I would speculate (with low confidence) that it is a larger risk if you are attempting to fundraise from a small number of large sources (who may have the bargaining power to extract significant concessions, and whose objectives are sufficiently transparent that you can modify yourself to become more congruent) than from the amorphous general public.
My personal experience is the converse: large donors are more willing to dig into more complex theories of change, explain their skepticism to you and have you point out anything they might be missing, etc., whereas with small donors you either have to get them sold ~immediately or else they aren’t going to buy in.
(I think CEA is fortunate to have this kind of large donor though – probably there are other large funders who would cause more mission drift than the general public would.)
Thanks the reply; I’m not sure we really disagree.
A grab-bag of thoughts on the subject:
Back-and-forth communication is possible with large donors but not small donors.
This is equivalent to small donors pre-committing not to negotiate; they give you a take-it-or-leave-it offer, albeit one whose terms you can’t directly observe.
You can persuade a foundation your approach is good, increasing the expected funding.
But your competition can also do this, so this might effectively end up with the foundation having a higher bar than if they didn’t do this.
The average applicant might be better off if this channel did not exist! Though the best applicants will likely benefit from it.
Your experience with large EA foundations is positive because the discussions focus on the things you think matter and you respect their decision making.
But this is mainly because they are EA, not because they are large.
Less aligned foundations are more likely to want you to make arguments about things you consider less important.
Small EA donors probably care about similar things to you (just at lower levels of sophistication/granularity).
Funding is more binary from a donor, vs foundations which can scale grants with the confidence in you.
But there are many small donors, with different levels of confidence in you, so you aggregate donation still scales with average confidence.
Foundations can persuade you to change your approach.
If they are good evaluators this might be via insightful feedback and the effect is positive.
If they are bad or poorly aligned this might look more like your making concessions, giving up impact/dollar in return for more dollars.
In theory you could do similar ‘negotiation’ with small donors by trying to predict what they want. But this negotiation plays out without actual conversations taking place. Implicitly my argument is that this uncertainty makes negotiation here harder than with foundations.
thanks for writing this! One comment:
My personal experience is the converse: large donors are more willing to dig into more complex theories of change, explain their skepticism to you and have you point out anything they might be missing, etc., whereas with small donors you either have to get them sold ~immediately or else they aren’t going to buy in.
(I think CEA is fortunate to have this kind of large donor though – probably there are other large funders who would cause more mission drift than the general public would.)
Thanks the reply; I’m not sure we really disagree.
A grab-bag of thoughts on the subject:
Back-and-forth communication is possible with large donors but not small donors.
This is equivalent to small donors pre-committing not to negotiate; they give you a take-it-or-leave-it offer, albeit one whose terms you can’t directly observe.
You can persuade a foundation your approach is good, increasing the expected funding.
But your competition can also do this, so this might effectively end up with the foundation having a higher bar than if they didn’t do this.
The average applicant might be better off if this channel did not exist! Though the best applicants will likely benefit from it.
Your experience with large EA foundations is positive because the discussions focus on the things you think matter and you respect their decision making.
But this is mainly because they are EA, not because they are large.
Less aligned foundations are more likely to want you to make arguments about things you consider less important.
Small EA donors probably care about similar things to you (just at lower levels of sophistication/granularity).
Funding is more binary from a donor, vs foundations which can scale grants with the confidence in you.
But there are many small donors, with different levels of confidence in you, so you aggregate donation still scales with average confidence.
Foundations can persuade you to change your approach.
If they are good evaluators this might be via insightful feedback and the effect is positive.
If they are bad or poorly aligned this might look more like your making concessions, giving up impact/dollar in return for more dollars.
In theory you could do similar ‘negotiation’ with small donors by trying to predict what they want. But this negotiation plays out without actual conversations taking place. Implicitly my argument is that this uncertainty makes negotiation here harder than with foundations.