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.
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.