What I’d like to see during Funding Strategy Week

[Will Howard🔹]

The first mini-event we have planned for Giving Season is Funding Strategy Week (Nov 4th – Nov 10th). Personally, I’m very excited about this. As a category of EA thought I think it has as much depth and potential for discovering cruxy disagreements as, say, the recent Animal Welfare vs Global Health debate.

However, it’s one of the less well defined themes, so you might not be immediately inspired to write a post. In this post, I want to lay out what we were thinking of when we came up with the idea, and give some examples of posts that would fit under the theme.

We were originally calling this week “Funding Diversification Week”. The narrowest interpretation of that term is something like “funding is very concentrated in OpenPhil, and we think this is bad, what can we do to change this?”. Posts that would fit under this theme would be things like:

1. What your org has done to fundraise from non-OP sources

2. A story of an organisation’s mission being subverted as a result of pressure from funders

3. How concentrated funding increases the risk of organisations collapsing (relevant)

We’d love to see posts like these. But we were also thinking of a much broader range of questions related to funding. Upon reflection, “Funding Diversification Week” was a bit of a misnomer. We’ve renamed the week “Funding Strategy Week”.

There are inputs and outputs in EA^[1]. The outputs are all of the organisations, what the people in them do all day, and the research and interventions they produce. This is obviously a rich set of topics, where there can be a lot of discussion about even a tiny portion of it (e.g. there are 2162 posts on Cause Prioritisation).

The input side is just as important, and consists of questions about where funding comes from, how much there is, restrictions on its use, and similar questions for other inputs like talent, time, and social capital. A lot of this can fall under the banner of “funding strategy”. This grandiose vision of funding strategy being near-equal in depth to the whole “output” side of EA is what I want you to keep in mind when thinking about what you could write.

The next section gives some sorts of posts that would fit under this theme.

Posts which would fit under the theme:

1. Strategy for small donors

   1. Whether to split your donations vs giving to one thing^[2]

   2. Giving now vs investing to give later

   3. Giving to tried and tested (and OP funded?) orgs vs unknown/​underrated/​reputationally risky opportunities^[3]

2. Earning to give

   1. Stories from E2G-ers, about their strategy, personal experience, challenges and so on

   2. Data visualisation on how much EAs (including E2G-ers) donate. I believe the latest on this is EA Survey 2020 Series: Donation Data, maybe more recent data doesn’t exist, but I’d be interested in someone trying

   3. High-upside vs predictable career choices

3. Solutions to funding problems without getting more funding

   1. How to be frugal (as a person or org). Or “a good steward of funding”, e.g. keeping your funding in a money market account

   2. Promoting things to mainstream appeal, à la PEPFAR or LEAF

   3. When should we value volunteering/​pro-bono work over direct funding?

4. Non-standard funding mechanisms

   1. Introducing new funding mechanisms (like this)

   2. Donor lotteries

   3. Impact certificates and prizes

   4. Donation matching

5. Large donors

   1. Input from wealthy and EA-adjacent people (e.g. Vitalik Buterin) who don’t donate to the standard “big EA” charities, on their reasoning behind their personal giving

   2. Posts from people who work with High Net Worth Individuals (e.g. Founder’s Pledge), on whatever insights they have as a result of this

6. Fact posts (underrated)- posts which contribute to our collective understanding of the funding ecosystem

   1. Anything like this spreadsheet that @Hamish McDoodles kindly created

   2. Changes in the proportion + demographics of people doing Earning to Give over time

   3. How big is the pool of near-EA funding (e.g. The Navigation Fund)

For many of these, we have specific people in mind who we would love to hear from, and we’ll be reaching out to you if you are one of them. If you know someone who has interesting thoughts on topics like these, you can claim some sweet counterfactual impact by reaching out to them too.

1. ^

   I stand behind something like this dichotomy, although if you think too closely about what counts as an “input” or “output” it falls apart. So please try to interpret it as a vibe level thing for the purposes of this post

2. ^

   There is at least one previous post about this, I feel the state of the art could be improved upon

3. ^

   I am personally planning a post on the value of small donor dollars relative to OP dollars for earlier stage opportunities

[Jason]

What I’d like to see (but don’t have the insights to fully write):

According to an apparently common argument, having more medium-size donors (e.g., from earning-to-give) would create a significant decentralization of funding power in EA (e.g., the post from Abraham linked in the original post). However, I can easily envision worlds in which the new mid-size donors largely end up funging off Open Phil (and a few other megadonors), and there isn’t any meaningful decentralization at all. Therefore:

• Under what circumstances would introduction of a significant number of medium-size donors be likely to cause a significant decentralization?

  • Working theory: It would be particularly challenging for mid-size donors to meaningfully influence the split between major cause areas, but it would be easier to influence which smaller orgs get funded, which sub-cause areas /​ early-stage cause area candidates get funded, etc.

• What steps, if any, should major funders take to avoid controlling more than their “fair share” of the funding allocation?

  • I do not have a firm definition of “fair share,” which would be an interesting discussion in itself.

  • As a tentative starting point: I think it is generally undesirable for a major funder to have greater percentage control of the funding landscape than the percentage of funding they bring to the table. One could argue for a lower threshold as well.

[Elliot Billingsley]

I’m sorry, but after reading the article I’m still unsure what the final decision is.

“ Upon reflection, “Funding Diversification Week” is a bit of a misnomer. From now on we’ll call it “Funding Strategy Week”.”

But the title of this post is still Funding Diversification Week. So what will it be called?

[Toby Tremlett🔹]

Thanks Elliot! Good question- it is now Funding Strategy Week.
I think the problem is that its very easy to assume people have the context that you do- so we would have assumed that people expected to see a post about Funding Diversification instead of Funding Strategy. But realistically most readers probably hadn’t memorised the name of our mini-event. I’ll post a quick take when I’ve got a minute, to make this clearer.