Something you touch upon very briefly and that I believe could uncover other important funding gaps is analyzing according to risk profile and the corresponding risk appetite of the supply side of funding. In my experience, risk appetite seems to be dispositional in the funder and not very changeable, leading some people to want to take huge risks and others as little risk as possible.
As a result, we might expect that organizations have more or less access to funding depending on different risk factors:
The stage of the organization, smaller, earlier stage organizations being riskier to more established organizations.
The intervention of the organization, since some theories of change require more assumptions and are less data-driven than others, but could still have a massive impact if the assumptions hold.
As a broad example, it seems that people donating to GH&D charities often give to GW charities and are looking for charities for which there is a lot of empirical evidence of the good being done. Many giving to longtermist organizations are convinced by the underlying logic and rationale and are happy to be more speculative, giving to organizations that tackle important problems in way that could reasonable turn out to have no impact of the assumptions don’t hold, but could result in massive impact if they do. But there seem to me to be (anecdotally) far fewer people who 1) give to GH&D and 2) are happy to be much more speculative in this way just described, which would lead me to think that charities or other high impact funding opportunities fitting this profile would be comparatively neglected.
Great post, Joey!
Something you touch upon very briefly and that I believe could uncover other important funding gaps is analyzing according to risk profile and the corresponding risk appetite of the supply side of funding. In my experience, risk appetite seems to be dispositional in the funder and not very changeable, leading some people to want to take huge risks and others as little risk as possible.
As a result, we might expect that organizations have more or less access to funding depending on different risk factors:
The stage of the organization, smaller, earlier stage organizations being riskier to more established organizations.
The intervention of the organization, since some theories of change require more assumptions and are less data-driven than others, but could still have a massive impact if the assumptions hold.
As a broad example, it seems that people donating to GH&D charities often give to GW charities and are looking for charities for which there is a lot of empirical evidence of the good being done. Many giving to longtermist organizations are convinced by the underlying logic and rationale and are happy to be more speculative, giving to organizations that tackle important problems in way that could reasonable turn out to have no impact of the assumptions don’t hold, but could result in massive impact if they do. But there seem to me to be (anecdotally) far fewer people who 1) give to GH&D and 2) are happy to be much more speculative in this way just described, which would lead me to think that charities or other high impact funding opportunities fitting this profile would be comparatively neglected.