I really appreciate this post, and I agree that the community should be mindful of both risks.
I think the instinct to share giving opportunities with Anthropic employees or other value-aligned prospective donors usually comes from a good place. And I would be excited to see more people apply to roles supporting donors who reach out for giving advice at the worldview level.
But to add to Elliot’s point about the value of coordination, here are a few other considerations:
Before (and up to six months after) a company IPOs, there are limited opportunities for employees to convert stock options into equity or transfer equity into a DAF. If prospective donors have limited bandwidth for their giving, certain moments are uniquely valuable for them to engage. And for illiquid donors, there can be long lag times between the intent to give and the disbursement of funds; donations directed by institutional funds can sometimes help smooth this.
My understanding is that many prospective donors are excited to complement the work that institutional funders support. Hearing from these institutions about the promising opportunities they’re not able to fund can be an efficient way to learn about where more funding can be especially valuable. When a time-poor prospective donor receives an unsolicited proposal from one organization, it’s hard to know how this opportunity fits into the broader field.
As potential donations directed by institutional funders crystalize, orgs may have new opportunities to apply for funding from institutional funders. To Abaham’s point, bringing on regrantors or external consultants with fresh perspectives helps build capacity and catch blind spots. I expect that full-time grant investigators would have more context on a proposal than the donors themselves, and could more productively engage in object-level conversations with orgs applying for funding.
[Commenting in a personal capacity]
I really appreciate this post, and I agree that the community should be mindful of both risks.
I think the instinct to share giving opportunities with Anthropic employees or other value-aligned prospective donors usually comes from a good place. And I would be excited to see more people apply to roles supporting donors who reach out for giving advice at the worldview level.
But to add to Elliot’s point about the value of coordination, here are a few other considerations:
Before (and up to six months after) a company IPOs, there are limited opportunities for employees to convert stock options into equity or transfer equity into a DAF. If prospective donors have limited bandwidth for their giving, certain moments are uniquely valuable for them to engage. And for illiquid donors, there can be long lag times between the intent to give and the disbursement of funds; donations directed by institutional funds can sometimes help smooth this.
My understanding is that many prospective donors are excited to complement the work that institutional funders support. Hearing from these institutions about the promising opportunities they’re not able to fund can be an efficient way to learn about where more funding can be especially valuable. When a time-poor prospective donor receives an unsolicited proposal from one organization, it’s hard to know how this opportunity fits into the broader field.
As potential donations directed by institutional funders crystalize, orgs may have new opportunities to apply for funding from institutional funders. To Abaham’s point, bringing on regrantors or external consultants with fresh perspectives helps build capacity and catch blind spots. I expect that full-time grant investigators would have more context on a proposal than the donors themselves, and could more productively engage in object-level conversations with orgs applying for funding.