Has there been any consideration of creating sub-funds for some or all of the critical ecosystem gaps? Conditioned on areas A, B, and C being both critical and ~not being addressed elsewhere, it would feel a bit unexpected if donors have no way to give monies to A, B, or C exclusively.
If a donor values A, B, and C differently—and yet the donor’s only option is defer to LTFF’s allocation of their marginal donation between A, B, and C—they may “score” LTFF less well than they would score an opportunity to donate to whichever area they rated most highly by their own lights.
The best reason to think this might not make a difference: If enough donors wanted to defer to LTFF’s allocation among the three areas, then donor choice of a specific cause would have no practical effect due to funging.
Hi Jason. Yeah this makes a lot of sense. I think in general I don’t have a very good sense of how much different people want to provide input into our grantmaking vs defer to LTFF; in practice I think most people want to defer, including the big(ish) donors; our objective is usually to try to be worthy of that trust.
That said, I think we haven’t really broken down the functions as cleanly before; maybe with increased concreteness/precision/clarity donors do in fact have strong opinions about which things they care about more on the margin? I’m interested in hearing more feedback, nonymously and otherwise.
Important caveat: A year or so ago when I floated the idea of earmarking some donations for anonymous vs non-anonymous purposes, someone (I think it was actually you? But I can’t find the comment) rightly pointed out that this is difficult to do in practice because of fungibility concerns (basically if 50% of the money is earmarked “no private donations” there’s nothing stopping us from increasing the anonymous donations in the other 50%). I think a similar issue might arise here, as long as we both have a “general LTFF” fund and specific “ecosystem subfunction” funds.
I don’t think the issue is dispositive, especially if most money eventually goes to the subfunction funds, but it does make the splits more difficult in various ways, both practically and as a matter of communication.
Has there been any consideration of creating sub-funds for some or all of the critical ecosystem gaps? Conditioned on areas A, B, and C being both critical and ~not being addressed elsewhere, it would feel a bit unexpected if donors have no way to give monies to A, B, or C exclusively.
If a donor values A, B, and C differently—and yet the donor’s only option is defer to LTFF’s allocation of their marginal donation between A, B, and C—they may “score” LTFF less well than they would score an opportunity to donate to whichever area they rated most highly by their own lights.
The best reason to think this might not make a difference: If enough donors wanted to defer to LTFF’s allocation among the three areas, then donor choice of a specific cause would have no practical effect due to funging.
Hi Jason. Yeah this makes a lot of sense. I think in general I don’t have a very good sense of how much different people want to provide input into our grantmaking vs defer to LTFF; in practice I think most people want to defer, including the big(ish) donors; our objective is usually to try to be worthy of that trust.
That said, I think we haven’t really broken down the functions as cleanly before; maybe with increased concreteness/precision/clarity donors do in fact have strong opinions about which things they care about more on the margin? I’m interested in hearing more feedback, nonymously and otherwise.
Important caveat: A year or so ago when I floated the idea of earmarking some donations for anonymous vs non-anonymous purposes, someone (I think it was actually you? But I can’t find the comment) rightly pointed out that this is difficult to do in practice because of fungibility concerns (basically if 50% of the money is earmarked “no private donations” there’s nothing stopping us from increasing the anonymous donations in the other 50%). I think a similar issue might arise here, as long as we both have a “general LTFF” fund and specific “ecosystem subfunction” funds.
I don’t think the issue is dispositive, especially if most money eventually goes to the subfunction funds, but it does make the splits more difficult in various ways, both practically and as a matter of communication.