I was initially impressed and considered donating to the fund in the future, but then noticed the ~$300K grant without a public report. I can’t see myself donating to a fund that doesn’t say what it’s doing with almost 30% of its disbursed funds.
I don’t have any insight into why this grantee wanted to remain anonymous.
I do know of some situations in the animal advocacy space, and advocacy space in general, where it is strategic to not have on the public record (or as little as possible) where one is receiving funding from. Reasons for this might include:
Exposing how groups and initiatives might be connected can damage how their targets interact with them. Ie bad and good cop initiatives having the same funding source can often damage the ability of the good cop to carry out their role.
A local organisation, with large amounts of funding from abroad, can easily be criticised for not representing local interests.
Sometimes it is simply just really useful for adversaries and people, organisations you want to influence to know as little about you as possible.
Probably more reasons I’m not thinking of right now
I hear the concern you raise and also see there are cases where the tradeoff with transparency on distributed funds and setting the grantees up for success may be in conflict. Might some insight into why the grant is anonymous help bridge that gap?
For example:
One of our grantees, who received $291,000, requested that we do not include public reports for their grants as doing so is likely to negatively impact their ability to carry out their work by exposing publicly how they are connected to other organisations.
One idea I’ve had to try and resolve this issue for donors is to have all private grants audited by a trusted animal welfare person who doesn’t work on the fund (e.g. Lewis Bollard) and commit to publishing their comments in payout reports. I think they’d be able to say things like “I agree that the private grants should be kept private and on average they were about as cost-effective as the public grants”.
I’ll take <agree> <disagree> votes to indicate how compelling this would be to readers.
I would find this compelling but I think there are pretty strong social incentives to not disagree publicly with the fund managers so you either need a mechanism to get around that or need someone who is very happy to disagree publicly and incur social/reputational costs
Personally I don’t believe in a “trusted person”, as a concept. I think EA has had its fun trying to be a high trust environment where some large things are kept private, and it backfired horribly.
I’ll take <agree> <disagree> votes to indicate how compelling this would be to readers.
That was the aim of my comment as well, so I do hope more people actually vote on it.
Thanks, Guy. I am very much for transparency in general[1], but I do not think it matters that much whether I know what happens with 70 % or 100 % of AWF’s funds. Even in a worst case scenario where there was no information about 30 % of the money granted by AWF, and the enspecified grants had a cost-effectiveness of 0, AWF’s cost-effectiveness would only decrease by 30 %. This would be significant, but still small in comparison with other considerations. In particular, I estimate the Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP) has been 173 times as cost-effective as cage-free campaigns. AWF has funded both SWP and cage-free campaigns, so they implicitly estimate the marginal cost-effectiveness of SWP and cage-free campaigns has not been that different[2]. I suspect our disagreement is mostly explained by me believing excruciating pain is more intense, and lack of scope-sensitivity in AWF’s grantmaking decisions, which is based on grantmakers’ ratings of grants (from −5 to 5) instead of explicit cost-effectiveness analyses.
I was initially impressed and considered donating to the fund in the future, but then noticed the ~$300K grant without a public report. I can’t see myself donating to a fund that doesn’t say what it’s doing with almost 30% of its disbursed funds.
I don’t have any insight into why this grantee wanted to remain anonymous.
I do know of some situations in the animal advocacy space, and advocacy space in general, where it is strategic to not have on the public record (or as little as possible) where one is receiving funding from. Reasons for this might include:
Increased government scrutiny and harassment as a ‘foreign agent’ by receiving money from abroad.
Exposing how groups and initiatives might be connected can damage how their targets interact with them. Ie bad and good cop initiatives having the same funding source can often damage the ability of the good cop to carry out their role.
A local organisation, with large amounts of funding from abroad, can easily be criticised for not representing local interests.
Sometimes it is simply just really useful for adversaries and people, organisations you want to influence to know as little about you as possible.
Probably more reasons I’m not thinking of right now
I hear the concern you raise and also see there are cases where the tradeoff with transparency on distributed funds and setting the grantees up for success may be in conflict. Might some insight into why the grant is anonymous help bridge that gap?
For example:
One of our grantees, who received $291,000, requested that we do not include public reports for their grants as doing so is likely to negatively impact their ability to carry out their work by exposing publicly how they are connected to other organisations.
One idea I’ve had to try and resolve this issue for donors is to have all private grants audited by a trusted animal welfare person who doesn’t work on the fund (e.g. Lewis Bollard) and commit to publishing their comments in payout reports. I think they’d be able to say things like “I agree that the private grants should be kept private and on average they were about as cost-effective as the public grants”.
I’ll take <agree> <disagree> votes to indicate how compelling this would be to readers.
I would find this compelling but I think there are pretty strong social incentives to not disagree publicly with the fund managers so you either need a mechanism to get around that or need someone who is very happy to disagree publicly and incur social/reputational costs
Personally I don’t believe in a “trusted person”, as a concept. I think EA has had its fun trying to be a high trust environment where some large things are kept private, and it backfired horribly.
That was the aim of my comment as well, so I do hope more people actually vote on it.
I think a reasonably independent reviewer who is not perfectly trustworthy would still be better than no reviewer at all.
Thanks, Guy. I am very much for transparency in general[1], but I do not think it matters that much whether I know what happens with 70 % or 100 % of AWF’s funds. Even in a worst case scenario where there was no information about 30 % of the money granted by AWF, and the enspecified grants had a cost-effectiveness of 0, AWF’s cost-effectiveness would only decrease by 30 %. This would be significant, but still small in comparison with other considerations. In particular, I estimate the Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP) has been 173 times as cost-effective as cage-free campaigns. AWF has funded both SWP and cage-free campaigns, so they implicitly estimate the marginal cost-effectiveness of SWP and cage-free campaigns has not been that different[2]. I suspect our disagreement is mostly explained by me believing excruciating pain is more intense, and lack of scope-sensitivity in AWF’s grantmaking decisions, which is based on grantmakers’ ratings of grants (from −5 to 5) instead of explicit cost-effectiveness analyses.
Not necessarily in this case. I would have to know the details.
If they thought SWP was way more cost-effective at the margin, they would just fund SWP and not cage-free campaigns.
Zero effect is not the worst case.
I agree, but unspecified grants being neutral in expectation would still be very pessimistic for someone enthusiastic about the specified grants.