I agree with what you are saying that yes, we ideally should rank order all the possible ways to market EA and only take those that get the best (quality adjusted) EAs per $ spent, regardless of our value of EAs—that is, we should maximize return on investment.
**However, in practice, as we do not currently yet have enough EA marketing opportunities to saturate our billions of dollars in potential marketing budget, it would be an easier decision procedure to simply fund every opportunity that meets some target ROI threshold and revise that ROI threshold over time as we learn more about our opportunities and budget. ** We’d also ideally set ourselves to learn-by-doing when engaging in this outreach work.
are we building ways to learn by doing into these programmes?
The discussions on post suggest that it’s at least plausible that the answers are ‘no’, ‘anything that seems plausibly good’ and ‘no’, which I think would be concerning for most people, irrespective of where you sit on the various debates/continuums within EA.
This varies grantmaker-to-grantmaker but I personally try to get an ROI that is at least 10x better than donating the equivalent amount to AMF.
I’d really like to help programs build more learning by doing. That seems like a large gap worth addressing. Right now I find myself without enough capacity to do it, so hopefully someone else will do it, or I’ll eventually figure out how to get myself or someone at Rethink Priorities to work on it (especially given that we’ve been hiring a lot more).
I agree with what you are saying that yes, we ideally should rank order all the possible ways to market EA and only take those that get the best (quality adjusted) EAs per $ spent, regardless of our value of EAs—that is, we should maximize return on investment.
**However, in practice, as we do not currently yet have enough EA marketing opportunities to saturate our billions of dollars in potential marketing budget, it would be an easier decision procedure to simply fund every opportunity that meets some target ROI threshold and revise that ROI threshold over time as we learn more about our opportunities and budget. ** We’d also ideally set ourselves to learn-by-doing when engaging in this outreach work.
Absolutely. And so the questions are:
have we defined that ROI threshold?
what is it?
are we building ways to learn by doing into these programmes?
The discussions on post suggest that it’s at least plausible that the answers are ‘no’, ‘anything that seems plausibly good’ and ‘no’, which I think would be concerning for most people, irrespective of where you sit on the various debates/continuums within EA.
This varies grantmaker-to-grantmaker but I personally try to get an ROI that is at least 10x better than donating the equivalent amount to AMF.
I’d really like to help programs build more learning by doing. That seems like a large gap worth addressing. Right now I find myself without enough capacity to do it, so hopefully someone else will do it, or I’ll eventually figure out how to get myself or someone at Rethink Priorities to work on it (especially given that we’ve been hiring a lot more).