That’s an interesting observation. A few more reasons and possible reasons for Open Phil’s priorities. I don’t know if they are sufficient to explain the phenomena you have observed.
Outside constraints:
Scalability of recipients. Open Phil may have limited confidence in an organization’s ability to scale, e.g., because there is little talent on the market, so hiring will be slow no matter how much money Open Phil throws at the organization. When we define the funding gap in terms of the highest “execution level” that Open Phil recognizes and then give the organization a reasonable safety margin, then the marginal utility of further grants will drop very steeply, because the organization will have no choice but to save the money, something that Good Ventures could have done at least as well.
Pacing of scaling. Spaces that have previously received smaller grants (e.g., farmed and wild animal advocacy) will have to scale up first before they can absorb the grants that spaces like the prison reform can absorb already, so the size of the grants that is really comparable is the integral of all grants to the space that will be made over the coming years or decades, or any amount of time necessary for the recipients to scale up.
Stability of recipients. The funding gaps that Open Phil can use are further restricted because in many cases they can’t simply fill the whole funding gap of an organization or other impact-minded donors would redirect their donations to an organization that still has a funding gap. The organization that received the Open Phil grant would become highly dependent on Open Phil, a precarious situation, and, vice versa, a situation that reduces Open Phil’s flexibility. Hence Open Phil has to either fill only part of the funding gap or restrict funding to one particular project of an organization.
Organizational constraints:
Value of information. Open Phil has repeatedly pointed out how grants can open doors to greater insight, e.g., because people in the spaces learn that they can prioritize conversations with Open Phil with lower risk of wasting their time. (This overlaps with Dan’s comment.)
Scalability of Open Phil. To operate at the necessary scale, Open Phil needs to split the prioritization and grant-making task up to parallelize it. Cause prioritization is probably costly because it requires that a team have an overview over all the causes that need to be compared. This is only possible at a much more shallow level. At this level it may seem plausible that there are highly effective interventions in all the prioritized cause areas, but to investigate this further, one part of the team has to specialize or hire a specialist, someone who will be much less able to assume the same generalist’s perspective that is necessary for comparison between the areas. Since some people will certainly remain generalists to oversee the operation, it will eventually become more or less clear which areas have turned out to be more suitable than others.
That said, I think there are more funding gaps at least in farmed animal advocacy (and there may soon be more in wild animal advocacy as well), and I think they would be great enough to enable more grants without driving away other donors. Especially grants restricted to marketing and onboarding (and other important items that charities rarely try to advertise to donors) should have the opposite effect and, in effect, actually attract donors. GiveDirectly’s case is again a good precedent.
I’m about to publish a blog post on a coordination problem that I think is highly important to the farmed animals space. Open Phil could greatly alleviate this problem by making the same commitment to ACE’s top charities that it has made to GiveWell’s top charities: grants whose size depends on the charities’ total funding gaps, minimizing fungibility concerns. (More on that on Thursday probably.)
That’s an interesting observation. A few more reasons and possible reasons for Open Phil’s priorities. I don’t know if they are sufficient to explain the phenomena you have observed.
Outside constraints:
Scalability of recipients. Open Phil may have limited confidence in an organization’s ability to scale, e.g., because there is little talent on the market, so hiring will be slow no matter how much money Open Phil throws at the organization. When we define the funding gap in terms of the highest “execution level” that Open Phil recognizes and then give the organization a reasonable safety margin, then the marginal utility of further grants will drop very steeply, because the organization will have no choice but to save the money, something that Good Ventures could have done at least as well.
Pacing of scaling. Spaces that have previously received smaller grants (e.g., farmed and wild animal advocacy) will have to scale up first before they can absorb the grants that spaces like the prison reform can absorb already, so the size of the grants that is really comparable is the integral of all grants to the space that will be made over the coming years or decades, or any amount of time necessary for the recipients to scale up.
Stability of recipients. The funding gaps that Open Phil can use are further restricted because in many cases they can’t simply fill the whole funding gap of an organization or other impact-minded donors would redirect their donations to an organization that still has a funding gap. The organization that received the Open Phil grant would become highly dependent on Open Phil, a precarious situation, and, vice versa, a situation that reduces Open Phil’s flexibility. Hence Open Phil has to either fill only part of the funding gap or restrict funding to one particular project of an organization.
Organizational constraints:
Value of information. Open Phil has repeatedly pointed out how grants can open doors to greater insight, e.g., because people in the spaces learn that they can prioritize conversations with Open Phil with lower risk of wasting their time. (This overlaps with Dan’s comment.)
Scalability of Open Phil. To operate at the necessary scale, Open Phil needs to split the prioritization and grant-making task up to parallelize it. Cause prioritization is probably costly because it requires that a team have an overview over all the causes that need to be compared. This is only possible at a much more shallow level. At this level it may seem plausible that there are highly effective interventions in all the prioritized cause areas, but to investigate this further, one part of the team has to specialize or hire a specialist, someone who will be much less able to assume the same generalist’s perspective that is necessary for comparison between the areas. Since some people will certainly remain generalists to oversee the operation, it will eventually become more or less clear which areas have turned out to be more suitable than others.
That said, I think there are more funding gaps at least in farmed animal advocacy (and there may soon be more in wild animal advocacy as well), and I think they would be great enough to enable more grants without driving away other donors. Especially grants restricted to marketing and onboarding (and other important items that charities rarely try to advertise to donors) should have the opposite effect and, in effect, actually attract donors. GiveDirectly’s case is again a good precedent.
I’m about to publish a blog post on a coordination problem that I think is highly important to the farmed animals space. Open Phil could greatly alleviate this problem by making the same commitment to ACE’s top charities that it has made to GiveWell’s top charities: grants whose size depends on the charities’ total funding gaps, minimizing fungibility concerns. (More on that on Thursday probably.)
Edit: My abovementioned post.