we were instructed to pause all our giving season campaigns around the time of the crisis
This line surprised me, as my impression was that GWWC is essentially autonomous. Who gave this instruction? The EV board? I think the decision was reasonable, I’m just trying to understand how it was made.
This is very surprising to me (though I don’t doubt you it happened). My impression from reading other things put out by EV has been that the individual orgs were meant to be very independent. For example here Rebecca explicitly lists you as being responsible for “strategic” issues with GWWC; if this does not count as a strategic decision I struggle to see what would.
The GWWC team are responsible for our strategy. This was a legal response decision (while it obviously affected our strategy and day-to-day operations).
The page you linked to lists pledges as the very first item under strategy. Pledges seem like a pretty core activity to GWWC, and the decision not to hold a pledge campaign a clear example of a strategic decision.
Legal decisions are not a separate magisteria from strategic decisions. Lawyers provide input into strategic decision making, by informing decision makers about the tradeoffs and legal risks of different options. At times they might give very strong advice. But lawyers do not give advice about non-legal consequences of actions, and nor will they give precise probabilities; they are not equipped to weigh legal considerations against other factors, and so ultimately the decisions fall to management, not the lawyers. The decision to not hold a pledge drive involves a tradeoff of (apparently) some legal risk to EV against the good that those pledges could have done for the poorest people in the world; EV’s lawyers are not qualified to make that decision. This was a strategic management decision that EV’s board took for you.
Perhaps part of my confusion here is coming from being unable to understand what legal reasons would lead to the banning of pledge drive or donation campaign. I don’t see what supposed legal risk EV would be incurring by encouraging people to donate to AMF, or to promise to do so in the future. Maybe you’re afraid that EV might be bankrupt, so you don’t want to solicit donations to the non-bankruptcy-remote EA Funds, but that shouldn’t entail an end to all GWWC campaigns.
Per my original comment, I agree that the EV decision (driven by legal considerations) obviously impacted GWWC strategy and day-to-day operations.
“Management” ultimately flows up to the board (and then EV recruited an Exec team to handle entity-wide decisions and processes for EV UK and EV US).
In a fiscal sponsorship scenario the fiscal sponsees actions can affect one another so it isn’t simply the case that an individual project can/should only think of their own risk appetite. During a crisis period I can understand the fiscal sponsor management not having the capacity to review all communications/decisions and therefore temporarily having blanket rules that sometimes may turn out to not have been necessary or nuanced enough after the fact.
In the comment you linked to Rebecca said that the Interim CEOs are responsible for “charity-wide issues, including legal response, coordination, and org structures, etc (that is, things that span multiple projects: 80k, CEA, GWWC, etc)” and prior to them being hired that fell to the board. This decision was part of the legal response/coordination and not a decision for project leads to make.
Note that I said we paused the giving season campaigns around the time of the crisis, we didn’t decide not to have a pledge campaign entirely (though the pause and the crisis itself did negatively impact pledges significantly).
To clarify: are you just saying that the campaigns were paused but then eventually resumed (which was my understanding), or that the giving season campaigns (which were paused) are distinct from some other kind of pledge campaign, which were not paused?
While I agree in terms of the ethos, I also understand the difficulty and a reasonable amount of the complexity of the situation and why this would have been difficult (and possibly bad, all things considered) to do at the time. I do not envy the position of those involved in this level of decision making/crisis response, and recognise the need to do a lot of satisficing at the time.
This line surprised me, as my impression was that GWWC is essentially autonomous. Who gave this instruction? The EV board? I think the decision was reasonable, I’m just trying to understand how it was made.
It was a board level decision.
While that is largely true for day to day operations, EV UK and EV US are still essentially responsible for the actions of their projects.
This is very surprising to me (though I don’t doubt you it happened). My impression from reading other things put out by EV has been that the individual orgs were meant to be very independent. For example here Rebecca explicitly lists you as being responsible for “strategic” issues with GWWC; if this does not count as a strategic decision I struggle to see what would.
The GWWC team are responsible for our strategy. This was a legal response decision (while it obviously affected our strategy and day-to-day operations).
The page you linked to lists pledges as the very first item under strategy. Pledges seem like a pretty core activity to GWWC, and the decision not to hold a pledge campaign a clear example of a strategic decision.
Legal decisions are not a separate magisteria from strategic decisions. Lawyers provide input into strategic decision making, by informing decision makers about the tradeoffs and legal risks of different options. At times they might give very strong advice. But lawyers do not give advice about non-legal consequences of actions, and nor will they give precise probabilities; they are not equipped to weigh legal considerations against other factors, and so ultimately the decisions fall to management, not the lawyers. The decision to not hold a pledge drive involves a tradeoff of (apparently) some legal risk to EV against the good that those pledges could have done for the poorest people in the world; EV’s lawyers are not qualified to make that decision. This was a strategic management decision that EV’s board took for you.
Perhaps part of my confusion here is coming from being unable to understand what legal reasons would lead to the banning of pledge drive or donation campaign. I don’t see what supposed legal risk EV would be incurring by encouraging people to donate to AMF, or to promise to do so in the future. Maybe you’re afraid that EV might be bankrupt, so you don’t want to solicit donations to the non-bankruptcy-remote EA Funds, but that shouldn’t entail an end to all GWWC campaigns.
Per my original comment, I agree that the EV decision (driven by legal considerations) obviously impacted GWWC strategy and day-to-day operations.
“Management” ultimately flows up to the board (and then EV recruited an Exec team to handle entity-wide decisions and processes for EV UK and EV US).
In a fiscal sponsorship scenario the fiscal sponsees actions can affect one another so it isn’t simply the case that an individual project can/should only think of their own risk appetite. During a crisis period I can understand the fiscal sponsor management not having the capacity to review all communications/decisions and therefore temporarily having blanket rules that sometimes may turn out to not have been necessary or nuanced enough after the fact.
In the comment you linked to Rebecca said that the Interim CEOs are responsible for “charity-wide issues, including legal response, coordination, and org structures, etc (that is, things that span multiple projects: 80k, CEA, GWWC, etc)” and prior to them being hired that fell to the board. This decision was part of the legal response/coordination and not a decision for project leads to make.
Note that I said we paused the giving season campaigns around the time of the crisis, we didn’t decide not to have a pledge campaign entirely (though the pause and the crisis itself did negatively impact pledges significantly).
To clarify: are you just saying that the campaigns were paused but then eventually resumed (which was my understanding), or that the giving season campaigns (which were paused) are distinct from some other kind of pledge campaign, which were not paused?
Thanks for clarifying. FWIW, given community desires for more communication from leadership and greater transparency, I think it would have been good for the board to share this decision publicly.
While I agree in terms of the ethos, I also understand the difficulty and a reasonable amount of the complexity of the situation and why this would have been difficult (and possibly bad, all things considered) to do at the time. I do not envy the position of those involved in this level of decision making/crisis response, and recognise the need to do a lot of satisficing at the time.