I’m very interested in hearing from grantmakers about their take on this problem (especially those at or associated with CEA, which it seems like has been involved in most of the biggest initiatives to scale out EA’s vetting, through EA Grants and EA Funds).
What % of grant applicants are in the “definitely good enough” vs “definitely (or reasonably confidently) not good enough” vs “uncertain + not enough time/expertise to evaluate” buckets?
(Are these the right buckets to be looking at?)
What do you feel your biggest constraints are to improving the impact of your grants? Funding, application quality, vetting capacity, something else?
Do you have any upcoming plans to address them?
Note also that the EA Meta and Long-Term Future Funds seem to have gone slightly in the direction of “less established” organizations since their management transition, and it seems like their previous conventionality might have been mostly a reflection of one specific person (Nick Beckstead) not having enough bandwidth.
We have run an application round for our last distribution for the first time. I conducted the very initial investigation which I communicated to the committee. Previous grantees came all through our personal network.
Things we learnt during our application round:
i) We got significantly fewer applications than we expected and would have been able to spend more time vetting projects. This was not a bottleneck. After some investigation through personal outreach I have the impression there are not many projects being started in the Meta space (this is different for other funding spaces).
ii) We were able to fund a decent fraction of the applications we received (25%?). For about half of the applications I was reasonably confident that they did not meet the bar so I did not investigate further. The remaining quarter felt borderline to me, I often still investigated but the results confirmed my initial impression.
My current impression for the Meta space is that we are not vetting constrained, but more mentoring/pro-active outreach constrained. One thing we want to do in the future is to run a request for proposals process.
One year later, do you think Meta is still less constrained by vetting, and more constrained by a lack of high-quality projects to fund?
And for other people who see vetting constraints: Do you see vetting constraints in particular cause areas? What kinds of organizations aren’t getting funding?
I’m very interested in hearing from grantmakers about their take on this problem (especially those at or associated with CEA, which it seems like has been involved in most of the biggest initiatives to scale out EA’s vetting, through EA Grants and EA Funds).
What % of grant applicants are in the “definitely good enough” vs “definitely (or reasonably confidently) not good enough” vs “uncertain + not enough time/expertise to evaluate” buckets?
(Are these the right buckets to be looking at?)
What do you feel your biggest constraints are to improving the impact of your grants? Funding, application quality, vetting capacity, something else?
Do you have any upcoming plans to address them?
Note also that the EA Meta and Long-Term Future Funds seem to have gone slightly in the direction of “less established” organizations since their management transition, and it seems like their previous conventionality might have been mostly a reflection of one specific person (Nick Beckstead) not having enough bandwidth.
(Funding manager of the EA Meta Fund here)
We have run an application round for our last distribution for the first time. I conducted the very initial investigation which I communicated to the committee. Previous grantees came all through our personal network.
Things we learnt during our application round:
i) We got significantly fewer applications than we expected and would have been able to spend more time vetting projects. This was not a bottleneck. After some investigation through personal outreach I have the impression there are not many projects being started in the Meta space (this is different for other funding spaces).
ii) We were able to fund a decent fraction of the applications we received (25%?). For about half of the applications I was reasonably confident that they did not meet the bar so I did not investigate further. The remaining quarter felt borderline to me, I often still investigated but the results confirmed my initial impression.
My current impression for the Meta space is that we are not vetting constrained, but more mentoring/pro-active outreach constrained. One thing we want to do in the future is to run a request for proposals process.
One year later, do you think Meta is still less constrained by vetting, and more constrained by a lack of high-quality projects to fund?
And for other people who see vetting constraints: Do you see vetting constraints in particular cause areas? What kinds of organizations aren’t getting funding?
Yes, everything I said above is sadly still true. We still do not receive many applications per distribution cycle (~12).