I’ve recently chatted with Tara of CEA about this and my recent post on raising the effectiveness waterline goes in a similar direction. Such programs will be limited to charities that operate in areas that allow for high effectiveness, and the charity has to be willing to do it of course.
My first charitable interpretation of the situation was that if a charity has the potential to be highly effective given its cause area and is willing to optimize its effectiveness but still fails to be on par with a top charity in the same area, they must be lacking in something that is hard to obtain, namely specialized knowledge they can get from the top charity. A cooperation between the charities would furthermore serve to thwart wasteful competition between the charities.
Tara’s experience with nonprofit counseling with Toyota, however, has been that what such charities lacked was not so much this specialized knowledge but general skills in accounting, controlling, and I don’t fully remember what else she mentioned. If the most salient problems of these charities are in such general areas, then a general EA consultancy firm would make sense.
The services of such a consultancy firm may be highly subsidized from donations, but I think the charity will be more likely to implement advice that it has paid for, and that should also make it easier for the consultancy firm to pay its bills. I haven’t done any calculations, but it feels to me like it will be very hard to keep this sort of operation afloat financially.
An alternative might be to find an existing, established consultancy firm with knowledge in the area of nonprofits that is ready to advise charities as to how they can maximize impact rather than just fundraising success. An EA funder, a charity, and this company could then agree on prices and a cofunding plan. This will usually involve lots of money, though, since this sort of optimization will be most cost-effective with charities that move a lot of non-EA donations, and those charities will be large and complex.
For your information, if effective altruism was to spearhead such consulting projects, they probably won’t be initiated by Givewell (see my comment here). The Centre for Effective Altruism, in particular Effective Altruism Ventures, might be the best organization poised to initiate such work.
I’ve recently chatted with Tara of CEA about this and my recent post on raising the effectiveness waterline goes in a similar direction. Such programs will be limited to charities that operate in areas that allow for high effectiveness, and the charity has to be willing to do it of course.
My first charitable interpretation of the situation was that if a charity has the potential to be highly effective given its cause area and is willing to optimize its effectiveness but still fails to be on par with a top charity in the same area, they must be lacking in something that is hard to obtain, namely specialized knowledge they can get from the top charity. A cooperation between the charities would furthermore serve to thwart wasteful competition between the charities.
Tara’s experience with nonprofit counseling with Toyota, however, has been that what such charities lacked was not so much this specialized knowledge but general skills in accounting, controlling, and I don’t fully remember what else she mentioned. If the most salient problems of these charities are in such general areas, then a general EA consultancy firm would make sense.
The services of such a consultancy firm may be highly subsidized from donations, but I think the charity will be more likely to implement advice that it has paid for, and that should also make it easier for the consultancy firm to pay its bills. I haven’t done any calculations, but it feels to me like it will be very hard to keep this sort of operation afloat financially.
An alternative might be to find an existing, established consultancy firm with knowledge in the area of nonprofits that is ready to advise charities as to how they can maximize impact rather than just fundraising success. An EA funder, a charity, and this company could then agree on prices and a cofunding plan. This will usually involve lots of money, though, since this sort of optimization will be most cost-effective with charities that move a lot of non-EA donations, and those charities will be large and complex.
For your information, if effective altruism was to spearhead such consulting projects, they probably won’t be initiated by Givewell (see my comment here). The Centre for Effective Altruism, in particular Effective Altruism Ventures, might be the best organization poised to initiate such work.