Do âÂŁ5xâ and âÂŁ5yâ refer to the impact accounting for all effects? If so, you are saying that the marginal multiplier accounting for all effects could be greater than the multiplier concerning the total spending accounting for all effects. I think this can only be the case if the organisation fails to allocate funds to the most cost-effective activities (accounting for all effects) 1st.
I still guess the marginal multiplier of the effective giving initiatives (EGIs) funded by Coefficient Giving (CG) is higher than 1, but I would be a bit surprised if it was 5. In this case, CG would be leaving lots of impact on the table by not funding EGIs more. CG is scaling up their funding of EGIs, and should ideally be doing this in the way that maximises impact. For CGâs marginal funding of EGIs to have a multiplier of 5, one would have to think they should be scaling up faster. Maybe they should. The altruistic market is not perfectly efficient. However, it is worth having in mind that the multiplier of CGâs marginal funding of EGIs may be closer to 1 after accounting for the risks of scaling up too fast. For example, a slower scale up could allow for learning more about which organisations are the most promising. I expect CG to be taking this into account, but mostly informally, not formally in the calculations of the multipliers of their grantees.
ÂŁ5x and ÂŁ5y refer to only money moved by fundraising in that year (or in the case of a pledge-based organisation, to pledges collected in that year multiplied by the estimated future money moved from a pledge). I believe this is standard for an organisation reporting its giving multiplier.
They do not account for total overall impact in the year (of a mature effective giving organisation), which would also need to account for a whole bunch of other things like
The intrinsic value of having a stable effective giving organisation next year as a place to put money with a substantial giving multiplier
The organisation acting as an entry point to the EA community and people who see an effective giving advert and get into EA for effective giving reasons then going on to make career changes
People who give effectively turning up to EA meetups and being great sources of career networking and advice, improving the value of the meetup.
People who start by giving effectively through an organisation, then transition to earning-to-give in a way that the organisation doesnât capture.
Any formal or on-the-job training in doing effective fundraising the organisation provides its staff or volunteers, who then may leave to work at another effective giving organisation.
Positive reputational effects on the EA brand from advertisement of doing a fairly well-regarded politically neutral activity (though plenty of people donât want to donate to the Against Malaria Foundation, you would be somewhat hard-pressed to find anyone who is pro-malaria and thinks someone who donates to AMF is evil).
I think certain effective giving organisations also have large impact through these fuzzier things too. Though itâs hard to measure, effective giving organisations that involve a significant amount of volunteer coordination and thus training delivery, or that reach larger numbers of people (giving smaller amounts per person) so introduce more people to the concepts of EA, seem like theyâd do more on the fuzzy impact side. Whereas paying a few staff who already know how to fundraise well to pitch at millionaires, less so.
-- I think CoGi have previously left a lot of impact on the table by not funding the expansion of effective giving enough (while consistently directing a lot of their money to GiveWell, implying they would have wanted to do so if theyâd known they should be diverting more of that to incubating effective giving). The time between the pivot to careers in 2017 until the FTX crash in 2022 when the EA community narrative was âweâre talent-constrained not funding-constrainedâ was a massive chokepoint for effective giving. Check out https://ââcoefficientgiving.org/ââfunds/ââeffective-giving-and-careers/ââ#featured-grants and look by yearâbefore and after 2022 is a huge difference in grant allocations to effective giving organisations.
And if that chokepoint hadnât have happened weâd be a hugely different and probably much bigger and better EA community today. (To be clear, I donât think it was at all obvious at the time that incubating effective giving was a good strategy! Itâs only become so in hindsight.)
Even now I think we could scale up faster (and hugely welcome this scale-up post). But I understand that CoGi has a certain amount it wishes to allocate, and its strategy to maximise impact is allocating that in such a way as to create clear high-giving-multiplier funding gaps for other GiveWell-aligned donors to be able to step in and fill.
Even now I think we could scale up faster (and hugely welcome this scale-up post). But I understand that CoGi has a certain amount it wishes to allocate, and its strategy to maximise impact is allocating that in such a way as to create clear high-giving-multiplier funding gaps for other GiveWell-aligned donors to be able to step in and fill.
Are you confident that CG should be increasing the funding of EGIs faster (for example, by using looser funding caps)? If not, can you be confident that funding the EGIs supported by CG is significantly more cost-effective than funding GiveWell?
I am confident that CG running more RFPs, committing multi-year scale-up funding, branching out into diverse initiatives, and other such things with its increased EGI budget allocation is a very clear sign that it believes there is both high impact and absorbency here. And knowing that their previous RoI has been 5x, I doubt this one will end up substantially lower. I reckon theyâll use about the same judging criteria, the pot just wonât run out so fast. Which means that I do think funding an EGI funded by CG is more cost-effective than GiveWell.
I am confident that CG running more RFPs, committing multi-year scale-up funding, branching out into diverse initiatives, and other such things with its increased EGI budget allocation is a very clear sign that it believes there is both high impact and absorbency here.
It does not follow from this that funding the EGIs supported by CG is more cost-effective than funding GiveWell? For this to be the case, assuming CG is trying to maximise their impact, one would have to think they should be scaling up their funding of EGIs faster, regardless of how fast they are currently scaling it. If CGâs marginal funding of EGIs had a multiplier above 1 accounting for all effects, they would be leaving impact on the table by not scaling up faster.
I do believe that, from a purely expected-impact-maximising perspective, CG should scale up faster than they are currently doing by directing more of their money from GiveWell charities â fundraising organisations for GiveWell charities. Thereâs a whole bunch of opportunities above 1x they are intentionally missing out on, and also opportunities above their 5x funding bar they are trying to create and then intentionally miss out on. I believe that their current limit here is primarily reputational, and that altruism at this scale is not an efficient market.
The reputational considerations being that CG does not want to be seen using too much of its global health allocation paying for fundraisers, because someone could write a hitpiece on âa billionaire wants you to give money to help the extreme poor but wonât give any himselfâ.
Anyone who is not CG is not bound by the reputational considerations of CG, and can take advantage of a significant arbitrage opportunity.
CGâs current scaling could still be maximising expected impact if they are correctly assessing the reputational risks of funding EGIs. However, I agree this applies less to small individual donors, and I also suspect the marginal multiplier accounting for all effects of these donors funding EGIs supported by CG is higher than 1.
I wonder whether it would be good for CG to clarify why they do not fund EGIs more. I feel like this would make sense even if the cause was the reputational risks you mentioned, which I believe are broadly seen as understandable.
Thanks for this discussion. I appreciate the thoughtful engagement even though I havenât had the capacity to follow the full back-and-forth in detail. I wanted to offer a few points from the grantmaker perspective that might be useful.
On the marginal cost-effectiveness question: most of the effective giving organizations we fund are running very lean, and their costs are primarily staffing. So when we think about marginal funding, weâre often not thinking about abstract diminishing returns on a smooth curve, weâre thinking about specific roles and what theyâd unlock. For example, if an org is going from two to four FTE, the additional hires might be an ultra-high-net-worth advisor who opens up a whole new donor segment, or a marketing hire who can meaningfully expand reach. In cases like these, the marginal dollar can be highly cost-effective (sometimes more so than earlier spending) because itâs funding a function the org simply couldnât perform before.
We try to do this kind of holistic (and sometimes hire-by-hire) assessment where we can, though we canât do it for every grantee at every funding level.
One further point: the theoretical argument that orgs should already be spending on their highest-priority items first, so marginal funding should by definition go to lower-priority uses, doesnât always hold in practice. Lean orgs often underspend on things like marketing or growth capacity, not because those arenât high-value, but because theyâre harder to justify from scarce operating budgets, especially when the payoff is uncertain. Additional funding can unlock spending that should have been happening but wasnât.
On average vs. marginal assessment: as I mentioned above, we tend to rely on average cost-effectiveness in our evaluations. I recognize that might be a limitation. In practice, we represent a large share of many granteesâ funding, idealistically around 50%, but realistically 70â100% for many newer grantees. When weâre that dominant a funder, the distinction between average and marginal matters less. Where weâve been a significantly smaller share of an orgâs funding, we have done more explicit marginal analysis, and we expect to move further in that direction, particularly when we represent a smaller share or when a grantee is requesting a substantial increase in funding. We want to make sure the additional funding makes sense. That said, we believe most organizations in our portfolio are cost-effective enough and able to absorb more funding at this stage, and that filling a 10â50% gap is cost-effective enough that more granular marginal analysis hasnât been a top priority.
On why weâre not funding effective giving orgs even more: in many cases, we are increasing grant sizes for successful grantees, and part of our 2026 strategy is actively pushing high-performers to absorb more funding where we see opportunity. But our portfolio spans more than effective giving, we also want to grow in areas like effective careers, where organizations typically have fewer alternative funding sources than EG orgs, which can tap tipping functions and individual donors more readily. We also think of ourselves as providing sustained, long-term support. As we expand and take on more renewable grants, which naturally grow over time with inflation and organizational costs, an increasing share of our budget might go to renewals. Committing to be the sole or near-sole funder for most of these organizations would be irresponsible, both for our portfolio flexibility and for their long-term resilience.
Do âÂŁ5xâ and âÂŁ5yâ refer to the impact accounting for all effects? If so, you are saying that the marginal multiplier accounting for all effects could be greater than the multiplier concerning the total spending accounting for all effects. I think this can only be the case if the organisation fails to allocate funds to the most cost-effective activities (accounting for all effects) 1st.
I still guess the marginal multiplier of the effective giving initiatives (EGIs) funded by Coefficient Giving (CG) is higher than 1, but I would be a bit surprised if it was 5. In this case, CG would be leaving lots of impact on the table by not funding EGIs more. CG is scaling up their funding of EGIs, and should ideally be doing this in the way that maximises impact. For CGâs marginal funding of EGIs to have a multiplier of 5, one would have to think they should be scaling up faster. Maybe they should. The altruistic market is not perfectly efficient. However, it is worth having in mind that the multiplier of CGâs marginal funding of EGIs may be closer to 1 after accounting for the risks of scaling up too fast. For example, a slower scale up could allow for learning more about which organisations are the most promising. I expect CG to be taking this into account, but mostly informally, not formally in the calculations of the multipliers of their grantees.
ÂŁ5x and ÂŁ5y refer to only money moved by fundraising in that year (or in the case of a pledge-based organisation, to pledges collected in that year multiplied by the estimated future money moved from a pledge). I believe this is standard for an organisation reporting its giving multiplier.
They do not account for total overall impact in the year (of a mature effective giving organisation), which would also need to account for a whole bunch of other things like
The intrinsic value of having a stable effective giving organisation next year as a place to put money with a substantial giving multiplier
The organisation acting as an entry point to the EA community and people who see an effective giving advert and get into EA for effective giving reasons then going on to make career changes
People who give effectively turning up to EA meetups and being great sources of career networking and advice, improving the value of the meetup.
People who start by giving effectively through an organisation, then transition to earning-to-give in a way that the organisation doesnât capture.
Any formal or on-the-job training in doing effective fundraising the organisation provides its staff or volunteers, who then may leave to work at another effective giving organisation.
Positive reputational effects on the EA brand from advertisement of doing a fairly well-regarded politically neutral activity (though plenty of people donât want to donate to the Against Malaria Foundation, you would be somewhat hard-pressed to find anyone who is pro-malaria and thinks someone who donates to AMF is evil).
I think certain effective giving organisations also have large impact through these fuzzier things too. Though itâs hard to measure, effective giving organisations that involve a significant amount of volunteer coordination and thus training delivery, or that reach larger numbers of people (giving smaller amounts per person) so introduce more people to the concepts of EA, seem like theyâd do more on the fuzzy impact side. Whereas paying a few staff who already know how to fundraise well to pitch at millionaires, less so.
--
I think CoGi have previously left a lot of impact on the table by not funding the expansion of effective giving enough (while consistently directing a lot of their money to GiveWell, implying they would have wanted to do so if theyâd known they should be diverting more of that to incubating effective giving). The time between the pivot to careers in 2017 until the FTX crash in 2022 when the EA community narrative was âweâre talent-constrained not funding-constrainedâ was a massive chokepoint for effective giving. Check out https://ââcoefficientgiving.org/ââfunds/ââeffective-giving-and-careers/ââ#featured-grants and look by yearâbefore and after 2022 is a huge difference in grant allocations to effective giving organisations.
And if that chokepoint hadnât have happened weâd be a hugely different and probably much bigger and better EA community today. (To be clear, I donât think it was at all obvious at the time that incubating effective giving was a good strategy! Itâs only become so in hindsight.)
Even now I think we could scale up faster (and hugely welcome this scale-up post). But I understand that CoGi has a certain amount it wishes to allocate, and its strategy to maximise impact is allocating that in such a way as to create clear high-giving-multiplier funding gaps for other GiveWell-aligned donors to be able to step in and fill.
Are you confident that CG should be increasing the funding of EGIs faster (for example, by using looser funding caps)? If not, can you be confident that funding the EGIs supported by CG is significantly more cost-effective than funding GiveWell?
I am confident that CG running more RFPs, committing multi-year scale-up funding, branching out into diverse initiatives, and other such things with its increased EGI budget allocation is a very clear sign that it believes there is both high impact and absorbency here. And knowing that their previous RoI has been 5x, I doubt this one will end up substantially lower. I reckon theyâll use about the same judging criteria, the pot just wonât run out so fast. Which means that I do think funding an EGI funded by CG is more cost-effective than GiveWell.
It does not follow from this that funding the EGIs supported by CG is more cost-effective than funding GiveWell? For this to be the case, assuming CG is trying to maximise their impact, one would have to think they should be scaling up their funding of EGIs faster, regardless of how fast they are currently scaling it. If CGâs marginal funding of EGIs had a multiplier above 1 accounting for all effects, they would be leaving impact on the table by not scaling up faster.
I do believe that, from a purely expected-impact-maximising perspective, CG should scale up faster than they are currently doing by directing more of their money from GiveWell charities â fundraising organisations for GiveWell charities. Thereâs a whole bunch of opportunities above 1x they are intentionally missing out on, and also opportunities above their 5x funding bar they are trying to create and then intentionally miss out on. I believe that their current limit here is primarily reputational, and that altruism at this scale is not an efficient market.
The reputational considerations being that CG does not want to be seen using too much of its global health allocation paying for fundraisers, because someone could write a hitpiece on âa billionaire wants you to give money to help the extreme poor but wonât give any himselfâ.
Anyone who is not CG is not bound by the reputational considerations of CG, and can take advantage of a significant arbitrage opportunity.
CGâs current scaling could still be maximising expected impact if they are correctly assessing the reputational risks of funding EGIs. However, I agree this applies less to small individual donors, and I also suspect the marginal multiplier accounting for all effects of these donors funding EGIs supported by CG is higher than 1.
I wonder whether it would be good for CG to clarify why they do not fund EGIs more. I feel like this would make sense even if the cause was the reputational risks you mentioned, which I believe are broadly seen as understandable.
Thanks for this discussion. I appreciate the thoughtful engagement even though I havenât had the capacity to follow the full back-and-forth in detail. I wanted to offer a few points from the grantmaker perspective that might be useful.
On the marginal cost-effectiveness question: most of the effective giving organizations we fund are running very lean, and their costs are primarily staffing. So when we think about marginal funding, weâre often not thinking about abstract diminishing returns on a smooth curve, weâre thinking about specific roles and what theyâd unlock. For example, if an org is going from two to four FTE, the additional hires might be an ultra-high-net-worth advisor who opens up a whole new donor segment, or a marketing hire who can meaningfully expand reach. In cases like these, the marginal dollar can be highly cost-effective (sometimes more so than earlier spending) because itâs funding a function the org simply couldnât perform before.
We try to do this kind of holistic (and sometimes hire-by-hire) assessment where we can, though we canât do it for every grantee at every funding level.
One further point: the theoretical argument that orgs should already be spending on their highest-priority items first, so marginal funding should by definition go to lower-priority uses, doesnât always hold in practice. Lean orgs often underspend on things like marketing or growth capacity, not because those arenât high-value, but because theyâre harder to justify from scarce operating budgets, especially when the payoff is uncertain. Additional funding can unlock spending that should have been happening but wasnât.
On average vs. marginal assessment: as I mentioned above, we tend to rely on average cost-effectiveness in our evaluations. I recognize that might be a limitation. In practice, we represent a large share of many granteesâ funding, idealistically around 50%, but realistically 70â100% for many newer grantees. When weâre that dominant a funder, the distinction between average and marginal matters less. Where weâve been a significantly smaller share of an orgâs funding, we have done more explicit marginal analysis, and we expect to move further in that direction, particularly when we represent a smaller share or when a grantee is requesting a substantial increase in funding. We want to make sure the additional funding makes sense. That said, we believe most organizations in our portfolio are cost-effective enough and able to absorb more funding at this stage, and that filling a 10â50% gap is cost-effective enough that more granular marginal analysis hasnât been a top priority.
On why weâre not funding effective giving orgs even more: in many cases, we are increasing grant sizes for successful grantees, and part of our 2026 strategy is actively pushing high-performers to absorb more funding where we see opportunity. But our portfolio spans more than effective giving, we also want to grow in areas like effective careers, where organizations typically have fewer alternative funding sources than EG orgs, which can tap tipping functions and individual donors more readily. We also think of ourselves as providing sustained, long-term support. As we expand and take on more renewable grants, which naturally grow over time with inflation and organizational costs, an increasing share of our budget might go to renewals. Committing to be the sole or near-sole funder for most of these organizations would be irresponsible, both for our portfolio flexibility and for their long-term resilience.
Thanks for the helpful clarifications, Melanie. They made sense to me.