What processes do you have for monitoring the outcome/impact of grants?
Relatedly, do the EAIF fund managers make forecasts about potential outcomes of grants?
I saw and appreciated that Ben Kuhn made a forecast related to the Giving Green grant.
I’m interested in whether other fund managers are making such forecasts and just not sharing them in the writeup or are just not making them—both of which are potentially reasonable options.
And/or do you write down in advance what sort of proxies you’d want to see from this grant after x amount of time?
E.g., what you’d want to see to feel that this had been a big success and that similar grant applications should be viewed (even) more positively in future, or that it would be worth renewing the grant if the grantee applied again.
(In the May grant recommendation report, it seems like Buck and Max shared such proxies for many grants (but not for all of them), that Ben did so for his one writeup, and that Michelle didn’t. But maybe in some cases these proxies have been written down but just not shared in the report)
(I ask this because I imagine that such forecasts and writing down of proxies could help improve decision-making both by providing another framing for thinking about whether a grant is worthwhile, and by tracking what did and didn’t go as expected in order to better train your judgement for future evaluations.
I am planning on checking in with grantees to see how well they’ve done, mostly so that I can learn more about grantmaking and to know if we ought to renew funding.
I normally didn’t make specific forecasts about the outcomes of grants, because operationalization is hard and scary.
I feel vaguely guilty about not trying harder to write down these proxies ahead of time. But I empirically don’t, and my intuitions apparently don’t feel that optimistic about working on this. I am not sure why. I think it’s maybe just that operationationalization is super hard and I feel like I’m going to have to spend more effort figuring out reasonable proxies than actually thinking about the question of whether this grant will be good, and so I feel drawn to a more “I’ll know it when I see it” approach to evaluating my past grants.
What processes do you have for monitoring the outcome/impact of grants?
Relatedly, do the EAIF fund managers make forecasts about potential outcomes of grants?
I saw and appreciated that Ben Kuhn made a forecast related to the Giving Green grant.
I’m interested in whether other fund managers are making such forecasts and just not sharing them in the writeup or are just not making them—both of which are potentially reasonable options.
And/or do you write down in advance what sort of proxies you’d want to see from this grant after x amount of time?
E.g., what you’d want to see to feel that this had been a big success and that similar grant applications should be viewed (even) more positively in future, or that it would be worth renewing the grant if the grantee applied again.
(In the May grant recommendation report, it seems like Buck and Max shared such proxies for many grants (but not for all of them), that Ben did so for his one writeup, and that Michelle didn’t. But maybe in some cases these proxies have been written down but just not shared in the report)
(I ask this because I imagine that such forecasts and writing down of proxies could help improve decision-making both by providing another framing for thinking about whether a grant is worthwhile, and by tracking what did and didn’t go as expected in order to better train your judgement for future evaluations.
I’m adapting these questions from a thread in a Long-Term Future Fund AMA and another in the Animal Welfare Fund AMA, and those threads also contained some interesting discussion that might be somewhat relevant here too.)
I am planning on checking in with grantees to see how well they’ve done, mostly so that I can learn more about grantmaking and to know if we ought to renew funding.
I normally didn’t make specific forecasts about the outcomes of grants, because operationalization is hard and scary.
I feel vaguely guilty about not trying harder to write down these proxies ahead of time. But I empirically don’t, and my intuitions apparently don’t feel that optimistic about working on this. I am not sure why. I think it’s maybe just that operationationalization is super hard and I feel like I’m going to have to spend more effort figuring out reasonable proxies than actually thinking about the question of whether this grant will be good, and so I feel drawn to a more “I’ll know it when I see it” approach to evaluating my past grants.