I understand why you can’t go public with applicant-related information, but is there a reason grantmakers shouldn’t have a private Slack channel where they can ask things like “Please PM me if any of you have any thoughts on John Smith, I’m evaluating a grant request for him now”?
Yeah we’re working on something like this! There are a few logistical and legal details, but I think we can at least make something like this work between legible-to-us grantmakers (from my lights, LTFF, EAIF, OP longtermism, Lightspeed, Manifund, and maybe a few of the European groups like Longview and Effective Giving). Obviously there are still limitations (eg we can’t systematically coordinate with academic groups, government bodies, and individual rich donors), but I think an expectation that longtermist nonprofit grantmakers talk to each other by default would be an improvement over the status quo.
(Note that weaker versions of this already happens, just not very systematically)
(Note that weaker versions of this already happens, just not very systematically)
The LTFF and one team at Open Phil have done this semi-systematically for about a year. I think that it’s still hard for data protection reasons (and general comms sensitivity reasons) to do this for the majority of applications we receive.
I think this is worth doing for large grants (eg >$50k); for smaller grants, coordination can get to be costly in terms of grantmaker time. Each additional step of the review process adds to the time until the applicant gets their response and their money.
Background checks with grantmakers are relatively easier with an application system that works in rounds (eg SFF is twice a year, Lightspeed and ACX also do open/closed rounds) -- you can batch them up, “here’s 40 potential grantees, let us know if you have red flags on any”. But if you have a continuous system like LTFF or Manifund, then every coordination request between two funders adds an interruption point/context switch. I think out of ~20 grants we’ve made on Manifund, we checked in with LTFF/Lightspeed on 2 of them, mostly not wanting to bother them too much.
Background checks also take longer the more people you’re checking with; you can ask in parallel but you’ll be bottlenecked by the time of the slowest respondent. Reliability can get especially hard (what if a grantmaker is sick/on vacation)? You can also try setting a fixed timeline “we’re going to approve this in 48h”, I guess, and try to find a tradeoff between “enough time for checks to come back” and “not delaying process overmuch”
Thanks for writing this.
I understand why you can’t go public with applicant-related information, but is there a reason grantmakers shouldn’t have a private Slack channel where they can ask things like “Please PM me if any of you have any thoughts on John Smith, I’m evaluating a grant request for him now”?
Yeah we’re working on something like this! There are a few logistical and legal details, but I think we can at least make something like this work between legible-to-us grantmakers (from my lights, LTFF, EAIF, OP longtermism, Lightspeed, Manifund, and maybe a few of the European groups like Longview and Effective Giving). Obviously there are still limitations (eg we can’t systematically coordinate with academic groups, government bodies, and individual rich donors), but I think an expectation that longtermist nonprofit grantmakers talk to each other by default would be an improvement over the status quo.
(Note that weaker versions of this already happens, just not very systematically)
The LTFF and one team at Open Phil have done this semi-systematically for about a year. I think that it’s still hard for data protection reasons (and general comms sensitivity reasons) to do this for the majority of applications we receive.
I think this is worth doing for large grants (eg >$50k); for smaller grants, coordination can get to be costly in terms of grantmaker time. Each additional step of the review process adds to the time until the applicant gets their response and their money.
Background checks with grantmakers are relatively easier with an application system that works in rounds (eg SFF is twice a year, Lightspeed and ACX also do open/closed rounds) -- you can batch them up, “here’s 40 potential grantees, let us know if you have red flags on any”. But if you have a continuous system like LTFF or Manifund, then every coordination request between two funders adds an interruption point/context switch. I think out of ~20 grants we’ve made on Manifund, we checked in with LTFF/Lightspeed on 2 of them, mostly not wanting to bother them too much.
Background checks also take longer the more people you’re checking with; you can ask in parallel but you’ll be bottlenecked by the time of the slowest respondent. Reliability can get especially hard (what if a grantmaker is sick/on vacation)? You can also try setting a fixed timeline “we’re going to approve this in 48h”, I guess, and try to find a tradeoff between “enough time for checks to come back” and “not delaying process overmuch”