Weighting each grant’s modeled social return on investment [SROI] by its funding amount gives a mean of roughly 5,500x — though these are early, uncertain estimates.
How do you estimate the benefits of a career transition in CG$ (1 CG$ is the value of giving 1 $ to someone earning 50 k$/​year)? Have you considered estimating this from the product between the marginal SROI of the organisation benefiting from the transition, and their willingness to pay for the transition?
The most common grants were to EA-affiliated career advising programs and high-impact fellowship programs in Sweden, France, Israel, Norway, Estonia, and Poland. These were explicitly evaluated by how many high-impact career transitions could be facilitated per unit of budget cost, and measured against our bar.
How did you evaluate the other organisations?
Based on our cost-effectiveness estimates for about 85% of the recommended grants, weighted by funding, every dollar invested is expected to create about $5,500 of social benefit.
Which % of funding is covered by the 85 % of grants for which you estimates the cost-effectiveness?
Of the 28 grants, 13 are cause-neutral, supporting high-impact transitions across our priority areas. The other 15 overlap strongly with one or two specific cause areas, with global health and development the heaviest concentration. We set out to focus on mid-career and senior professionals (much existing infrastructure skews toward students), and on LMIC talent pipelines, where many high-impact organizations operate but career infrastructure remains thin. The bigger surprise was about the ecosystem itself. We estimated a 25% chance we’d receive more than 40 applications; we got almost 500. We also came in assuming we’d fund far fewer proposals and give away considerably less money.
That is an impressive number of applications. I like that you shared a forecast you made for the number of applications despite it being far off.
Hello Kearney and Melanie. Thanks for the update.
How do you estimate the benefits of a career transition in CG$ (1 CG$ is the value of giving 1 $ to someone earning 50 k$/​year)? Have you considered estimating this from the product between the marginal SROI of the organisation benefiting from the transition, and their willingness to pay for the transition?
How did you evaluate the other organisations?
Which % of funding is covered by the 85 % of grants for which you estimates the cost-effectiveness?
That is an impressive number of applications. I like that you shared a forecast you made for the number of applications despite it being far off.
I would be happy to review your estimates of the SROI of the grants for free if you think it may be useful.