Yeah, I am also pretty worried about this. I don’t think we’ve figured out a great solution to this yet.
I think we don’t really have sufficient capacity to evaluate organizations on an ongoing basis and provide good accountability. Like, if a new organization were to be funded by us and then grow to a budget of $1M a year, I don’t feel like we have the capacity to evaluate their output and impact sufficiently well to justify giving them $1M each year (or even just $500k).
Our current evaluation process routes feels pretty good for smaller projects, and granting to established organizations that have other active evaluators looking into them that we can talk to, but doesn’t feel very well-suited to larger organizations that don’t have existing evaluations done on them (there is a lot of due diligence work to be done on that I think requires higher staff capacity than we have).
I also think the general process of the LTFF specializing into more something like venture funding, with other funders stepping in for more established organizations feels pretty good to me. I do think the current process has a lot of unnecessary uncertainty and risk in it, and I would like to work on that. So one thing I’ve been trying to get better at is predicting which projects could get long-term funding from other funders, and to try to help projects get to a place where they can receive long-term funding from more than just the LTFF.
Capital wise, I also think that we don’t really have the funding to support organizations over longer periods of time. I.e. supporting 3 organizations at $500k a year would take up almost all of our budget, and I think it’s not worth trading that off against the other smaller grants we’ve historically been making. But it is one of the most promising ways I would want to use additional funds we could get.
I agree with @Habryka that our current process is relatively lightweight which is good for small grants but doesn’t provide adequate accountability for large grants. I think I’m more optimistic about the LTFF being able to grow into this role. There’s a reasonable number of people who we might be excited about working as fund managers—the main thing that’s held us back from growing the team is the cost of coordination overhead as you add more individuals. But we could potentially split the fund into two sub-teams that specialize in smaller and larger grants (with different evaluation process), or even create a separate fund in EA Funds that focuses on more established organisations. Nothing certain yet, but it’s a problem we’re interested in addressing.
Ah yeah, I also think that if the opportunity presents itself we could grow into this role a good amount. Though I think on the margin I think it’s more likely we are going to invest even more into more early-stage expertise and maybe do more active early-stage grantmaking.
Yeah, I am also pretty worried about this. I don’t think we’ve figured out a great solution to this yet.
I think we don’t really have sufficient capacity to evaluate organizations on an ongoing basis and provide good accountability. Like, if a new organization were to be funded by us and then grow to a budget of $1M a year, I don’t feel like we have the capacity to evaluate their output and impact sufficiently well to justify giving them $1M each year (or even just $500k).
Our current evaluation process routes feels pretty good for smaller projects, and granting to established organizations that have other active evaluators looking into them that we can talk to, but doesn’t feel very well-suited to larger organizations that don’t have existing evaluations done on them (there is a lot of due diligence work to be done on that I think requires higher staff capacity than we have).
I also think the general process of the LTFF specializing into more something like venture funding, with other funders stepping in for more established organizations feels pretty good to me. I do think the current process has a lot of unnecessary uncertainty and risk in it, and I would like to work on that. So one thing I’ve been trying to get better at is predicting which projects could get long-term funding from other funders, and to try to help projects get to a place where they can receive long-term funding from more than just the LTFF.
Capital wise, I also think that we don’t really have the funding to support organizations over longer periods of time. I.e. supporting 3 organizations at $500k a year would take up almost all of our budget, and I think it’s not worth trading that off against the other smaller grants we’ve historically been making. But it is one of the most promising ways I would want to use additional funds we could get.
I agree with @Habryka that our current process is relatively lightweight which is good for small grants but doesn’t provide adequate accountability for large grants. I think I’m more optimistic about the LTFF being able to grow into this role. There’s a reasonable number of people who we might be excited about working as fund managers—the main thing that’s held us back from growing the team is the cost of coordination overhead as you add more individuals. But we could potentially split the fund into two sub-teams that specialize in smaller and larger grants (with different evaluation process), or even create a separate fund in EA Funds that focuses on more established organisations. Nothing certain yet, but it’s a problem we’re interested in addressing.
Ah yeah, I also think that if the opportunity presents itself we could grow into this role a good amount. Though I think on the margin I think it’s more likely we are going to invest even more into more early-stage expertise and maybe do more active early-stage grantmaking.