Since writing this post, I have benefited both from 4 years of hindsight, and also significantly more grantmaking experience with just over a year at the long-term future fund. My main updates:
Exploit networks: I think small individual donors are often best off donating to people in their network that larger donors don’t have access to. In particular I 70% believe it would have been better for me to wait 1-3 years and donate the money to opportunities as and when they came up. For example, there have been a few cases where something would help CHAI but couldn’t be funded institutionally (for various bureaucratic or political reasons) -- I think we always managed to find a way to make it work, but me just having effectively discretionary funding would have made things simpler.
Efficient Markets in Grantmaking: When I wrote the post I tended to think the small orgs were getting overlooked by major donors, because it wasn’t worth the time cost of evaluating. There’s some truth to this, but I think more often the major donors actually had good reasons against wanting to fund the orgs more. -
Impact from Post: The post had less direct impact than I hoped, e.g. I haven’t seen much analysis following on from it or heard of any major donations influenced by it. Although I’ve not tried very hard to track this, so I may have missed it. However, it did have a pretty big indirect impact, of making me more interested in grantmaking and likely helping me get a position on the long-term future fund. Notably you can write posts about what orgs are good to donate to even if you don’t have $100k to donate… so I’d encourage people to do this if they have an interest in grantmaking, or scrutinize how good the grants made by existing grantmakers are. In general I’d like to see more discussion and diversity of opinions around where to make grants.
Since writing this post, I have benefited both from 4 years of hindsight, and also significantly more grantmaking experience with just over a year at the long-term future fund. My main updates:
Exploit networks: I think small individual donors are often best off donating to people in their network that larger donors don’t have access to. In particular I 70% believe it would have been better for me to wait 1-3 years and donate the money to opportunities as and when they came up. For example, there have been a few cases where something would help CHAI but couldn’t be funded institutionally (for various bureaucratic or political reasons) -- I think we always managed to find a way to make it work, but me just having effectively discretionary funding would have made things simpler.
Efficient Markets in Grantmaking: When I wrote the post I tended to think the small orgs were getting overlooked by major donors, because it wasn’t worth the time cost of evaluating. There’s some truth to this, but I think more often the major donors actually had good reasons against wanting to fund the orgs more. -
Impact from Post: The post had less direct impact than I hoped, e.g. I haven’t seen much analysis following on from it or heard of any major donations influenced by it. Although I’ve not tried very hard to track this, so I may have missed it. However, it did have a pretty big indirect impact, of making me more interested in grantmaking and likely helping me get a position on the long-term future fund. Notably you can write posts about what orgs are good to donate to even if you don’t have $100k to donate… so I’d encourage people to do this if they have an interest in grantmaking, or scrutinize how good the grants made by existing grantmakers are. In general I’d like to see more discussion and diversity of opinions around where to make grants.