Are there plans to internally assess in future how the grants have gone /​ are going, without necessarily making the findings public, and even in cases where the grantees don’t apply for renewal?
(I seem to recall seeing that the EA Funds do this by default for all grants, but I can’t remember for sure and I can’t remember the details. Feel free to just point me to the relevant page or the like.)
That seems fairly important to me, and there are some loose ideas we’ve exchanged. However, there are a number of things that at first glance seem quite important, and we are very limited by capacity. So I’m currently not sure if and when ex-post evaluations of grants are going to happen. I would be very surprised if we thought that never doing any ex-post evaluations was the right call, but I wouldn’t be that surprised if we only did them for a fraction of grants or only in a quite ‘hacky’ way, etc.
I think we will probably do two types of post-hoc evaluations:
Specifically aiming to improve our own decision-making in ways that seem most relevant to us, without publishing the results (as they would be quite explicit about which grantees were successful in our view), driven by key uncertainties that we have
Publicly communicating our track record to donors, especially aiming to find and communicate the biggest successes to date
#1 is somewhat high on my priority list (may happen later this year), whereas #2 is further down (probably won’t happen this year, or if it does, it would be a very quick version). The key bottleneck for both of these is hiring more people who can help our team carry out these evaluations.
Are there plans to internally assess in future how the grants have gone /​ are going, without necessarily making the findings public, and even in cases where the grantees don’t apply for renewal?
(I seem to recall seeing that the EA Funds do this by default for all grants, but I can’t remember for sure and I can’t remember the details. Feel free to just point me to the relevant page or the like.)
That seems fairly important to me, and there are some loose ideas we’ve exchanged. However, there are a number of things that at first glance seem quite important, and we are very limited by capacity. So I’m currently not sure if and when ex-post evaluations of grants are going to happen. I would be very surprised if we thought that never doing any ex-post evaluations was the right call, but I wouldn’t be that surprised if we only did them for a fraction of grants or only in a quite ‘hacky’ way, etc.
I think we will probably do two types of post-hoc evaluations:
Specifically aiming to improve our own decision-making in ways that seem most relevant to us, without publishing the results (as they would be quite explicit about which grantees were successful in our view), driven by key uncertainties that we have
Publicly communicating our track record to donors, especially aiming to find and communicate the biggest successes to date
#1 is somewhat high on my priority list (may happen later this year), whereas #2 is further down (probably won’t happen this year, or if it does, it would be a very quick version). The key bottleneck for both of these is hiring more people who can help our team carry out these evaluations.