Does your recommendation account for the staff-time costs of doing anything other than whatever an org’s current setup is? Orgs like CEA have stated that this is why they don’t do financial-optimization things like this.
Since you mentioned CEA, I’ll use them as an example. CEA internally values staff time at $75 an hour. Assuming CEA moves the $4,005,000 in cash (as of January 31, 2019) in EA Funds to StoneCastle’s zero-risk 2.4% banking option, the expected yearly gain is $96,120. Making the conservative assumption of 10 hours of setup time to fill out a short application and get internal approval and 10 minutes a month using an online interface to transfer money between StoneCastle and a checking account, this adds up to $900 a year in operational expenses, which is under 1% of the expected gain. My understanding is that CEA is already actively moving to implement a better cash management solution.
I believe that EA organizations that are currently keeping money in a checking account or low-yield savings account are not aware of how much additional annual funding they could be generating with a low investment of staff time. The goal of this article is to make more organizations aware of the potential gains and low cost of implementation of a much higher-yielding cash management program and provide specific guidance on how to get started.
Given the relatively small number of EA organizations with large cash reserves, I assume that you’ve either reached out to most of them already or will do so eventually. Have any of them declined to pursue the project, even after seeing your analysis of how much they could gain? If so, what were their reasons for doing so?
(Also, this is a great post, and even if you could have done the same work through emails to organizations, I’m glad you took the time to write it up and share it in public.)
Based on our preliminary research into nonprofit financial documents, there may be quite a few organizations within or adjacent to EA that have significant cash reserves, so we think there is the chance we can increase funding for EA causes by millions of dollars relatively quickly.
Last year, we directly reached out to two well-known EA organizations and recommended that they move cash to a money market fund. This recommendation was more complex than our current StoneCastle recommendation. One of them implemented our recommendation with millions of dollars. The other felt like they weren’t large enough to gain a significant benefit (I am not sure the exact amount of cash they had on hand when making this judgement).
It is hard from our end to determine exactly how much an organization can gain because financial documents like the public Form 990 nonprofit tax return can be outdated (the latest Form 990s available are from 2016) and not clearly indicate how effectively an organization is managing its cash and exactly how much cash it has on hand.
We are currently evaluating whether to pursue a slow, networking-based outreach approach versus something like emailing staff members at dozens of EA and EA-aligned organizations to try to accelerate the rate of adoption.
We are being cautious with planning our outreach strategy because if a recommendation is accepted or rejected, in some cases a single charity may be holding tens of millions of dollars, and so a single successful or failed recommendation could impact funding by millions of dollars over the course of one year or several years.
Any insight into how we should approach outreach to maximize our impact would be appreciated! Perhaps emailing a lot of organizations as you mention is the best option.
Another interesting thought is that while EA is focused on driving a limited amount of funding to the most effective charities, we can essentially “create funding out of thin air” so to speak. That means that we may be able to have a very high impact even if we advise organizations that are likely a bit lower impact than say GiveWell’s top charities. If anyone knows of a convenient list of dozens or hundreds of charities that are high impact enough where advising them would be a high impact use of time, I’d love to see it!
If anyone knows of a convenient list of dozens or hundreds of charities that are high impact enough where advising them would be a high impact use of time, I’d love to see it!
It seems there’s a good chance you’ve thought of this already, but maybe GiveWell’s standout (rather than top) charities, the Life You Can Save’s recommended charities, charities GWWC used to recommend, charities Open Phil has granted to in the past, and ACE’s top and standout charities would be good starting points?
It’s also possible SoGive would have a larger list of potentially high-impact charities, though I know less about what they do and how they work.
Does your recommendation account for the staff-time costs of doing anything other than whatever an org’s current setup is? Orgs like CEA have stated that this is why they don’t do financial-optimization things like this.
Since you mentioned CEA, I’ll use them as an example. CEA internally values staff time at $75 an hour. Assuming CEA moves the $4,005,000 in cash (as of January 31, 2019) in EA Funds to StoneCastle’s zero-risk 2.4% banking option, the expected yearly gain is $96,120. Making the conservative assumption of 10 hours of setup time to fill out a short application and get internal approval and 10 minutes a month using an online interface to transfer money between StoneCastle and a checking account, this adds up to $900 a year in operational expenses, which is under 1% of the expected gain. My understanding is that CEA is already actively moving to implement a better cash management solution.
I believe that EA organizations that are currently keeping money in a checking account or low-yield savings account are not aware of how much additional annual funding they could be generating with a low investment of staff time. The goal of this article is to make more organizations aware of the potential gains and low cost of implementation of a much higher-yielding cash management program and provide specific guidance on how to get started.
Given the relatively small number of EA organizations with large cash reserves, I assume that you’ve either reached out to most of them already or will do so eventually. Have any of them declined to pursue the project, even after seeing your analysis of how much they could gain? If so, what were their reasons for doing so?
(Also, this is a great post, and even if you could have done the same work through emails to organizations, I’m glad you took the time to write it up and share it in public.)
Based on our preliminary research into nonprofit financial documents, there may be quite a few organizations within or adjacent to EA that have significant cash reserves, so we think there is the chance we can increase funding for EA causes by millions of dollars relatively quickly.
Last year, we directly reached out to two well-known EA organizations and recommended that they move cash to a money market fund. This recommendation was more complex than our current StoneCastle recommendation. One of them implemented our recommendation with millions of dollars. The other felt like they weren’t large enough to gain a significant benefit (I am not sure the exact amount of cash they had on hand when making this judgement).
It is hard from our end to determine exactly how much an organization can gain because financial documents like the public Form 990 nonprofit tax return can be outdated (the latest Form 990s available are from 2016) and not clearly indicate how effectively an organization is managing its cash and exactly how much cash it has on hand.
We are currently evaluating whether to pursue a slow, networking-based outreach approach versus something like emailing staff members at dozens of EA and EA-aligned organizations to try to accelerate the rate of adoption.
We are being cautious with planning our outreach strategy because if a recommendation is accepted or rejected, in some cases a single charity may be holding tens of millions of dollars, and so a single successful or failed recommendation could impact funding by millions of dollars over the course of one year or several years.
Any insight into how we should approach outreach to maximize our impact would be appreciated! Perhaps emailing a lot of organizations as you mention is the best option.
Another interesting thought is that while EA is focused on driving a limited amount of funding to the most effective charities, we can essentially “create funding out of thin air” so to speak. That means that we may be able to have a very high impact even if we advise organizations that are likely a bit lower impact than say GiveWell’s top charities. If anyone knows of a convenient list of dozens or hundreds of charities that are high impact enough where advising them would be a high impact use of time, I’d love to see it!
It seems there’s a good chance you’ve thought of this already, but maybe GiveWell’s standout (rather than top) charities, the Life You Can Save’s recommended charities, charities GWWC used to recommend, charities Open Phil has granted to in the past, and ACE’s top and standout charities would be good starting points?
It’s also possible SoGive would have a larger list of potentially high-impact charities, though I know less about what they do and how they work.
Thanks for your suggestions! We didn’t look into Open Phil grant recipients—that’s a great idea for expanding the scope of charities to advise.