We’d hope to find advisors in both these areas, but we’re particularly interested in advocacy within development and research (where knowledge is fairly easily transferable – our outreach is a bit more different from what others are doing). For example over the last couple of weeks we added someone to our advisory board whose PhD was on schistosomiasis and is about to take up a position working on a Gates foundation project to eliminate STHs, and connected with the person who runs the Emerging Policy, Innovation and Capability unit for the UK Department of international development.
HNW advising
We’ve started this by supporting a large donor who had previously been assessing projects entirely independently, and by working with the Founders’ Pledge. In the former case, it seems we have fairly good reason to think that we have been of genuine help to the person in determining which of the high impact projects considered were the best. As a HNW donor with good connections, he has various projects open to him that aren’t to other donors, and which smaller and more risk averse donors wouldn’t be interested in. He has said that he has found our advice useful. In the latter case, we produced reports like this one on mental health for donors who want to give partly within restricted areas. This collaboration is in early stages, so we don’t yet know to what extent donors will follow our recommendations. But so far donors have seemed grateful for the recommendations and interested in the research, and it seems likely they will follow them. If that’s the case, it would mean money going to our top recommended charities which otherwise almost certainly wouldn’t have, and money going to more effective charities within particular areas than it would otherwise have. Since these donors are donating substantial amounts, they expect more bespoke reports than simply being pointed towards GW’s research. Currently, the reports are somewhat labour intensive to create, though we estimate they are still worth it since each is moving 10s of thousands of dollars. In the future, we can pull together the reports from research we did previously, so we expect it the cost-effectiveness to increase fairly swiftly. This is something we are monitoring carefully however. One expected benefit of this work is simply presenting research in a form that makes it more likely to be acted on. The Founders’ Pledge know their donors well, and seem to think that the reports we produce are the kind that are likely to be acted on. Another benefit is in understanding the overall health sphere well enough to find particular synergies. People often want to help a particular sphere. Since the charities we recommend are the most cost-effective we could find, and helping in very basic ways, there are often synergies that aren’t immediately obvious. For example, as we write about in our mental health report, it seems that the most cost-effective way to reduce epilepsy incidence is actually to prevent malaria, since cerebral malaria causes in the region of a five-fold increase in chance of epilepsy. A similar example: when we’ve looked into cancer, the most cost-effective treatment to cancer we could find was to prevent Vitamin A deficiency, since that causes stomach cancer. In both these cases, this ignores the other benefits of malaria prevention and Vitamin A supplementation. These kinds of cases aren’t just interesting, they are likely to be persuasive to people who might not otherwise have given to such cost-effective charities. In neither of these cases did the points seem to have been made by others, so it does not appear to be a duplication of effort.
On the last two points:
We’d hope to find advisors in both these areas, but we’re particularly interested in advocacy within development and research (where knowledge is fairly easily transferable – our outreach is a bit more different from what others are doing). For example over the last couple of weeks we added someone to our advisory board whose PhD was on schistosomiasis and is about to take up a position working on a Gates foundation project to eliminate STHs, and connected with the person who runs the Emerging Policy, Innovation and Capability unit for the UK Department of international development.
We’ve started this by supporting a large donor who had previously been assessing projects entirely independently, and by working with the Founders’ Pledge. In the former case, it seems we have fairly good reason to think that we have been of genuine help to the person in determining which of the high impact projects considered were the best. As a HNW donor with good connections, he has various projects open to him that aren’t to other donors, and which smaller and more risk averse donors wouldn’t be interested in. He has said that he has found our advice useful. In the latter case, we produced reports like this one on mental health for donors who want to give partly within restricted areas. This collaboration is in early stages, so we don’t yet know to what extent donors will follow our recommendations. But so far donors have seemed grateful for the recommendations and interested in the research, and it seems likely they will follow them. If that’s the case, it would mean money going to our top recommended charities which otherwise almost certainly wouldn’t have, and money going to more effective charities within particular areas than it would otherwise have. Since these donors are donating substantial amounts, they expect more bespoke reports than simply being pointed towards GW’s research. Currently, the reports are somewhat labour intensive to create, though we estimate they are still worth it since each is moving 10s of thousands of dollars. In the future, we can pull together the reports from research we did previously, so we expect it the cost-effectiveness to increase fairly swiftly. This is something we are monitoring carefully however. One expected benefit of this work is simply presenting research in a form that makes it more likely to be acted on. The Founders’ Pledge know their donors well, and seem to think that the reports we produce are the kind that are likely to be acted on. Another benefit is in understanding the overall health sphere well enough to find particular synergies. People often want to help a particular sphere. Since the charities we recommend are the most cost-effective we could find, and helping in very basic ways, there are often synergies that aren’t immediately obvious. For example, as we write about in our mental health report, it seems that the most cost-effective way to reduce epilepsy incidence is actually to prevent malaria, since cerebral malaria causes in the region of a five-fold increase in chance of epilepsy. A similar example: when we’ve looked into cancer, the most cost-effective treatment to cancer we could find was to prevent Vitamin A deficiency, since that causes stomach cancer. In both these cases, this ignores the other benefits of malaria prevention and Vitamin A supplementation. These kinds of cases aren’t just interesting, they are likely to be persuasive to people who might not otherwise have given to such cost-effective charities. In neither of these cases did the points seem to have been made by others, so it does not appear to be a duplication of effort.