Fund weird things: A decent litmus test is “would it be really embarrassing for my parents, friends or employer to find out about this?” and if the answer is yes, more strongly consider making the grant.
Things don’t even have to be that weird to be things that let you have outsized impact with small funding.
A couple examples come to mind of things I’ve either helped fund or encouraged others to fund that for one reason or another got passed over for grants. Typically the reason wasn’t that the idea was in principle bad, but that there were trust issues with the principals: maybe the granters had a bad interaction with the principals, maybe they just didn’t know them that well or know anyone who did, or maybe they just didn’t pass a smell test for one reason or another. But, if I know and trust the principals and think the idea is good, then I can fund it when no one else would.
Basically this is a way of exploiting information asymmetries to make donations. It doesn’t scale indefinitely, but if you’re a small time funder with plenty of social connections in the community there’s probably work you could fund that would get passed over for being weird in the sense I describe above.
Things don’t even have to be that weird to be things that let you have outsized impact with small funding.
A couple examples come to mind of things I’ve either helped fund or encouraged others to fund that for one reason or another got passed over for grants. Typically the reason wasn’t that the idea was in principle bad, but that there were trust issues with the principals: maybe the granters had a bad interaction with the principals, maybe they just didn’t know them that well or know anyone who did, or maybe they just didn’t pass a smell test for one reason or another. But, if I know and trust the principals and think the idea is good, then I can fund it when no one else would.
Basically this is a way of exploiting information asymmetries to make donations. It doesn’t scale indefinitely, but if you’re a small time funder with plenty of social connections in the community there’s probably work you could fund that would get passed over for being weird in the sense I describe above.