I’m guessing what you mean is something like “One of RP’s aims is to advise grantmaking. How many total dollars of grantmaking have you advised?” You might then be tempted to take this number, divide it by our costs, and compare that to other organizations. But this is a tricky question to answer actually, since it never has been as straightforward of a relationship as I’d expect for a few reasons:
Our advice is marginal and we never make a sole and final decision on any grant. Also the amount of contribution varies a lot between grants. So you need some counterfactually-adjusted marginal figure.
Sometimes our advice leads to grantmakers being less likely to make a grant rather than more likely… how does that count?
The impact value of the grants themselves is not equal.
Some of our research work looks into decisions but doesn’t actually change the answer. For example, we look into an area that we think isn’t promising and confirm it isn’t promising so in absolute terms we got nowhere but the hits-based fact that it could’ve gone somewhere is valuable. It’s hard to figure out how to quantify this value.
A large portion of our research builds on itself. For example, our invertebrate work has led to some novel grantmaking that likely would not have otherwise happened, but only after three years of work. A lot of our current research is still (hopefully) in that pre-payoff period and so hasn’t lead to any concrete grants yet. It’s hard to figure out how to quantify this value.
A large portion of our research is of the form “given that this grant is being made, how can we make sure it goes as well as possible?” rather than actually advising on the initial grant. It’s hard to figure out how to quantify this value.
A lot more of our recent work has been focused on creating entirely new areas to put funding into (e.g., new incubated organizations, exploring new AI interventions). This takes time and is also hard to value.
We’ve been working this year on producing a figure that looks at itemizing decisions we’ve contributed to and estimating how much we’ve influenced that decision and how valuable that decision was, but we don’t have that work finished yet because it is complicated. Additionally, we’ve been involved in such a large number of decisions by this point that it is a lot of hard work to do all the follow-up and number crunching.
Do also keep in mind that influencing grantmaking is not RP’s sole objective and we achieve impact in other ways (e.g., talent recruitment + training + placement, conferences, incubated organizations, fiscal sponsorships).
All this to say is that I don’t actually have an answer to your question. But we did hire a Worldview Investigations Team that is working more on this.
Do you have a sense of how much funding this informed?
I’m guessing what you mean is something like “One of RP’s aims is to advise grantmaking. How many total dollars of grantmaking have you advised?” You might then be tempted to take this number, divide it by our costs, and compare that to other organizations. But this is a tricky question to answer actually, since it never has been as straightforward of a relationship as I’d expect for a few reasons:
Our advice is marginal and we never make a sole and final decision on any grant. Also the amount of contribution varies a lot between grants. So you need some counterfactually-adjusted marginal figure.
Sometimes our advice leads to grantmakers being less likely to make a grant rather than more likely… how does that count?
The impact value of the grants themselves is not equal.
Some of our research work looks into decisions but doesn’t actually change the answer. For example, we look into an area that we think isn’t promising and confirm it isn’t promising so in absolute terms we got nowhere but the hits-based fact that it could’ve gone somewhere is valuable. It’s hard to figure out how to quantify this value.
A large portion of our research builds on itself. For example, our invertebrate work has led to some novel grantmaking that likely would not have otherwise happened, but only after three years of work. A lot of our current research is still (hopefully) in that pre-payoff period and so hasn’t lead to any concrete grants yet. It’s hard to figure out how to quantify this value.
A large portion of our research is of the form “given that this grant is being made, how can we make sure it goes as well as possible?” rather than actually advising on the initial grant. It’s hard to figure out how to quantify this value.
A lot more of our recent work has been focused on creating entirely new areas to put funding into (e.g., new incubated organizations, exploring new AI interventions). This takes time and is also hard to value.
We’ve been working this year on producing a figure that looks at itemizing decisions we’ve contributed to and estimating how much we’ve influenced that decision and how valuable that decision was, but we don’t have that work finished yet because it is complicated. Additionally, we’ve been involved in such a large number of decisions by this point that it is a lot of hard work to do all the follow-up and number crunching.
Do also keep in mind that influencing grantmaking is not RP’s sole objective and we achieve impact in other ways (e.g., talent recruitment + training + placement, conferences, incubated organizations, fiscal sponsorships).
All this to say is that I don’t actually have an answer to your question. But we did hire a Worldview Investigations Team that is working more on this.