Thank you, Rick, for your kind words and thoughtful question! Let me break down when it might make sense to donate directly to individual charities versus contributing to the Animal Welfare Fund.
There are a few specific instances where donating directly to individual charities could be the better choice:
When you have strong specific views about effectiveness or moral weights that differ significantly from our approach. For example:
If you believe certain species should be prioritized based on moral weight calculations that differ substantially from current research.
If you want to focus exclusively on particular intervention types (like corporate outreach) or specific animal groups (like hen welfare).
If you are a large donor who feels strongly about donating to a specific organization and actively wants the experience of donor stewardship by that specific organization, such as regular impact updates or contributing your time and skills as a volunteer or a board member.
When you have unique opportunities to make high-impact donations in areas where AWF faces operational constraints. Fortunately, we donāt have many restrictions in our grantmaking and can fund a wide range of opportunities, but sometimes a grant is too complicated legally and operationally. For example, we can make grants to China, and we can make grants to for-profits, but for-profit in China is a stretch. If you can make grants in such a context, you can reach out to us, and we will be happy to refer you to a particular opportunity. You may also find yourself in a situation where you have the ability to support a talented person you know who would find it hard to put together an application (we try to make it a low-burden process, but can imagine there are still obstacles in terms of language, internet access, etc.).
However, for most individual donors, contributing to the Animal Welfare Fund offers several key advantages and is a better option:
Access to opportunities: Through our open application process, we discover and evaluate promising projects that individual donors typically wouldnāt encounter, including early-stage initiatives that arenāt yet widely known or opportunities that have to stay private for strategic reasons.
Evaluation capacity: Our fund managers bring extensive experience evaluating animal welfare projects and maintain a broad knowledge base across different areas. We also can put in a lot of time to evaluate a given opportunity, in many cases much, much more than an individual donor could.
Information advantage: We often have access to confidential information about organizations and the wider funding landscape that helps inform our grant decisions.
Complex active grantmaking: We can often create new grantmaking opportunities that require a lot of time, knowledge, network, and trust to shape up. Those are also often one of the highest-impact opportunities and are highly counterfactual since they wouldnāt exist if not for those efforts. This would be very hard for individual donors to arrange.
Operational efficiency: We make the donating and grantmaking process efficient, straightforward, yet robust. For example, you can donate to AWF tax-efficiently, and we can grant to many organizations where you wouldnāt be able to donate tax-efficiently directly yourself, or we conduct thorough due diligence on our grantees and set up a strong grant agreement.
Ability to have candid conversations, track progress, and conduct MEL: We have a capacity and systems in place that allow us to track granteesā progress and have candid conversations with organizations about their success, but also struggles and learnings that they may feel more hesitant to discuss in public, based on that we can also conduct monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) from the grants we make.
Comparing the value of funding to different projects: We evaluate not only the promise or impact of a project but also the value of marginal funding. Itās worth noting that many charities individual EA donors support directly are also AWF grantees, and we can decide to fund them at a larger amount (while ensuring they still have funding diversity and are not too reliant on AWF). With our broader view of the landscape, we can better assess whether additional funding to that charity would be more effective than funding the next marginal opportunity. This kind of comparative assessment is typically challenging for individual donors to make given limited information access.
That said, we respect that donors may have specific priorities or insights that make direct donations more appropriate in their situation. We aim to be transparent about our approach so donors can make informed decisions about what best aligns with their goals. We also care about organizations not being too reliant on AWF as their only source of funding, I think organizations that are unlikely to receive other funding (e.g., from Open Philanthropy or Farmed Animal Funders) are especially good donation opportunities for individual donors. In this case, there are still advantages that AWF has (eval ability, access to info, etc.), so if you are a large donor considering donation, you can reach out to us.
Thank you, Rick, for your kind words and thoughtful question! Let me break down when it might make sense to donate directly to individual charities versus contributing to the Animal Welfare Fund.
There are a few specific instances where donating directly to individual charities could be the better choice:
When you have strong specific views about effectiveness or moral weights that differ significantly from our approach. For example:
If you believe certain species should be prioritized based on moral weight calculations that differ substantially from current research.
If you want to focus exclusively on particular intervention types (like corporate outreach) or specific animal groups (like hen welfare).
If you are a large donor who feels strongly about donating to a specific organization and actively wants the experience of donor stewardship by that specific organization, such as regular impact updates or contributing your time and skills as a volunteer or a board member.
When you have unique opportunities to make high-impact donations in areas where AWF faces operational constraints. Fortunately, we donāt have many restrictions in our grantmaking and can fund a wide range of opportunities, but sometimes a grant is too complicated legally and operationally. For example, we can make grants to China, and we can make grants to for-profits, but for-profit in China is a stretch. If you can make grants in such a context, you can reach out to us, and we will be happy to refer you to a particular opportunity. You may also find yourself in a situation where you have the ability to support a talented person you know who would find it hard to put together an application (we try to make it a low-burden process, but can imagine there are still obstacles in terms of language, internet access, etc.).
However, for most individual donors, contributing to the Animal Welfare Fund offers several key advantages and is a better option:
Access to opportunities: Through our open application process, we discover and evaluate promising projects that individual donors typically wouldnāt encounter, including early-stage initiatives that arenāt yet widely known or opportunities that have to stay private for strategic reasons.
Evaluation capacity: Our fund managers bring extensive experience evaluating animal welfare projects and maintain a broad knowledge base across different areas. We also can put in a lot of time to evaluate a given opportunity, in many cases much, much more than an individual donor could.
Information advantage: We often have access to confidential information about organizations and the wider funding landscape that helps inform our grant decisions.
Complex active grantmaking: We can often create new grantmaking opportunities that require a lot of time, knowledge, network, and trust to shape up. Those are also often one of the highest-impact opportunities and are highly counterfactual since they wouldnāt exist if not for those efforts. This would be very hard for individual donors to arrange.
Operational efficiency: We make the donating and grantmaking process efficient, straightforward, yet robust. For example, you can donate to AWF tax-efficiently, and we can grant to many organizations where you wouldnāt be able to donate tax-efficiently directly yourself, or we conduct thorough due diligence on our grantees and set up a strong grant agreement.
Ability to have candid conversations, track progress, and conduct MEL: We have a capacity and systems in place that allow us to track granteesā progress and have candid conversations with organizations about their success, but also struggles and learnings that they may feel more hesitant to discuss in public, based on that we can also conduct monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) from the grants we make.
Comparing the value of funding to different projects: We evaluate not only the promise or impact of a project but also the value of marginal funding. Itās worth noting that many charities individual EA donors support directly are also AWF grantees, and we can decide to fund them at a larger amount (while ensuring they still have funding diversity and are not too reliant on AWF). With our broader view of the landscape, we can better assess whether additional funding to that charity would be more effective than funding the next marginal opportunity. This kind of comparative assessment is typically challenging for individual donors to make given limited information access.
That said, we respect that donors may have specific priorities or insights that make direct donations more appropriate in their situation. We aim to be transparent about our approach so donors can make informed decisions about what best aligns with their goals. We also care about organizations not being too reliant on AWF as their only source of funding, I think organizations that are unlikely to receive other funding (e.g., from Open Philanthropy or Farmed Animal Funders) are especially good donation opportunities for individual donors. In this case, there are still advantages that AWF has (eval ability, access to info, etc.), so if you are a large donor considering donation, you can reach out to us.