Could you define what counts as sufficiently “current” in your view?
I am a bit concerned that there are already practices that significantly favor larger organizations, such as GiveWell only considering orgs with tons of room for more funding for its top charity status. It’s not cost-effective for evaluators to devote considerable resources to updating evaluations on midsize organizations very often. And there are downsides to putting all the eggs in a few baskets, which I fear a demanding currentness requirement would promote.
I think I would ask the recommending evaluator to affirm every X years that there are no known significant/material changes from the public evaluation, and have an absolute sunset after Y years—but X and Y would differ to some extent on current organization size. Otherwise, I would model a decay function based on the date of the last public evaluation—the assumed cost-effectiveness reduces over time as the amount of potential information not in the public analysis grows, and removal is triggered when the adjusted effectiveness no longer meets GWWC’s bar.
In general, I think it makes more sense for smaller organizations to be supported via funds, where grantmakers can engage directly with organization leadership.
On staleness, I would go the other way: a review of a small, agile, or quickly growing organization goes stale a lot faster than a larger and more stable one.
I like your first idea in theory, but I think you have to have enough varied funds in place first. Of the four recommended funds in Global Health & Development, all are GiveWell at their core and even GiveWell All Grants is an estimated 75 percent to GiveWell top charities per https://www.givewell.org/research/all-grants. So everyone who doesn’t score well on GiveWell’s system is going to get shut entirely out under that approach. This is absolutely not a criticism of GiveWell, which does what it is intended to do very well.
On your second point, I also agree in theory—I think SM’s growth in room for funding is one reason I qualitatively find the public report a bit stale. But how quickly to age these out loops, in part, back to whether the funds are diverse enough and willing enough to fund a range of small/midsized organizations.
Could you define what counts as sufficiently “current” in your view?
I am a bit concerned that there are already practices that significantly favor larger organizations, such as GiveWell only considering orgs with tons of room for more funding for its top charity status. It’s not cost-effective for evaluators to devote considerable resources to updating evaluations on midsize organizations very often. And there are downsides to putting all the eggs in a few baskets, which I fear a demanding currentness requirement would promote.
I think I would ask the recommending evaluator to affirm every X years that there are no known significant/material changes from the public evaluation, and have an absolute sunset after Y years—but X and Y would differ to some extent on current organization size. Otherwise, I would model a decay function based on the date of the last public evaluation—the assumed cost-effectiveness reduces over time as the amount of potential information not in the public analysis grows, and removal is triggered when the adjusted effectiveness no longer meets GWWC’s bar.
In general, I think it makes more sense for smaller organizations to be supported via funds, where grantmakers can engage directly with organization leadership.
On staleness, I would go the other way: a review of a small, agile, or quickly growing organization goes stale a lot faster than a larger and more stable one.
I like your first idea in theory, but I think you have to have enough varied funds in place first. Of the four recommended funds in Global Health & Development, all are GiveWell at their core and even GiveWell All Grants is an estimated 75 percent to GiveWell top charities per https://www.givewell.org/research/all-grants. So everyone who doesn’t score well on GiveWell’s system is going to get shut entirely out under that approach. This is absolutely not a criticism of GiveWell, which does what it is intended to do very well.
On your second point, I also agree in theory—I think SM’s growth in room for funding is one reason I qualitatively find the public report a bit stale. But how quickly to age these out loops, in part, back to whether the funds are diverse enough and willing enough to fund a range of small/midsized organizations.