What does EA AWF think about publishing annual impact reports reporting the outcomes of its previous grants? I understand how this might be much more difficult than publishing an impact report for a single organisation. But as it stands, donating to EA AWF requires a lot of trust in fund managers and EA movement as there is little data available on the impact of previous grants. I care a lot about the growth of this fund and I’d have much easier time recommending this fund to potential donors if they could learn more about its past impact.
Thank you for raising this question, Emre! We value transparency and recognize how outcome data helps potential donors make informed decisions. We would like to move more toward that direction, but there are some limitations to that. First, we could only present the result in aggregation potentially with individual data for successful grants/work. Publishing individual grant outcomes, particularly unsuccessful ones, could discourage grantee candor and lead others to draw overly broad conclusions about interventions or grantee capabilities. That’s why we lean toward aggregate reporting—for example, sharing overall success rates or highlighting particularly impactful grants that make up the bulk of the impact. The second limitation is our capacity. Even after I joined the fund in greater capacity, we still only have 1.3 FTE, most of which goes toward grant sourcing, evaluation, decisions, and internal impact tracking. While we’re planning to expand our team soon, we need to carefully balance any new initiatives with other strategic priorities. Therefore, even though we would be excited to increase the amount of public grant outcome reporting, we’re still assessing the extent to which we can implement it while balancing other goals. We hope that the steps we are taking right now, like regularly publishing payout reports, and annual reports like the one above, will already help supporters assess our work until we could do more on that front.
What does EA AWF think about publishing annual impact reports reporting the outcomes of its previous grants? I understand how this might be much more difficult than publishing an impact report for a single organisation. But as it stands, donating to EA AWF requires a lot of trust in fund managers and EA movement as there is little data available on the impact of previous grants. I care a lot about the growth of this fund and I’d have much easier time recommending this fund to potential donors if they could learn more about its past impact.
Thank you for raising this question, Emre! We value transparency and recognize how outcome data helps potential donors make informed decisions. We would like to move more toward that direction, but there are some limitations to that.
First, we could only present the result in aggregation potentially with individual data for successful grants/work. Publishing individual grant outcomes, particularly unsuccessful ones, could discourage grantee candor and lead others to draw overly broad conclusions about interventions or grantee capabilities. That’s why we lean toward aggregate reporting—for example, sharing overall success rates or highlighting particularly impactful grants that make up the bulk of the impact.
The second limitation is our capacity. Even after I joined the fund in greater capacity, we still only have 1.3 FTE, most of which goes toward grant sourcing, evaluation, decisions, and internal impact tracking. While we’re planning to expand our team soon, we need to carefully balance any new initiatives with other strategic priorities. Therefore, even though we would be excited to increase the amount of public grant outcome reporting, we’re still assessing the extent to which we can implement it while balancing other goals.
We hope that the steps we are taking right now, like regularly publishing payout reports, and annual reports like the one above, will already help supporters assess our work until we could do more on that front.
Totally agree with this, maybe it’s included in the additional transparency mentioned.