Open Phil and the CEA Global Health and Development Fund have each made a grant to One for the World before, Open Phil has made grants to Founders Pledge, and the EA Infrastructure Fund has made grants to TLYCS, One for the World, RC Forward, Raising for Effective Giving, Founders Pledge, a tax deductible status project run by Effective Altruism Netherlands, Generation Pledge, http://gieffektivt.no/, Lucius Caviola and Joshua Greene (givingmultiplier.org), EA Giving Tuesday and Effektiv Spenden.
Of the 4 EA funds, the EA Infrastructure Fund has paid out the least to date, though, and it looks like they all started paying out in 2017.
My sense is that most individual donors aren’t excited about multiplier orgs because they find them complicated, don’t have time to dig into the leverage numbers to really understand them, and therefore don’t trust those numbers. And I think that’s a pretty reasonable strategy for most individuals. But it does seem telling that funders that have the resources to do more vetting have supported such a wide range of multiplier orgs.
These sophisticated donors’ support of such a wide range of multiplier orgs supports the idea that there could be a lot of leverage out there to be had. If that’s true, it also has some interesting implications for the “it’s hard to get a job at an EA org” discussion that’s been going on for a while, most recently here.
Here’s a simplified thought experiment. Let’s say you invested $1 million in the orgs listed above, allocated proportionally to their current size (not all that far off from what the infrastructure fund has actually done, but we’ll use stylized numbers to keep the math simple). Salaries are typically the biggest expense for multiplier orgs, so let’s say $800k flows through to hiring new people. Assume $100k/year per new person and that’s 8 new hires. If 75% of those jobs go to people in the EA community, that’s 6 EA’s getting the sorts of jobs that are immensely desireable and immensely scarce.
If the multiplier model really works, $1 million will be a small fraction of what’s needed to build a flourishing system multiplier orgs with models spanning research (e.g. GiveWell, ACE), fundraising for targeted causes (e.g. TLYCS, OFTW), fundraising for targeted donors (e.g. Founders Pledge and REG), and country-level organizations that provide tax deductible giving (e.g. RC Forward, EA Netherlands). If you built that ecosystem, you’d quickly create dozens of new roles. So if the multiplier model works at scale, you’ll move a ton of incremental money while also making real headway on the issue of EA jobs being scarce. (To be clear, I don’t think we should fund multiplier orgs so EAs will be able to get the jobs they want, I’m just saying that would be a nice added benefit if the multiplier model works and another reason to investigate whether it does work.)
Open Phil and the CEA Global Health and Development Fund have each made a grant to One for the World before, Open Phil has made grants to Founders Pledge, and the EA Infrastructure Fund has made grants to TLYCS, One for the World, RC Forward, Raising for Effective Giving, Founders Pledge, a tax deductible status project run by Effective Altruism Netherlands, Generation Pledge, http://gieffektivt.no/, Lucius Caviola and Joshua Greene (givingmultiplier.org), EA Giving Tuesday and Effektiv Spenden.
Of the 4 EA funds, the EA Infrastructure Fund has paid out the least to date, though, and it looks like they all started paying out in 2017.
My sense is that most individual donors aren’t excited about multiplier orgs because they find them complicated, don’t have time to dig into the leverage numbers to really understand them, and therefore don’t trust those numbers. And I think that’s a pretty reasonable strategy for most individuals. But it does seem telling that funders that have the resources to do more vetting have supported such a wide range of multiplier orgs.
These sophisticated donors’ support of such a wide range of multiplier orgs supports the idea that there could be a lot of leverage out there to be had. If that’s true, it also has some interesting implications for the “it’s hard to get a job at an EA org” discussion that’s been going on for a while, most recently here.
Here’s a simplified thought experiment. Let’s say you invested $1 million in the orgs listed above, allocated proportionally to their current size (not all that far off from what the infrastructure fund has actually done, but we’ll use stylized numbers to keep the math simple). Salaries are typically the biggest expense for multiplier orgs, so let’s say $800k flows through to hiring new people. Assume $100k/year per new person and that’s 8 new hires. If 75% of those jobs go to people in the EA community, that’s 6 EA’s getting the sorts of jobs that are immensely desireable and immensely scarce.
If the multiplier model really works, $1 million will be a small fraction of what’s needed to build a flourishing system multiplier orgs with models spanning research (e.g. GiveWell, ACE), fundraising for targeted causes (e.g. TLYCS, OFTW), fundraising for targeted donors (e.g. Founders Pledge and REG), and country-level organizations that provide tax deductible giving (e.g. RC Forward, EA Netherlands). If you built that ecosystem, you’d quickly create dozens of new roles. So if the multiplier model works at scale, you’ll move a ton of incremental money while also making real headway on the issue of EA jobs being scarce. (To be clear, I don’t think we should fund multiplier orgs so EAs will be able to get the jobs they want, I’m just saying that would be a nice added benefit if the multiplier model works and another reason to investigate whether it does work.)
Do you disagree that the EA community at large seems less excited about multiplier orgs vs. more direct orgs?
No, I agree with that.