That strategy is contingent on the foundation’s donor being open to spending money on the types of programs GiveWell (or another elite evaluator) recommends. Many are not. If they are not, then the expected value of that approach is zero. Rather, we need to meet those donors closer to where they are and help them more effectively achieve their own goals (with some nudges toward highly effective organizations, to be sure). They have lots of other people who are happy to give them free advice on how to spend their millions, and “you should jettison all your goals/thoughts and adopt ours 100% instead” is unlikely to help win market share in the market of already-funded foundations.
For those donors, say that these foundations will be handing out $60MM per year as per the report, and that the training increased the mean cost-effectiveness of their donations from 0.1 GiveWells to 0.2 GiveWells (i.e., it only brought them 11% of the distance from where they were to full GiveWell). I think there’s a decent chance that the mentored foundations will devote at least a few percent to GiveWell-level charities on average, and that the rest of their portfolio will move in a somewhat more cost-effective direction. That produces an amount of good equivalent to $6MM in new funds that would have blown on something totally useless going to GiveWell instead. And that’s in a single year. So even if you think the effect size is much more modest, 0.1 GiveWells to 0.12 GiveWells would still be $1.2MM GiveWell-equivalents every year.
Compared to the marginal cost of re-running this program, that seems like a great investment.
That strategy is contingent on the foundation’s donor being open to spending money on the types of programs GiveWell (or another elite evaluator) recommends. Many are not. If they are not, then the expected value of that approach is zero. Rather, we need to meet those donors closer to where they are and help them more effectively achieve their own goals (with some nudges toward highly effective organizations, to be sure). They have lots of other people who are happy to give them free advice on how to spend their millions, and “you should jettison all your goals/thoughts and adopt ours 100% instead” is unlikely to help win market share in the market of already-funded foundations.
For those donors, say that these foundations will be handing out $60MM per year as per the report, and that the training increased the mean cost-effectiveness of their donations from 0.1 GiveWells to 0.2 GiveWells (i.e., it only brought them 11% of the distance from where they were to full GiveWell). I think there’s a decent chance that the mentored foundations will devote at least a few percent to GiveWell-level charities on average, and that the rest of their portfolio will move in a somewhat more cost-effective direction. That produces an amount of good equivalent to $6MM in new funds that would have blown on something totally useless going to GiveWell instead. And that’s in a single year. So even if you think the effect size is much more modest, 0.1 GiveWells to 0.12 GiveWells would still be $1.2MM GiveWell-equivalents every year.
Compared to the marginal cost of re-running this program, that seems like a great investment.