Perhaps I’m stating the obvious, and of course you’ve got it here already at the start of your “funding opportunity” approach, but whether you are are single cause focused or not I think cost effectiveness (impact is a bit vague for me) has to be front and center and what USAID bridging decisions ride on. I would estimate ?80 percent plus of USAID funding which has been cut is not very cost effective. (Cost effective programs like HIV meds and malaria meds have not yet been completely cut although the future is unclear)
I would even put much of the the Open Phil funded DIV grants in this bracket. We applied for a DIV grant last year and (I’m not just bitter haha and there were good other reasons for our rejection). When we were rejected by the panel there were many issues raised but not even a mention of cost effectiveness. I would bet quite a lot that half the panel that reviewed us didn’t consider it important. Looking at DIV grants given last year im pretty dubious about whether cost effectiveness has been deeply considered for half of them.
Whether the org will die if they don’t get funded, or the program won’t complete, or the study will be stopped halfway through is somewhat immaterial if it’s well below a given cost effectiveness bar.
This might sound obvious but I thought it could have come through a little more strongly maybe?
Also I could be a bit wrong here (and it’s not super important), but my impression is that the “contributing to funds” approach is more of an EA thing. Its a good approach for this audience, but most outside philanthropists and donors want to fund individual orgs rather than contribute to high impact general funds. I suppose the post is mostly for this audience though so makes sense.
Hi Nick, Thanks for engaging! I’ll engage with one bit of your comment in return :) As you can imagine, cost-effectiveness is very important to us, and I hope that doesn’t get lost in our approach. One of the issues we’ve tried to highlight is that even if your estimate of the number of cost-effective programs funded by the US is accurate, we still won’t be able to close all the funding gaps. If that’s the case, cost-effectiveness alone might not allow us to substantially narrow down on opportunities. In these situations, we believe it might be important to consider some of the things we’ve pointed out. For example, how many future opportunities will we lose to run cost-effective programs if some organizations cease to exist? (Maybe a lot!) There might also be a weaker, but plausible, case for supporting organizations implementing work below a certain cost-effectiveness threshold, when we consider some of those implications we outline.
Thanks Tom—I think this great comment was missing “One of the issues we’ve tried to highlight is that even if your estimate of the number of cost-effective programs funded by the US is accurate, we still won’t be able to close all the funding gaps. If that’s the case, cost-effectiveness alone might not allow us to substantially narrow down on opportunities.”
It might even be helpful saying something like this near the start of your article? This concept that you were only talking about the most cost-effective programs from the stat wasn’t clear to me from the initial article and now I think your framework makes a lot more sense.
I agree there’s a plausible case for bridging funding fororgs that aren’t as cost-effective, for example if 10% of the remaining funding would help them get over the line with 80% of the impact. I’m sure this can be the situation in rare cases, although I can’t think of an obvious example right now. The only risk here though is you might keep a less cost-effective org afloat when it might be better for it to die, preventing the org accessing more money from the donor pool.
Thanks for this helpful framework.
Perhaps I’m stating the obvious, and of course you’ve got it here already at the start of your “funding opportunity” approach, but whether you are are single cause focused or not I think cost effectiveness (impact is a bit vague for me) has to be front and center and what USAID bridging decisions ride on. I would estimate ?80 percent plus of USAID funding which has been cut is not very cost effective. (Cost effective programs like HIV meds and malaria meds have not yet been completely cut although the future is unclear)
I would even put much of the the Open Phil funded DIV grants in this bracket. We applied for a DIV grant last year and (I’m not just bitter haha and there were good other reasons for our rejection). When we were rejected by the panel there were many issues raised but not even a mention of cost effectiveness. I would bet quite a lot that half the panel that reviewed us didn’t consider it important. Looking at DIV grants given last year im pretty dubious about whether cost effectiveness has been deeply considered for half of them.
Whether the org will die if they don’t get funded, or the program won’t complete, or the study will be stopped halfway through is somewhat immaterial if it’s well below a given cost effectiveness bar.
This might sound obvious but I thought it could have come through a little more strongly maybe?
Also I could be a bit wrong here (and it’s not super important), but my impression is that the “contributing to funds” approach is more of an EA thing. Its a good approach for this audience, but most outside philanthropists and donors want to fund individual orgs rather than contribute to high impact general funds. I suppose the post is mostly for this audience though so makes sense.
Keep up the good work :)
Hi Nick, Thanks for engaging! I’ll engage with one bit of your comment in return :) As you can imagine, cost-effectiveness is very important to us, and I hope that doesn’t get lost in our approach. One of the issues we’ve tried to highlight is that even if your estimate of the number of cost-effective programs funded by the US is accurate, we still won’t be able to close all the funding gaps. If that’s the case, cost-effectiveness alone might not allow us to substantially narrow down on opportunities. In these situations, we believe it might be important to consider some of the things we’ve pointed out. For example, how many future opportunities will we lose to run cost-effective programs if some organizations cease to exist? (Maybe a lot!) There might also be a weaker, but plausible, case for supporting organizations implementing work below a certain cost-effectiveness threshold, when we consider some of those implications we outline.
Thanks again for reading!
Thanks Tom—I think this great comment was missing “One of the issues we’ve tried to highlight is that even if your estimate of the number of cost-effective programs funded by the US is accurate, we still won’t be able to close all the funding gaps. If that’s the case, cost-effectiveness alone might not allow us to substantially narrow down on opportunities.”
It might even be helpful saying something like this near the start of your article? This concept that you were only talking about the most cost-effective programs from the stat wasn’t clear to me from the initial article and now I think your framework makes a lot more sense.
I agree there’s a plausible case for bridging funding fororgs that aren’t as cost-effective, for example if 10% of the remaining funding would help them get over the line with 80% of the impact. I’m sure this can be the situation in rare cases, although I can’t think of an obvious example right now. The only risk here though is you might keep a less cost-effective org afloat when it might be better for it to die, preventing the org accessing more money from the donor pool.
Thanks Nick, helpful!