“Consistent Growth in Donations: There has been a consistent increase in overall donations year over year, with the EA Infrastructure and Long-Term Future funds experiencing notable growth in 2021 and 2022.”
@emre that’s a good point but I think there is a couple things to unpack here:
1- In this particular section I am referring to the “grants” that EA Funds gives to beneficiaries and not “donations” they receive, which is what the graph you shared is referring to. If you look at the first graph, besides the drop in 2023 (data incomplete when I ran the analysis) the grants they gave followed an upward trajectory.This may be a language/semantic issue from my end as I use these interchangeably, but I’ll look over the text and try to make sure this is clear.
2- The graph you shared, I am assuming it corresponds only to individual donors donating to EA funds. This is one of my suggestions for EA funds, that they could be more explicit about this on the website so the information is easier to interpret. Either way, individual donations has clearly gone down, however overly grant giving has gone up. The two most obvious explanations for this are (1) they had built up a larger cash position that is being drawn down now and (2) they are receiving or have received more institutional funding that isn’t represented in that graph.
Re 2: Yes this is correct. It does not include institutional funds. I’m also not sure if it includes non-cash donations from individuals either; I think the dashboard was created back when there was only one way to donate to EA Funds. I’ll check.
The dashboard includes all individual giving through Giving What We Can, which is a partner of EA Funds that offers the public frontend that most people who want to donate to EA Funds see.
Some of individual donors to the different funds, particularly the largest ones, choose to donate to various funds within EA Funds through other ways, eg every.org or more idiosyncratic ways (which we’re more willing to work with for larger donors).
We don’t currently have a public dashboard to expose all of our donations, unfortunately.
“Consistent Growth in Donations: There has been a consistent increase in overall donations year over year, with the EA Infrastructure and Long-Term Future funds experiencing notable growth in 2021 and 2022.”
This doesn’t seem right to me. Data from EA Funds dashboard:
@emre that’s a good point but I think there is a couple things to unpack here:
1- In this particular section I am referring to the “grants” that EA Funds gives to beneficiaries and not “donations” they receive, which is what the graph you shared is referring to. If you look at the first graph, besides the drop in 2023 (data incomplete when I ran the analysis) the grants they gave followed an upward trajectory.This may be a language/semantic issue from my end as I use these interchangeably, but I’ll look over the text and try to make sure this is clear.
2- The graph you shared, I am assuming it corresponds only to individual donors donating to EA funds. This is one of my suggestions for EA funds, that they could be more explicit about this on the website so the information is easier to interpret. Either way, individual donations has clearly gone down, however overly grant giving has gone up. The two most obvious explanations for this are (1) they had built up a larger cash position that is being drawn down now and (2) they are receiving or have received more institutional funding that isn’t represented in that graph.
(I work for EA Funds)
Re 2: Yes this is correct. It does not include institutional funds. I’m also not sure if it includes non-cash donations from individuals either; I think the dashboard was created back when there was only one way to donate to EA Funds. I’ll check.
(Thanks for your hard work on the post btw!)
Quick update:
The dashboard includes all individual giving through Giving What We Can, which is a partner of EA Funds that offers the public frontend that most people who want to donate to EA Funds see.
Some of individual donors to the different funds, particularly the largest ones, choose to donate to various funds within EA Funds through other ways, eg every.org or more idiosyncratic ways (which we’re more willing to work with for larger donors).
We don’t currently have a public dashboard to expose all of our donations, unfortunately.