Have you considered sometimes producing longer write-ups that somewhat extensively detail the arguments you saw for and against giving to a particular funding opportunity? (Perhaps just for larger grants.)
This could provide an additional dose of the kind of benefits already provided by the current payout reports, as well as some of the benefits that having an additional animal welfare charity evaluator would provide. (Obviously there’s already ACE in this space, but these write-ups could focus on funding opportunities they haven’t got a write-up on, or this could simply provide an additional perspective.)
A similar idea would be to sometimes investigate a smaller funding opportunity or set of opportunities in detail as a sort of exemplar of a certain type of funding opportunity, and produce a write-up on that. Or to do things more explicitly like intervention reports or cause area reports.
Some of this probably isn’t the Animal Welfare Fund’s comparative advantage, but perhaps it’d be interesting to experiment with the first option, as that could mostly just use the reasoning and discussions you already have internally when making decisions?
Not strongly considered longer write-ups at this point. Basically, it takes a lot of work to publicly and extensively communicate our views in the form of longer-write ups. We generally don’t think that work adds much value to our primary output; it’s not a big part of how we make grant decisions, and donors rarely ask about it. So we usually prefer to focus our time on other parts of grant reporting, as well all the other work the Fund requires.
That said, if you have any questions about any of the decisions we’ve made, please feel free to contact us.
Fwiw, we are doing somewhat longer write-ups for our biggest grantees of the round. However, these are more like a page or a bit over a page rather than a paragraph, but in the scheme of things, that may not be that much longer of a write-up.
>A similar idea would be to sometimes investigate a smaller funding opportunity or set of opportunities in detail as a sort of exemplar of a certain type of funding opportunity, and produce a write-up on that.
Yeah, that feels pretty interesting to me. I won’t make any commitments but I could see us doing more of that in the future. It could be worth experimenting with that.
Have you considered sometimes producing longer write-ups that somewhat extensively detail the arguments you saw for and against giving to a particular funding opportunity? (Perhaps just for larger grants.)
This could provide an additional dose of the kind of benefits already provided by the current payout reports, as well as some of the benefits that having an additional animal welfare charity evaluator would provide. (Obviously there’s already ACE in this space, but these write-ups could focus on funding opportunities they haven’t got a write-up on, or this could simply provide an additional perspective.)
A similar idea would be to sometimes investigate a smaller funding opportunity or set of opportunities in detail as a sort of exemplar of a certain type of funding opportunity, and produce a write-up on that. Or to do things more explicitly like intervention reports or cause area reports.
Some of this probably isn’t the Animal Welfare Fund’s comparative advantage, but perhaps it’d be interesting to experiment with the first option, as that could mostly just use the reasoning and discussions you already have internally when making decisions?
Not strongly considered longer write-ups at this point. Basically, it takes a lot of work to publicly and extensively communicate our views in the form of longer-write ups. We generally don’t think that work adds much value to our primary output; it’s not a big part of how we make grant decisions, and donors rarely ask about it. So we usually prefer to focus our time on other parts of grant reporting, as well all the other work the Fund requires.
That said, if you have any questions about any of the decisions we’ve made, please feel free to contact us.
Fwiw, we are doing somewhat longer write-ups for our biggest grantees of the round. However, these are more like a page or a bit over a page rather than a paragraph, but in the scheme of things, that may not be that much longer of a write-up.
>A similar idea would be to sometimes investigate a smaller funding opportunity or set of opportunities in detail as a sort of exemplar of a certain type of funding opportunity, and produce a write-up on that.
Yeah, that feels pretty interesting to me. I won’t make any commitments but I could see us doing more of that in the future. It could be worth experimenting with that.