Thanks Dan and Kim for this analysis, super interesting to see this work done! A main question and a couple of smaller ones:
Do you think a group as big as Sunrise is still a marginal and counterfactually impactful donation for EAs to give to now? As my thinking around social movement organisations like Sunrise is that they’re usually quite funding constrained early on but once they “blow up”, raising more money for them isn’t too challenging. Given that Sunrise has a fairly large supporter base, it seems they could raise donations quite easily from a pool of people who wouldn’t otherwise give to EA-aligned charities, so it’s hard to see the marginal value an EA donor would have here. What are your thoughts on the above? And if you’ve spoken with Sunrise/a similar activist group, what would they do with additional funds?
2. These values were informed by our research and expert interviews. While impossible to know for sure, most insiders have told us that the climate provisions in the reconciliation bill would not have happened without the rise in activist policy organizations (such as the Sunrise Movement) over the last couple of years.
Specifically, who did you speak to and who do you consider insiders and experts in this case? You’ve probably seen this document already by Founders Pledge on evaluating policy organisations but they have an interesting hierarchy of desirable sources so curious to see where yours ranked on that. Also did you push them much for numerical estimates or do you have any transcripts of those interviews?
3. We assigned probabilities of 0.5%, 0.5%, 5%, and 10% for the Very Pessimistic, Pessimistic, Realistic, and Optimistic cases, respectively.
How come you selected the same probability for activist influence on a progressive bill for both the pessimistic and very pessimistic cases? Seems a bit counter-intuitive to me.
4. Another question about these probabilities are: Have you thought about deriving them from Sunrise’s to date impact on influencing policy and how successful they’ve been so far? Or referencing to other activist organisations globally to see if there’s some base rate for activist success on influencing policy (I appreciate this is a huge job!).
Thanks for your feedback! It was really helpful and gave us a few things to think about. A few responses:
Marginal benefit: These are all good questions. They are ones we didn’t tackle in our general activism model laid out here (which was inspired more by looking backward at Sunrise’s previous activities) , but that we are thinking about as we consider whether or not to recommend Sunrise this giving season. Sunrise says that additional funds (especially to the c3) will be used to grow their movement in both size and effectivness. I think is is a compelling argument that Sunrise’s movement would be a lot more powerful if it could recruit more active, passionate members. However, I agree it’s not clear whether there may be declining marginal returns to money at this point and/or if Sunrise could easily raise all the money it needs from mainstream donors. (Both those points are intertwined.)
Expert interviews: We’ve spoken with philanthropists (who do this kind of thing for a living) as well as a spectrum of folks who work across the climate sphere (private sector, think tanks, government, nonprofits, etc). No, we haven’t pushed for numerical estimates and no we don’t have transcripts, but we do have notes. I’ll agree that this kind of information can be pretty unreliable, and be very influenced by the biases of the people you speak with. For the case of Sunrise in particular, we’re working on getting more opinions to hone our estimates. Thanks for attaching that document from FP- I’d seen it before but it was helpful to re-read as it gave me some ideas for how to push some of this estimation forward.
There are a few variables which change in the different scenarios, and we didn’t necessarily change all variables between all scenarios. The pessimistic and very pessimistic scenarios both have a very low (.5%) influence of activism on the progressive bill, but have different assumptions on activism’s influence on the bipartisan bill.
For this model, we have been “deriving them from Sunrise’s to date impact on influencing policy and how successful they’ve been so far”, though we understand that even doing this takes pretty great assumptions. We haven’t tried to reference to other activist orgs globally- we think it would get even less accurate if we try to move to different contexts.
Thanks Dan and Kim for this analysis, super interesting to see this work done! A main question and a couple of smaller ones:
Do you think a group as big as Sunrise is still a marginal and counterfactually impactful donation for EAs to give to now? As my thinking around social movement organisations like Sunrise is that they’re usually quite funding constrained early on but once they “blow up”, raising more money for them isn’t too challenging. Given that Sunrise has a fairly large supporter base, it seems they could raise donations quite easily from a pool of people who wouldn’t otherwise give to EA-aligned charities, so it’s hard to see the marginal value an EA donor would have here. What are your thoughts on the above? And if you’ve spoken with Sunrise/a similar activist group, what would they do with additional funds?
Specifically, who did you speak to and who do you consider insiders and experts in this case? You’ve probably seen this document already by Founders Pledge on evaluating policy organisations but they have an interesting hierarchy of desirable sources so curious to see where yours ranked on that. Also did you push them much for numerical estimates or do you have any transcripts of those interviews?
How come you selected the same probability for activist influence on a progressive bill for both the pessimistic and very pessimistic cases? Seems a bit counter-intuitive to me.
4. Another question about these probabilities are: Have you thought about deriving them from Sunrise’s to date impact on influencing policy and how successful they’ve been so far? Or referencing to other activist organisations globally to see if there’s some base rate for activist success on influencing policy (I appreciate this is a huge job!).
Hi James,
Thanks for your feedback! It was really helpful and gave us a few things to think about. A few responses:
Marginal benefit: These are all good questions. They are ones we didn’t tackle in our general activism model laid out here (which was inspired more by looking backward at Sunrise’s previous activities) , but that we are thinking about as we consider whether or not to recommend Sunrise this giving season. Sunrise says that additional funds (especially to the c3) will be used to grow their movement in both size and effectivness. I think is is a compelling argument that Sunrise’s movement would be a lot more powerful if it could recruit more active, passionate members. However, I agree it’s not clear whether there may be declining marginal returns to money at this point and/or if Sunrise could easily raise all the money it needs from mainstream donors. (Both those points are intertwined.)
Expert interviews: We’ve spoken with philanthropists (who do this kind of thing for a living) as well as a spectrum of folks who work across the climate sphere (private sector, think tanks, government, nonprofits, etc). No, we haven’t pushed for numerical estimates and no we don’t have transcripts, but we do have notes. I’ll agree that this kind of information can be pretty unreliable, and be very influenced by the biases of the people you speak with. For the case of Sunrise in particular, we’re working on getting more opinions to hone our estimates. Thanks for attaching that document from FP- I’d seen it before but it was helpful to re-read as it gave me some ideas for how to push some of this estimation forward.
There are a few variables which change in the different scenarios, and we didn’t necessarily change all variables between all scenarios. The pessimistic and very pessimistic scenarios both have a very low (.5%) influence of activism on the progressive bill, but have different assumptions on activism’s influence on the bipartisan bill.
For this model, we have been “deriving them from Sunrise’s to date impact on influencing policy and how successful they’ve been so far”, though we understand that even doing this takes pretty great assumptions. We haven’t tried to reference to other activist orgs globally- we think it would get even less accurate if we try to move to different contexts.
Thanks again!