Yes, I think we’re definitely limited by our application pool, and it’s something I’d like to change.
I’m pretty excited about the possibility of getting more applications. We’ve started advertising the fund more, and in the latest round we got the highest number of applications we rated as good (score >= 2.0, where 2.5 is the funding threshold). This is about 20-50% more than the long-term trend, though it’s a bit hard to interpret (our scores are not directly comparable across time). Unfortunately the percentage of good applications also dropped this round, so we do need to avoid too indiscriminate outreach to avoid too high a review burden.
I’m most excited about more active grant-making. For example, we could post proposals we’d like to see people work on, or reach out to people in particular areas to encourage them to apply for funding. Currently we’re bottlenecked on fund manager time, but we’re working on scaling that.
I’d be hesitant about funding individuals or organisations that haven’t applied—our application process is lightweight, so if someone chooses not to apply even after we prompt them, that seems like a bad sign. A possible exception would be larger organisations that already make the information we need available for assessment. Right now I’m not excited about funding more large organisations, since I think the marginal impact there is lower, but if the LTFF had a lot more money to distribute then I’d want to scale up our organisation grants.
Yes, I think we’re definitely limited by our application pool, and it’s something I’d like to change.
I’m pretty excited about the possibility of getting more applications. We’ve started advertising the fund more, and in the latest round we got the highest number of applications we rated as good (score >= 2.0, where 2.5 is the funding threshold). This is about 20-50% more than the long-term trend, though it’s a bit hard to interpret (our scores are not directly comparable across time). Unfortunately the percentage of good applications also dropped this round, so we do need to avoid too indiscriminate outreach to avoid too high a review burden.
I’m most excited about more active grant-making. For example, we could post proposals we’d like to see people work on, or reach out to people in particular areas to encourage them to apply for funding. Currently we’re bottlenecked on fund manager time, but we’re working on scaling that.
I’d be hesitant about funding individuals or organisations that haven’t applied—our application process is lightweight, so if someone chooses not to apply even after we prompt them, that seems like a bad sign. A possible exception would be larger organisations that already make the information we need available for assessment. Right now I’m not excited about funding more large organisations, since I think the marginal impact there is lower, but if the LTFF had a lot more money to distribute then I’d want to scale up our organisation grants.
Thanks for this reply. Active grant-making sounds like an interesting idea!