Thank you for the thoughtful read. I resonate with the “we don’t even know we don’t know” point because a portfolio can look well-optimized even when the unfound orgs never enter the denominator.
The search cost isn’t just high, it’s front-loaded and shareable in a way the field doesn’t take advantage of. Once a grantmaker has done the work of mapping who’s real in a place, that map is close to a public good, but too often we fund as if every funder has to rediscover it alone. A shared diligence layer for high-proximity orgs would change the per-grant math.
This is a great point, I think it’s sort of a double-edged sword where this is the reason why the same elite legible orgs keep on getting funded, but if some orgs can do deeper work in local networks and share this extra information with others and this work compounds, it will have positive effects
One of my off-the-wall ideas for the donor intelligence platform I’m building, Kindora, is a follow button for philanthropy where we create a highly transparent way of piggy backing on the diligence of proximate funders. I’ll likely build a prototype of it at some point this year.
Thank you for the thoughtful read. I resonate with the “we don’t even know we don’t know” point because a portfolio can look well-optimized even when the unfound orgs never enter the denominator.
The search cost isn’t just high, it’s front-loaded and shareable in a way the field doesn’t take advantage of. Once a grantmaker has done the work of mapping who’s real in a place, that map is close to a public good, but too often we fund as if every funder has to rediscover it alone. A shared diligence layer for high-proximity orgs would change the per-grant math.
This is a great point, I think it’s sort of a double-edged sword where this is the reason why the same elite legible orgs keep on getting funded, but if some orgs can do deeper work in local networks and share this extra information with others and this work compounds, it will have positive effects
One of my off-the-wall ideas for the donor intelligence platform I’m building, Kindora, is a follow button for philanthropy where we create a highly transparent way of piggy backing on the diligence of proximate funders. I’ll likely build a prototype of it at some point this year.