If it seems like you are in an especially good position to assess that org, you should give to them directly. This could, e.g., be the case if you happened to know the org’s founders especially well, or if you had rare subject-matter expertise relevant to assessing that org.
If you win the donor lottery, you would probably benefit from coordinating with EA Funds. Literally giving the donor lottery winnings to EA Funds would be a solid baseline, but I would hope that many people can ‘beat’ that baseline, especially if they get the most valuable inputs from 1-10 person-hours of fund manager time.
Generally, I doubt that it’s good use of the donor’s and fund managers’ time if donors and fund managers coordinated on $1,000 donations (except in rare and obvious cases). For a donation of $10,000 some very quick coordination may sometimes be useful—especially if it goes to an early-stage organization. For a $100,000 donation, it starts looking “some coordination is helpful more likely than not” (though in many cases the EA Funds answer may still be “we don’t really have anything to say, it seems best if you make this decision independently”), but I still don’t think explicit coordination should be a strong default or norm.
One underlying and potentially controversial assumption I make is that more variance in funding decisions is good at the margin. This pushes toward more independent funders being good, reducing correlation between the decisions of different funders, etc. - My view on this isn’t resilient, and I think I remember that some thoughtful people disagree with that assumption.
My very off-the-cuff thoughts are:
If it seems like you are in an especially good position to assess that org, you should give to them directly. This could, e.g., be the case if you happened to know the org’s founders especially well, or if you had rare subject-matter expertise relevant to assessing that org.
If not, you should give to a donor lottery.
If you win the donor lottery, you would probably benefit from coordinating with EA Funds. Literally giving the donor lottery winnings to EA Funds would be a solid baseline, but I would hope that many people can ‘beat’ that baseline, especially if they get the most valuable inputs from 1-10 person-hours of fund manager time.
Generally, I doubt that it’s good use of the donor’s and fund managers’ time if donors and fund managers coordinated on $1,000 donations (except in rare and obvious cases). For a donation of $10,000 some very quick coordination may sometimes be useful—especially if it goes to an early-stage organization. For a $100,000 donation, it starts looking “some coordination is helpful more likely than not” (though in many cases the EA Funds answer may still be “we don’t really have anything to say, it seems best if you make this decision independently”), but I still don’t think explicit coordination should be a strong default or norm.
One underlying and potentially controversial assumption I make is that more variance in funding decisions is good at the margin. This pushes toward more independent funders being good, reducing correlation between the decisions of different funders, etc. - My view on this isn’t resilient, and I think I remember that some thoughtful people disagree with that assumption.