Since it seems like a major goal is of the Future Fund is to experiment and gain information on types of philanthropy —how much data collection and causal inference are you doing/plan to do on the grant evaluations?
Here are some ideas I quickly came up with that might be interesting.
If you decided whether to fund marginal projects by votes or some scoring system—you could later assess what you think is the impact of funding projects by using a regression-discontinuity-design.
You mentioned that there is some randomness in who you used as re-granters. This has some similarities to the random assignment of judges that is frequently used in applied econ. You could use this to infer if certain features of grantmakers cause better grants (e.g. some grant-makers might tend to believe in providing higher amounts of funding, so you could assess if this more gung-ho attitude leads to better grants, etc.)
Explicitly introduce some randomness on if you approve a grant or not.
In all these cases, you’d need to ex-post assess grant applications a few years later, including the ones you didn’t fund on impact. Then these above strategies would let you assess the causal impact of your grants.
Since it seems like a major goal is of the Future Fund is to experiment and gain information on types of philanthropy —how much data collection and causal inference are you doing/plan to do on the grant evaluations?
Here are some ideas I quickly came up with that might be interesting.
If you decided whether to fund marginal projects by votes or some scoring system—you could later assess what you think is the impact of funding projects by using a regression-discontinuity-design.
You mentioned that there is some randomness in who you used as re-granters. This has some similarities to the random assignment of judges that is frequently used in applied econ. You could use this to infer if certain features of grantmakers cause better grants (e.g. some grant-makers might tend to believe in providing higher amounts of funding, so you could assess if this more gung-ho attitude leads to better grants, etc.)
Explicitly introduce some randomness on if you approve a grant or not.
In all these cases, you’d need to ex-post assess grant applications a few years later, including the ones you didn’t fund on impact. Then these above strategies would let you assess the causal impact of your grants.