Random thoughts on grants (inspired by some recent posts):
Do (m)any grantmakers offer participation grants for certain unsuccessful grant applicants who submitted grants in good faith, to (help) defray the time and expense of applying? I briefly floated this idea at the end of a discussion about grants in medium-income countries, and I think it ties into a recent discussion about compensating applications for work trials to some extent.The grant-seeker and the grant-maker are semi-cooperatively producing a joint product of sorts—a good grant portfolio. Both incur costs to make that product happen. It seems that common practice is that the grant-seeker and the grant-maker both bear their own costs for unsuccessful grants, but I can’t think of any a priori reason that should be case vs. a potentially more satisfactory allocation of the burden.
And in the recent discussion about work tests, the consensus was that job applicants should be (and generally were) compensated for trial tasks that took a few hours—even though many of those tasks are standardized and thus do not have any substantive value for the would-be employer. Rather, they only have value to the semi-cooperative joint product of hiring the best employee. Even though both candidate and employer benefit from that process, we have (correctly, in my view) decided that the employer should bear more of the costs of the matching process by compensating the candidate for work trials.
Providing some minimal compensation for most unsuccessful applicants would presumably encourage more grant applications among the group to whom the offer was extended. The initial suggestion was to presumptively give such compensation to applicants from low/middle-income countries for various reasons, but one could imagine other objectives for selectively boosting applications (e.g., trying to encourage more applications among groups underrepresented in EA).
In my field (law), the court can kick out your case-initating document in a few different ways. That can include “with prejudice” (i.e., there is a fatal flaw that you can’t fix), “without prejudice” (i.e., you may be able to fix the weakness and can try again), or without prejudice to refiling after a certain event (e.g., you didn’t follow the proper process at the administrative agency but can come back after you complete those). For grantmakers who don’t want to offer more complete feedback, even knowing which of those categories a rejection generally falls into would be helpful, e.g.:
We just don’t think this is a viable idea absent a significant change in circumstances. You should consider moving on to another one.
We don’t think you are the right person for this idea. You should consider moving on to another one.
We think you need more experience. Consider reapplying once you have it.
There’s nothing wrong with this grant proposal, it just didn’t quite clear the funding bar this year (although it might have in prior years and might in future years).
Re: participation grants—I don’t know if I like the suggestion or not, but I want to point out that it’s significantly different from compensation on work tasks, in that paid work tasks are not the first stage of a hiring process. So orgs have control over who gets to do the work task to begin with. This probably reduces the number of people only doing it for that compensation, if not eliminating those entirely. With participation grants, this is IMO a problem you’ll encounter.
Agreed—I tried to account for this with weasel words like “most,” “good-faith,” and “presumptively.”
I know at least one of the prize contests this year offered participation prizes for good-faith submissions (e.g., GiveWell awarded 39 $500 participation prizes). I would be curious whether the judges felt there were a bunch of submissions that seemed engineered to just garner one of those prizes.
My hunch is the compensation-seeking problem is manageable if the grants are modest; it would be tricky for someone to figure out how to do enough to clear the good-faith/serious application bar while working quickly enough to make compensation-seeking an attractive approach. Presumably, there would be one participation grant per lifetime, unless the applicant was given specific encouragement to reapply on a prior round and reasonably addressed any suggestions given. Also, I wouldn’t be opposed to the grantmaker compensating for somewhat less than the value of the applicant’s time—both as a means of discouraging compensation-seeking, and because it’s not unreasonable for the would-be grantee to bear some of the costs of the joint product.
Random thoughts on grants (inspired by some recent posts):
Do (m)any grantmakers offer participation grants for certain unsuccessful grant applicants who submitted grants in good faith, to (help) defray the time and expense of applying? I briefly floated this idea at the end of a discussion about grants in medium-income countries, and I think it ties into a recent discussion about compensating applications for work trials to some extent.The grant-seeker and the grant-maker are semi-cooperatively producing a joint product of sorts—a good grant portfolio. Both incur costs to make that product happen. It seems that common practice is that the grant-seeker and the grant-maker both bear their own costs for unsuccessful grants, but I can’t think of any a priori reason that should be case vs. a potentially more satisfactory allocation of the burden.
And in the recent discussion about work tests, the consensus was that job applicants should be (and generally were) compensated for trial tasks that took a few hours—even though many of those tasks are standardized and thus do not have any substantive value for the would-be employer. Rather, they only have value to the semi-cooperative joint product of hiring the best employee. Even though both candidate and employer benefit from that process, we have (correctly, in my view) decided that the employer should bear more of the costs of the matching process by compensating the candidate for work trials.
Providing some minimal compensation for most unsuccessful applicants would presumably encourage more grant applications among the group to whom the offer was extended. The initial suggestion was to presumptively give such compensation to applicants from low/middle-income countries for various reasons, but one could imagine other objectives for selectively boosting applications (e.g., trying to encourage more applications among groups underrepresented in EA).
In my field (law), the court can kick out your case-initating document in a few different ways. That can include “with prejudice” (i.e., there is a fatal flaw that you can’t fix), “without prejudice” (i.e., you may be able to fix the weakness and can try again), or without prejudice to refiling after a certain event (e.g., you didn’t follow the proper process at the administrative agency but can come back after you complete those). For grantmakers who don’t want to offer more complete feedback, even knowing which of those categories a rejection generally falls into would be helpful, e.g.:
We just don’t think this is a viable idea absent a significant change in circumstances. You should consider moving on to another one.
We don’t think you are the right person for this idea. You should consider moving on to another one.
We think you need more experience. Consider reapplying once you have it.
There’s nothing wrong with this grant proposal, it just didn’t quite clear the funding bar this year (although it might have in prior years and might in future years).
Re: participation grants—I don’t know if I like the suggestion or not, but I want to point out that it’s significantly different from compensation on work tasks, in that paid work tasks are not the first stage of a hiring process. So orgs have control over who gets to do the work task to begin with. This probably reduces the number of people only doing it for that compensation, if not eliminating those entirely. With participation grants, this is IMO a problem you’ll encounter.
Agreed—I tried to account for this with weasel words like “most,” “good-faith,” and “presumptively.”
I know at least one of the prize contests this year offered participation prizes for good-faith submissions (e.g., GiveWell awarded 39 $500 participation prizes). I would be curious whether the judges felt there were a bunch of submissions that seemed engineered to just garner one of those prizes.
My hunch is the compensation-seeking problem is manageable if the grants are modest; it would be tricky for someone to figure out how to do enough to clear the good-faith/serious application bar while working quickly enough to make compensation-seeking an attractive approach. Presumably, there would be one participation grant per lifetime, unless the applicant was given specific encouragement to reapply on a prior round and reasonably addressed any suggestions given. Also, I wouldn’t be opposed to the grantmaker compensating for somewhat less than the value of the applicant’s time—both as a means of discouraging compensation-seeking, and because it’s not unreasonable for the would-be grantee to bear some of the costs of the joint product.
Edit: typo, should be not UNreasonable