal. Another option would be to have a more structured/systematic approach to vetting applicants themselves, which could be anonymous-ish: based on past achievements and some answers to questions that seem relevant and important.
To be clear, we did invest time into vetting applications from people we didn’t know, we just obviously have limits to how much time we can invest. I expect this will be a limiting factor for any grant body.
My guess is that if you don’t have any information besides the application info, and the plan requires a significant level of skill (as the vast majority of grants do), you have to invest at least an additional 5, often 10, hours of effort into reaching out to them, performing interviews, getting testimonials, analyzing their case, etc. If you don’t do this, I expect the average grant to be net negative.
Our review period lasted about one month. At 100 applications, assuming that you create an anonymous review process, this would have resulted in around 250-500 hours of additional work, which would have made this the full-time job for 2-3 of the 5 people on the grant board, plus the already existing ~80 hours of overhead this grant round required from the board. You likely would have filtered out about 50 of them at an earlier stage, so you can maybe cut that in half, resulting in ~2 full-time staff for that review period.
I don’t think that level of time-investment is possible for the EA Funds, and if you make it a requirement for being on an EA Fund board, the quality of your grant decisions will go down drastically because there are very few people who have a track record of good judgement in this domain, who are not also holding other full-time jobs. That level of commitment would not be compatible with holding another full-time job, especially not in a leadership position.
I do think that at our current grant volume, we should invest more resources into building infrastructure for vetting grant applications. I think it might make sense for us to hire a part-time staff to help with evaluations and do background research as well as interviews for us, but it’s currently unclear to me how such a person would be managed and whether their salary would be worth the benefit, but it seems like plausibly the correct choice.
Thanks for your detailed response Ollie. I appreciate there are tradeoffs here, but based on what you’ve said I do think that more time needs to be going into these grant reviews.
It don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that it should require 2 people full time for a month to distribute nearly $1,o00,000 in grant funding, especially if the aim is to find the most effective ways of doing good/influencing the long-term future. (though I recognise that this decision isn’t your responsibility personally!) Maybe it is very difficult for CEA to find people with the relevant expertise who can do that job. But if that’s the case, then I think there’s a bigger problem (the job isn’t being paid well enough, or being valued highly enough by the community), and maybe we should question the case for EA funds distributing so much money.
I strongly agree that I would like there to be more people who have the competencies and resources necessary to assess grants like this. With the Open Philanthropy Project having access to ~10 billion dollars, the case for needing more people with that expertise is pretty clear, and my current sense is that there is a broad consensus in EA that finding more people for those roles is among, if not the, top priority.
I think giving less money to EA Funds would not clearly improve this situation from this perspective at all, since most other granting bodies that exist in the EA space have an even higher
(funds-distributed)/staffratio than this.The Open Philanthropy Project has about 15-20 people assessing grants, and gives out at least 100 million dollars a year, and likely aims to give closer to a $1 billion dollars a year given their reserves.
BERI has maybe 2 people working full-time on grant assessment, and my current guess is that they give out about $5 million dollars of grants a year
My guess is that GiveWell also has about 10 staff assessing grants full-time, making grants of about $20 million dollars
I think at the current level of team-member-involvement, and since I do think there is a significant judgement-component to evaluating grants which allows the average LTF-Fund team member to act with higher leverage, plus the time that anyone involved in the LTF-landscape has to invest to build models and keep up to speed with recent developments, I actually think that the LTF-Fund team is able to make more comprehensive grant assessments per dollar granted than almost any other granting body in the space.
I do think that having more people who can assess grants and help distribute resources like this is key, and think that investing in training and recruiting those people should be one of the top priorities for the community at large.
Note that BERI has only existed for a little over 2 years, and their grant-making has been pretty lumpy, so I don’t think they’ve yet reached any equilibrium grant-making rate (one which could be believably expressed in terms of $X dollars / year).
I agree. Though I think I expect the ratio of
funds-distributed/staffto roughly stay the same, at least for a bit, and probably go up a bit.I think older and larger organizations will have smaller
funds-distributed/staffratios, but I think that’s mostly because coordinating people is hard and marginal productiveness of a hire goes down a lot after the initial founders, so you need to hire a lot more people to produce the same quality of output.I would be in favour of this fund using ~5% of its money to pay for staff costs, including a permanent secretariat. The secretariat would probably decrease pressure on grantmakers a little, and improve grant/feedback quality a little, which makes the costs seem worth it. (I know you’ve already considered this and I want to encourage it!)
I imagine the secretariat would:
-Handle the admin of opening and advertising a funding round
-Respond to many questions on the Forum, Facebook, and by email, and direct more difficult questions to the correct person
-Coordinate the writing of Forum posts like this
-Take notes on what additional information grantmakers would like from applicants, contact applicants with follow-up questions, and suggest iterations of the application form
-(potentially) Manage handover to new grantmakers when current members step down
-(potentially) Sift through applications and remove those which are obviously inappropriate for the Long Term Future Fund
-(potentially) Provide a couple of lines of fairly generic but private feedback for applicants
This strikes me as a great, concrete suggestion. As I tell a lot of people, great suggestions in EA only go somewhere if someone is done with them. I would strongly encourage you to develop this suggestion into its own article on the EA Forum about how the EA Funds can be improved. Please let me know if you are interested in doing so, and I can help out. If you don’t think you’ll have time to develop this suggestion, please let me know, as I would be interested in doing that myself if you don’t have the time.
The way the management of the EA Funds is structured to me makes sense within the goals set for the EA Funds. So I think the situation in which 2 people are paid full-time for one month to evaluate EA Funds applications makes sense is one where 2 of the 4 volunteer fund managers took a month off from their other positions to evaluate the applications. Finding 2 people from out of the blue to evaluate applications for one month without continuity with how the LTF Fund has been managed seems like it’d be too difficult to effectively accomplish in the timeframe of a few months.
In general, one issue the EA Funds face other granting bodies in EA don’t face is the donations come from many different donors. This consequently means how much the EA Funds receive and distribute, and how it’s distributed, is much more complicated than ones the CEA or a similar organization typically faces.
Thanks for the care & attention you’re putting towards all of these replies!
Strong +1.
One issue with this is the fund managers are unpaid volunteers who have other full-time jobs, so being a fund manager isn’t a “job” in the most typical sense. Of course a lot of people think it should be treated like one though. When this came up in past discussions regarding how the EA Funds could be structured better, suggestions like hiring a full-time fund manager came up against trade-offs against other priorities for the EA Funds, like not spending too much overheard on them, or having the diversity of perspectives that comes with multiple volunteer fund managers.