Someone donating $100K to REG would push it to the point where I don’t feel confident that additional funding would be valuable. My purpose in referring to “small donors” here was that REG is a small organization and might not have much RFMF, so one very wealthy person could quickly exhaust its RFMF. I think that would be a great thing to do, of course, but I wouldn’t be as bullish on REG anymore afterward.
Michael said he has strong confidence REG can easily absorb $100k USD to fund scaling their programs, and perhaps greater than that, but with not as much confidence beyond $100k USD. Plausibly, we could do some reference class forecasting to figure out what a typical effective donor donates, and how many donors to REG at a given level. Then, we could estimate the number of donors who will shift their donations to REG based on this and the last of Michael’s posts about cause selection.
From that, you could figure out if you qualify as a small donor or not, and estimate how many other small donors there will be in the near future, say, by the end of 2015, or over the next six months. If based on the estimates, you don’t expect the $100k USD to be donated to REG without your intervention, then you could likely donate all of your donation budget without needing to worry. Otherwise, you could donate a certain portion of your donation budget now, wait to see if the room for more funding for REG is filled by other donors over some interval of time, and if not, donate the rest of your budget later.
I’m going to try doing some rough calculations here. This is my first attempt at reference class forecasting, so bear with me. Feel free to downvote this comment or respond with criticism if the below analysis sucks. I’ll try to make my assumptions clear throughout, so you can decide for yourself if they’re reasonable or not.
How much does one of us typically give?
From the results of the 2014 EA Survey, I discovered the median donation for survey-takers was $450.00 USD, in 2013 dollars. To fill a RfMF budget of $100k USD, if each donor gave $450 to REG, that would take 222 donors to fill. That seems like more than will actually donate, so, that seems a lower number than the upper bound for “small donor”. Note the last EA survey was completed less than optimally, and was conducted gauging 2013 donations, a time when even more of us were students or starting out our careers, so had less money than donate.
To qualify for the top 30% of survey-takers for money donated, one had to donate $1.5k. It would take 66 donors giving that amount to fill a $100k RfMF budget. The top 20% of survey-takers donated at least $3.2k. It would take 31 donors giving at that level to fill a $100k RfMF budget.
The average of $1.5k and $3.2k is $2.35k. I’m not bothering to go into the raw data right now, so I’m assuming $2.35k is the amount needed to be donated to be considered in the top 25% of effective altruists in terms of money donated.
At the level of $2.35k, it would take 42 donors to fill a $100k RfMF budget. It seems plausible that many donors could give to REG, although some will give much more than that, and some will give much less than that. This is just an intution, but a few thousands dollars feels like it constitutes what a “small donor” is, so I’ll go with the number $2.35k from here out.
How many donors at this level are there for REG?
I looked up effective charities from the EA survey, particularly community metacharities, to see if I could find one similar to size to REG. The closest one I’ve found is ACE. ACE currently has five paid staff, and REG has four. However, the best recent data for how much money ACE received is for 2014, when they only had 4 paid staff at most, since they hired Jacy Anthis as a researcher only this year. So, the ACE of 2014 seems comparable to the REG of the present. I’m using ACE as a point of reference for REG because I can’t currently there isn’t any data from REG about how many major donors they’ve had, and what their expenses have been over the course of a whole year, either 2014 or 2015.
In 2014, ACE had expenses of ~$90k USD. That’s nice, because it’s also close to the $100k we’re thinking about, in terms of funding REG can absorb without plausibly hitting RfMF issues.
A top donor to ACE is someone who made a major gift to ACE of =>$1k USD to ACE. In 2014, 22 individual donors constituted those who made major gifts. In 2014, ACE received $170k in donations, virtually all of it from individual donors rather than foundations. If we make the assumption all that money came from major donors, that’s a mean donation of ~$7.7k per major donor. However, ACE had expenses of only ~$90k for 2014. So, only $4.1k of the mean donation from major donors was used by ACE last year. That leaves $3.6k per the average major donor to ACE whose donations were unused in 2014. I’m guessing they just rolled over to the 2015 budget and expenses.
That is still more than the $2.35k one would need to donate to be in the top 25% of donors in the EA community.
At $7.7k per mean major donor, it would take 12 donors to fill a $100k RfMF budget. If $4.1k was used, and the rest shelved, it would take 24 donors to fill that same budget. 24 is close to 22, the number of major donors ACE had in 2014.
If a small donor is one who donates less than $5,000 per year, and typically donates between $2000 and $4000, then it would take between 20 and 40 donors to fill up a $100k USD RfMF budget.
It seems to me the average donor to REG who donates more than $1,000 will donate some amount in the window of $2k-$4k. In 2014, ACE was an organization of very similar size, which actually had expenses close to $100k. They had 22 major donors. In the absence of Michael Dickens urging more donors to donate at this level to REG, I expect REG wouldn’t have more than roughly this number of donors at this “small donor” level.
At this point, if you’re planning on donating less than $5k over the next 12 months, I’d estimate it’s safe to donate all that to REG, without coordinating with all the other donors, and that money wouldn’t be wasted by REG.
How much does or will Buck donate?
The closest reference class for Buck_2015 is Buck_2014. In 2014, Buck donated $6060, primarily to metacharities. If we assume Buck donates the same amount in 2015 he donated in 2014, and we account for the $2500 Buck already donated to MIRI in 2015, it seems Buck would an additional $3500 for the remainder of 2015.
Based on prior assumptions and calculations, it seems Buck would be able to donate that much to REG without worry REG couldn’t use that money in the next year.
How many more people will donate to REG, who otherwise wouldn’t, on the basis of Michael’s recommendation?
Ask Michael.
Conclusion
*Someone who gives less than $5k is considered a “small donor”. As of the 2014 EA survey, this appears to be at a level above what 80% of EAs donated.
*In the absence of Michael’s recommendations, based on a similar track record from ACE in 2014, I’d expect between 20 and 30 donors to donate at a level of $2k-$5k to REG.
*We know it would take between 30 and 40 donors at this level to to fill REG’s expected $100k USD RfMF budget.
*If Michael Dickens can confirm he expects less than 10 additional people (besides yourself) will donate between $2k-$5k to REG in the next year on the basis of his recommendations, than it seems safe for you to donate an amount in that interval to REG without worry.
*In particular, if you’re Buck, and you’re inclined to, it seems you can donate an amount of money in the interval of $2k-$5k, i.e., your expected remaining donation budget for 2015, to REG, without worry.
I feel like this is a basic confusion on my part, but wouldn’t it be better to delay until the end of REG’s fundraising period, i.e. when they are making spending decisions for the next year, and then top them off in explicit coordination with other EAs thinking about this? Like, RfMF should be an easily solved problem in cases with a friendly/communicative nonprofit and a donorbase explicitly discussing RfMF with each other.
How much does or will Buck donate?
Buck has stated that he plans to donate ~40,000 dollars this year, although that might not be true anymore.
I didn’t know they were running a fundraiser, but yeah, waiting until it’s over makes the most sense. Coordination itself is difficult, so the above was an experiment in trying to figure out what do when coordination doesn’t seem feasible over a given time period, which seems possible. Denis Drescher and I have been discussing attempts to coordinate donors, and we actually intend to post on the EA Forum soon a discussion where donors can register their upcoming donations for the remainder of 2015, across all EA meta-charities.
My analysis applies to small donors who aren’t you, then. Alex commented to wait until after any upcoming fundraisers to then donate to REG and see if they have a funding gap. I think my analysis might still apply to you, we just need to scale how much RfMF you would take up. I think donating all $38k to REG at this point alone would be a mistake. I’m guessing Michael won’t actually convince ten people to donate a couple thousand dollars apiece to REG, but maybe five people. I’d guess you could donate $20k to REG right now, and it would still be safe. That is, you wouldn’t displace anyone who would’ve otherwise donated to REG, and then has to do a bunch more work to figure out where to donate to next.
Of course, I don’t recommend just donating $20k to REG anyway. You would at least want to talk to them first, or perhaps be one of the matchers in a donation matching fundraiser. $38k is enough money you could do a lot with that, and there are enough projects who could use more money but not tons it might even make sense to donate that money in two or three chunks to two or three different effective charities. I’m sure you’ve already been thinking about this, though.
Also, if you expect you’ll be able to donate at least five figures each year for many years in a row, consider contacting Tyler Alterman by joining as a funder at EA Ventures. That’s a sizable amount of money you can donate, and becoming part of the EA Ventures network outsources spotting great funding opportunities you might otherwise miss to a team working on that goal full-time.
How small is “small donor” here?
Someone donating $100K to REG would push it to the point where I don’t feel confident that additional funding would be valuable. My purpose in referring to “small donors” here was that REG is a small organization and might not have much RFMF, so one very wealthy person could quickly exhaust its RFMF. I think that would be a great thing to do, of course, but I wouldn’t be as bullish on REG anymore afterward.
I largely agree with Evan’s analysis.
Michael said he has strong confidence REG can easily absorb $100k USD to fund scaling their programs, and perhaps greater than that, but with not as much confidence beyond $100k USD. Plausibly, we could do some reference class forecasting to figure out what a typical effective donor donates, and how many donors to REG at a given level. Then, we could estimate the number of donors who will shift their donations to REG based on this and the last of Michael’s posts about cause selection.
From that, you could figure out if you qualify as a small donor or not, and estimate how many other small donors there will be in the near future, say, by the end of 2015, or over the next six months. If based on the estimates, you don’t expect the $100k USD to be donated to REG without your intervention, then you could likely donate all of your donation budget without needing to worry. Otherwise, you could donate a certain portion of your donation budget now, wait to see if the room for more funding for REG is filled by other donors over some interval of time, and if not, donate the rest of your budget later.
I’m going to try doing some rough calculations here. This is my first attempt at reference class forecasting, so bear with me. Feel free to downvote this comment or respond with criticism if the below analysis sucks. I’ll try to make my assumptions clear throughout, so you can decide for yourself if they’re reasonable or not.
How much does one of us typically give?
From the results of the 2014 EA Survey, I discovered the median donation for survey-takers was $450.00 USD, in 2013 dollars. To fill a RfMF budget of $100k USD, if each donor gave $450 to REG, that would take 222 donors to fill. That seems like more than will actually donate, so, that seems a lower number than the upper bound for “small donor”. Note the last EA survey was completed less than optimally, and was conducted gauging 2013 donations, a time when even more of us were students or starting out our careers, so had less money than donate.
To qualify for the top 30% of survey-takers for money donated, one had to donate $1.5k. It would take 66 donors giving that amount to fill a $100k RfMF budget. The top 20% of survey-takers donated at least $3.2k. It would take 31 donors giving at that level to fill a $100k RfMF budget.
The average of $1.5k and $3.2k is $2.35k. I’m not bothering to go into the raw data right now, so I’m assuming $2.35k is the amount needed to be donated to be considered in the top 25% of effective altruists in terms of money donated.
At the level of $2.35k, it would take 42 donors to fill a $100k RfMF budget. It seems plausible that many donors could give to REG, although some will give much more than that, and some will give much less than that. This is just an intution, but a few thousands dollars feels like it constitutes what a “small donor” is, so I’ll go with the number $2.35k from here out.
How many donors at this level are there for REG?
I looked up effective charities from the EA survey, particularly community metacharities, to see if I could find one similar to size to REG. The closest one I’ve found is ACE. ACE currently has five paid staff, and REG has four. However, the best recent data for how much money ACE received is for 2014, when they only had 4 paid staff at most, since they hired Jacy Anthis as a researcher only this year. So, the ACE of 2014 seems comparable to the REG of the present. I’m using ACE as a point of reference for REG because I can’t currently there isn’t any data from REG about how many major donors they’ve had, and what their expenses have been over the course of a whole year, either 2014 or 2015.
In 2014, ACE had expenses of ~$90k USD. That’s nice, because it’s also close to the $100k we’re thinking about, in terms of funding REG can absorb without plausibly hitting RfMF issues.
A top donor to ACE is someone who made a major gift to ACE of =>$1k USD to ACE. In 2014, 22 individual donors constituted those who made major gifts. In 2014, ACE received $170k in donations, virtually all of it from individual donors rather than foundations. If we make the assumption all that money came from major donors, that’s a mean donation of ~$7.7k per major donor. However, ACE had expenses of only ~$90k for 2014. So, only $4.1k of the mean donation from major donors was used by ACE last year. That leaves $3.6k per the average major donor to ACE whose donations were unused in 2014. I’m guessing they just rolled over to the 2015 budget and expenses.
That is still more than the $2.35k one would need to donate to be in the top 25% of donors in the EA community.
At $7.7k per mean major donor, it would take 12 donors to fill a $100k RfMF budget. If $4.1k was used, and the rest shelved, it would take 24 donors to fill that same budget. 24 is close to 22, the number of major donors ACE had in 2014.
If a small donor is one who donates less than $5,000 per year, and typically donates between $2000 and $4000, then it would take between 20 and 40 donors to fill up a $100k USD RfMF budget.
It seems to me the average donor to REG who donates more than $1,000 will donate some amount in the window of $2k-$4k. In 2014, ACE was an organization of very similar size, which actually had expenses close to $100k. They had 22 major donors. In the absence of Michael Dickens urging more donors to donate at this level to REG, I expect REG wouldn’t have more than roughly this number of donors at this “small donor” level.
At this point, if you’re planning on donating less than $5k over the next 12 months, I’d estimate it’s safe to donate all that to REG, without coordinating with all the other donors, and that money wouldn’t be wasted by REG.
How much does or will Buck donate?
The closest reference class for Buck_2015 is Buck_2014. In 2014, Buck donated $6060, primarily to metacharities. If we assume Buck donates the same amount in 2015 he donated in 2014, and we account for the $2500 Buck already donated to MIRI in 2015, it seems Buck would an additional $3500 for the remainder of 2015.
Based on prior assumptions and calculations, it seems Buck would be able to donate that much to REG without worry REG couldn’t use that money in the next year.
How many more people will donate to REG, who otherwise wouldn’t, on the basis of Michael’s recommendation?
Ask Michael.
Conclusion
*Someone who gives less than $5k is considered a “small donor”. As of the 2014 EA survey, this appears to be at a level above what 80% of EAs donated.
*In the absence of Michael’s recommendations, based on a similar track record from ACE in 2014, I’d expect between 20 and 30 donors to donate at a level of $2k-$5k to REG.
*We know it would take between 30 and 40 donors at this level to to fill REG’s expected $100k USD RfMF budget.
*If Michael Dickens can confirm he expects less than 10 additional people (besides yourself) will donate between $2k-$5k to REG in the next year on the basis of his recommendations, than it seems safe for you to donate an amount in that interval to REG without worry.
*In particular, if you’re Buck, and you’re inclined to, it seems you can donate an amount of money in the interval of $2k-$5k, i.e., your expected remaining donation budget for 2015, to REG, without worry.
I feel like this is a basic confusion on my part, but wouldn’t it be better to delay until the end of REG’s fundraising period, i.e. when they are making spending decisions for the next year, and then top them off in explicit coordination with other EAs thinking about this? Like, RfMF should be an easily solved problem in cases with a friendly/communicative nonprofit and a donorbase explicitly discussing RfMF with each other.
Buck has stated that he plans to donate ~40,000 dollars this year, although that might not be true anymore.
I didn’t know they were running a fundraiser, but yeah, waiting until it’s over makes the most sense. Coordination itself is difficult, so the above was an experiment in trying to figure out what do when coordination doesn’t seem feasible over a given time period, which seems possible. Denis Drescher and I have been discussing attempts to coordinate donors, and we actually intend to post on the EA Forum soon a discussion where donors can register their upcoming donations for the remainder of 2015, across all EA meta-charities.
I plan to donate about $38k more this year, but I appreciate your guessing :)
My reference Buck forecasting isn’t very good :/
My analysis applies to small donors who aren’t you, then. Alex commented to wait until after any upcoming fundraisers to then donate to REG and see if they have a funding gap. I think my analysis might still apply to you, we just need to scale how much RfMF you would take up. I think donating all $38k to REG at this point alone would be a mistake. I’m guessing Michael won’t actually convince ten people to donate a couple thousand dollars apiece to REG, but maybe five people. I’d guess you could donate $20k to REG right now, and it would still be safe. That is, you wouldn’t displace anyone who would’ve otherwise donated to REG, and then has to do a bunch more work to figure out where to donate to next.
Of course, I don’t recommend just donating $20k to REG anyway. You would at least want to talk to them first, or perhaps be one of the matchers in a donation matching fundraiser. $38k is enough money you could do a lot with that, and there are enough projects who could use more money but not tons it might even make sense to donate that money in two or three chunks to two or three different effective charities. I’m sure you’ve already been thinking about this, though.
Also, if you expect you’ll be able to donate at least five figures each year for many years in a row, consider contacting Tyler Alterman by joining as a funder at EA Ventures. That’s a sizable amount of money you can donate, and becoming part of the EA Ventures network outsources spotting great funding opportunities you might otherwise miss to a team working on that goal full-time.