Extremely interesting article -and I’d love to see other posts exploring your assumptions!
I had a chance to meet a private foundation’s leader in Europe recently (raising and donating several millions / year). Interestingly, they also mentioned TBP and I’m now wondering whether it was to somehow position themselves as opposed to some sort of highly demanding grantmaking.
I do think TBP and EA are compatible, to some degree. We should not confuse (1) “having a very high bar for anticipated effectiveness” and (2) “having a very high bar for evidence of impact”. It is quite simple to apply for a grant from most EA grantmakers. In my (certainly limited) experience, if you want your grant to be renewed (and, supposedly, increased), you’ll probably have to provide significant evidence, and I think it’s fair enough.
I suppose non-EA funders might: - Have actually little knowledge of EA or the EA funding landscape - Be discouraged by the depth of analysis that they can see from GiveWell - Be annoyed or discouraged by EA’s frequent, strong claim of “making decisions based on evidence” (btw, this claim is so often advertized that I’d assume that it can be conflated with a reliance on frequent reports from and control over grantees).
Also, maybe it’s be worth distinguishing different cases, in particular:
Funders of “traditional” animal welfare or GHD charities;
Funders of more “exotic” projects (global catastrophic risks, community-building, forecasting...), which usually cannot rely as much on historical data for evaluation.
Extremely interesting article -and I’d love to see other posts exploring your assumptions!
I had a chance to meet a private foundation’s leader in Europe recently (raising and donating several millions / year). Interestingly, they also mentioned TBP and I’m now wondering whether it was to somehow position themselves as opposed to some sort of highly demanding grantmaking.
I do think TBP and EA are compatible, to some degree. We should not confuse (1) “having a very high bar for anticipated effectiveness” and (2) “having a very high bar for evidence of impact”. It is quite simple to apply for a grant from most EA grantmakers. In my (certainly limited) experience, if you want your grant to be renewed (and, supposedly, increased), you’ll probably have to provide significant evidence, and I think it’s fair enough.
I suppose non-EA funders might:
- Have actually little knowledge of EA or the EA funding landscape
- Be discouraged by the depth of analysis that they can see from GiveWell
- Be annoyed or discouraged by EA’s frequent, strong claim of “making decisions based on evidence” (btw, this claim is so often advertized that I’d assume that it can be conflated with a reliance on frequent reports from and control over grantees).
Also, maybe it’s be worth distinguishing different cases, in particular:
Funders of “traditional” animal welfare or GHD charities;
Funders of more “exotic” projects (global catastrophic risks, community-building, forecasting...), which usually cannot rely as much on historical data for evaluation.