Although whoever carried this out would have to make sure it stayed a list of projects that failed to fundraise or else it’ll just become a big pitch bank.
Why is this a failure mode? What if someone deliberately created a big pitch bank for the purpose of collecting these kind of statistics? (“Kickstarter/AngelList for effective nonprofits.” Edit: It seems that AngelList does allow nonprofits to list, but the EA community might also have unique funding needs, as described in this post.) This could solve some of the data collection issues, since you’re giving people an incentive to put their info in your database. And potentially work to address issues related to time spent fundraising/ease of pitching new projects without requiring any new charitable funds (beyond those required to create the pitch bank itself). Heck, it even might eliminate the need for people to have their failure to fundraise analyzed publicly, if a more liquid market solves the original problem of matching supply and demand better.
I know this is kind of what Effective Altruism Ventures was. I’m not entirely clear on why it’s no longer in operation. Kerry mentioned difficulty finding both quality projects and generous donors—apparently resources for EAV were allocated towards other projects that were doing better. So maybe this is something that only starts to be worth the overhead once the community reaches a certain size.
Oh—in the long run a pitch bank could definitely be good. It might be more valuable than the project I was suggesting. Although it would also, I think, take substantially more work to do well. You’d need to keep it updated, create a way to get in touch with potential grantees, etc.
The reason I think it would corrupt the data is because if the list included lots of projects that are still fundraising (and perhaps only recently started fundraising) then it would no longer help someone figure out today which projects are actually on the margin. It would make for interesting data in a year or so once we could see which projects from the list were still fundraising.
Why is this a failure mode? What if someone deliberately created a big pitch bank for the purpose of collecting these kind of statistics? (“Kickstarter/AngelList for effective nonprofits.” Edit: It seems that AngelList does allow nonprofits to list, but the EA community might also have unique funding needs, as described in this post.) This could solve some of the data collection issues, since you’re giving people an incentive to put their info in your database. And potentially work to address issues related to time spent fundraising/ease of pitching new projects without requiring any new charitable funds (beyond those required to create the pitch bank itself). Heck, it even might eliminate the need for people to have their failure to fundraise analyzed publicly, if a more liquid market solves the original problem of matching supply and demand better.
I know this is kind of what Effective Altruism Ventures was. I’m not entirely clear on why it’s no longer in operation. Kerry mentioned difficulty finding both quality projects and generous donors—apparently resources for EAV were allocated towards other projects that were doing better. So maybe this is something that only starts to be worth the overhead once the community reaches a certain size.
Oh—in the long run a pitch bank could definitely be good. It might be more valuable than the project I was suggesting. Although it would also, I think, take substantially more work to do well. You’d need to keep it updated, create a way to get in touch with potential grantees, etc.
The reason I think it would corrupt the data is because if the list included lots of projects that are still fundraising (and perhaps only recently started fundraising) then it would no longer help someone figure out today which projects are actually on the margin. It would make for interesting data in a year or so once we could see which projects from the list were still fundraising.