It is known why Open Philanthropy Coefficient Giving is no longer contributing to the operating budget?
(I generally don’t weight such considerations much in my own decisionmaking per se for various reasons, but do consider the rationale if one is known or can be guessed.)
I’m going to have a crack at the rationale, it’s probably several things:
One for the World’s statistical recorded RoI from tracked donations / pledges through their platform is less than that of other effective giving infrastructure opportunities. (Note: it’s still significantly above 1x, which is the bar one should care about if considering between this and AMF entirely from an effectiveness standpoint with zero reputation considerations—however the portfolio average is about 6x I believe)
As I say in my comment, One for the World hits the issue that in-person engagement of large numbers of people giving small amounts is an absolute *nightmare* to track reliable statistics for. People will just give money without saying it was because of you (and why wouldn’t they, really?) so the RoI is definitely an undercount, but we don’t know by how much. This is compared to running more passive online platforms, where the RoI may well be an overcount (people pick your platform who would have otherwise picked a different platform). Or UHNW donations where you can reasonably track things even if they weren’t through a platform.
It’s my personal witnessing that OftW is really quite good at spreading the effective giving message, but people who respond really well to that can end up either choosing direct to charity, GiveWell, or Giving What We Can as their donation platform or bouncing through to other areas of the EA community. Thus the OftW enterprise is functioning as a leaky sieve of good things while struggling to achieve its core stated goal of large numbers of 1% pledgers through its own donation platform. I personally don’t mind this at all but I’m sure OftW are a little exasperated.
It’s been recently noted that setting up an online donation platform in a new country that didn’t previously have one is really quite a cost-effective strategy, and there’s lots of absorbency for doing that for a whole bunch of different countries. This puts quite a lot of pressure on a CG grant pot of a fixed size.
I imagine that One for the World is possibly one of the only effective giving infrastructure organisations that could survive without money from CG, because a) its operating costs are small, something like $350k a year total, a fraction of the cost of e.g. Giving What We Can, b) it is cultivating a pretty large community of volunteers and supportive medium-high earners, many of whom are invested in its success. So there may be a degree of “cut it loose and see if it flies” going on.
Thank question and great answer Kestrel. I’ll add some color.
There’s a few reasons why Open Phil (now CG) no longer funds OFTW. As for the weight between these reasons, they can jump in if they’d like but here’s a few dynamics:
CG funds either new effective giving orgs or highly effective ones. We used to be a new org, and while we are no longer “new” we haven’t met the benchmark of the more established (and funded) orgs.
While during my first year as ED, we did modestly improve our money moved, and slightly reduced our budget (this happened before we identified and implemented our new growth strategy, which just began in July), the entire baseline of fundable seems to have increased due to the amazing work of other orgs. It’s good for the movement, even if it wasn’t ideal for us funding wise.
CG shifted to a competitive RFP-style grant round, which then made it less about us alone, but we then competed against all other orgs in our space simultaneously, which given the previous point, made it a defensive decision to not fund us for our current year.
We are looking at becoming competitive enough to receive CG funding within the next two years by better capturing off-platform data (we likely are missing six figures worth of money moved a year due to dynamic Kestrel mentioned), dramatically improving our money moved metrics, and lastly, maintaining operational excellence through austere overhead (while still investing in our team appropriately). However, the early signal looks like our growth strategy is working, with the 4x pledge count YTD as a leading indicator.
Thanks for this—I donated. Although I support better measures to minimize leakage, it seems plausible to me that OFTW’s theory of impact just can’t be measured as confidently as that of many other organizations in this space. Effective-giving outreach to university students, who generally have no/little income in the short run, strikes me as prone to measurement difficulties. In contrast, I’d expect that most impact for a small-country effective giving organization flows through the organization (so the donors secure the relevant tax advantages).
We should probably allow some impact credit for raising awareness of a problem + an effective action in response, even if there is no discernable effect in the measurement period. For example, I think attending something like an Oxfam Hunger Banquet during the first semester of college deserves some non-trivial amount of credit for my own giving, but the organizers will never account for that in a cost-effectiveness analysis. But I find it difficult to decide how much credit to assign for generating awareness / change in attitudes that has not (and may never) blossom into effective action.
It is known why
Open PhilanthropyCoefficient Giving is no longer contributing to the operating budget?(I generally don’t weight such considerations much in my own decisionmaking per se for various reasons, but do consider the rationale if one is known or can be guessed.)
I’m going to have a crack at the rationale, it’s probably several things:
One for the World’s statistical recorded RoI from tracked donations / pledges through their platform is less than that of other effective giving infrastructure opportunities. (Note: it’s still significantly above 1x, which is the bar one should care about if considering between this and AMF entirely from an effectiveness standpoint with zero reputation considerations—however the portfolio average is about 6x I believe)
As I say in my comment, One for the World hits the issue that in-person engagement of large numbers of people giving small amounts is an absolute *nightmare* to track reliable statistics for. People will just give money without saying it was because of you (and why wouldn’t they, really?) so the RoI is definitely an undercount, but we don’t know by how much. This is compared to running more passive online platforms, where the RoI may well be an overcount (people pick your platform who would have otherwise picked a different platform). Or UHNW donations where you can reasonably track things even if they weren’t through a platform.
It’s my personal witnessing that OftW is really quite good at spreading the effective giving message, but people who respond really well to that can end up either choosing direct to charity, GiveWell, or Giving What We Can as their donation platform or bouncing through to other areas of the EA community. Thus the OftW enterprise is functioning as a leaky sieve of good things while struggling to achieve its core stated goal of large numbers of 1% pledgers through its own donation platform. I personally don’t mind this at all but I’m sure OftW are a little exasperated.
It’s been recently noted that setting up an online donation platform in a new country that didn’t previously have one is really quite a cost-effective strategy, and there’s lots of absorbency for doing that for a whole bunch of different countries. This puts quite a lot of pressure on a CG grant pot of a fixed size.
I imagine that One for the World is possibly one of the only effective giving infrastructure organisations that could survive without money from CG, because a) its operating costs are small, something like $350k a year total, a fraction of the cost of e.g. Giving What We Can, b) it is cultivating a pretty large community of volunteers and supportive medium-high earners, many of whom are invested in its success. So there may be a degree of “cut it loose and see if it flies” going on.
Thank question and great answer Kestrel. I’ll add some color.
There’s a few reasons why Open Phil (now CG) no longer funds OFTW. As for the weight between these reasons, they can jump in if they’d like but here’s a few dynamics:
CG funds either new effective giving orgs or highly effective ones. We used to be a new org, and while we are no longer “new” we haven’t met the benchmark of the more established (and funded) orgs.
While during my first year as ED, we did modestly improve our money moved, and slightly reduced our budget (this happened before we identified and implemented our new growth strategy, which just began in July), the entire baseline of fundable seems to have increased due to the amazing work of other orgs. It’s good for the movement, even if it wasn’t ideal for us funding wise.
CG shifted to a competitive RFP-style grant round, which then made it less about us alone, but we then competed against all other orgs in our space simultaneously, which given the previous point, made it a defensive decision to not fund us for our current year.
We are looking at becoming competitive enough to receive CG funding within the next two years by better capturing off-platform data (we likely are missing six figures worth of money moved a year due to dynamic Kestrel mentioned), dramatically improving our money moved metrics, and lastly, maintaining operational excellence through austere overhead (while still investing in our team appropriately). However, the early signal looks like our growth strategy is working, with the 4x pledge count YTD as a leading indicator.
Thanks for this—I donated. Although I support better measures to minimize leakage, it seems plausible to me that OFTW’s theory of impact just can’t be measured as confidently as that of many other organizations in this space. Effective-giving outreach to university students, who generally have no/little income in the short run, strikes me as prone to measurement difficulties. In contrast, I’d expect that most impact for a small-country effective giving organization flows through the organization (so the donors secure the relevant tax advantages).
We should probably allow some impact credit for raising awareness of a problem + an effective action in response, even if there is no discernable effect in the measurement period. For example, I think attending something like an Oxfam Hunger Banquet during the first semester of college deserves some non-trivial amount of credit for my own giving, but the organizers will never account for that in a cost-effectiveness analysis. But I find it difficult to decide how much credit to assign for generating awareness / change in attitudes that has not (and may never) blossom into effective action.