erstwhile EA-adjacent, opinions my own
ethai
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TLYCS’s own pledge is progressive with income, for what it’s worth https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/take-the-pledge/
yes, you can do something about US politics
omg I have already left my EA comms job but I would be down to hang out and yap in there if that’s welcome!!!
as far as I can tell the answer to this type of question is always that someone did a napkin calculation 10 years ago and decided that either (a) lots of funding within an arbitrarily-defined “cause area” means everything within that cause isn’t neglected, or (b) affecting a large pool of funding isn’t tractable enough and therefore not worth spending EA resources on, and then because of path dependency in the development of EA as a community of practice it’s now just hard to gain traction or interest in cause areas outside of the EA canon
1000000% this is the messaging that resonates best for Giving Green donors, also precisely for the reasons you named. We did a bit of qualitative user research and persona work a few years ago on this, and it still continues to be a core theme with new donors (who range from EA-adjacent to classic environmentalist). I don’t have anything useful to add, just here to corroborate!
edit: ok I have one useful thing to add, which is that, especially because of the type of work we fund, we explicitly don’t use “certain impact” or “best charity” framing. but “certainty in giving” is different from “certainty in impact”!
I once saw on the Forum that someone had scraped the 990s from a bunch of EA and AI safety* orgs and put all the salaries in a spreadsheet, with names—it wouldn’t be that hard to go from that to at least an estimate of what you’re looking for, for the highest-paid employees. I can’t find a link to the post anymore, and want to respect that they might have taken it down with good reason, but given it’s public information, if some enterprising data-wrangling Forum-poster wants to dm me for it I’m not opposed to sharing the link...
*I do have a loose intuition that besides the grantmaker/grantee divide, the AI/not-AI divide within EA is driving some of the bizarre funding and salary dynamics
When early digital experiments don’t show ROI, many orgs seem to conclude that the channel itself is misaligned, rather than that execution, resourcing, or the evaluation window were insufficient. Given small budgets and high standards of proof, it’s not surprising those early attempts fail — but that doesn’t tell us much about the counterfactual of sustained investment.
yeah I basically think this is the problem, and agree that some level of investment would yield a return, but small orgs can’t just keep putting in time and money for hypothetical return at some undetermined threshold! we’re not for-profits that can take out loans or get VC money to sink into big upfront acquisition costs :’)
again, if any funders are interested in funding EA digital marketing experiments for audience growth, I’m all ears… I’d like to see a case study of what level of investment is needed for smallish orgs to see a return, especially for fundraising asks.
hm this is super interesting. I started Giving Green’s comms/growth function, and at the time I remember talking to a bunch of EAs in comms and marketing functions for advice (RIP, EA comms slack!) - almost everyone said: digital marketing hasn’t worked for us, what’s worked is earned media and relationship-building. I don’t really know whether that’s due to underinvestment in good digital marketing, or the broader nonprofit fundraising environment, or the FTX collapse, or something else. But I think it’s worth noting that a lot of us have experimented with digital marketing and not seen ROI. (And at least for Giving Green specifically, we do have people on staff who come from growth-oriented digital roles, myself sort of included, but just haven’t really seen return from those channels.) I do think I see EA orgs investing more in digital marketing now and I am excited about the learnings we’ll have in the ecosystem in the next few years.
A couple of other theories I have:
EA funders don’t like to fund digital marketing (possibly downstream of your theories)
Lots of EA orgs’ theories of change are more focused on finding a few special individuals (large donors, highly skilled people for career programs, etc), not mass reach to large audiences. In my first year I A/B tested our email donation asks but we simply didn’t have the sample size and conversion rate to learn anything meaningful.
EAs care a lot about communicating with rigor and nuance, which is hard to do in bite-sized digital formats
Good digital marketing requires a lot of upfront investment in time/money/technical skill, which is hard to justify without seeing ROI on smaller experiments
I’d be curious if you’re seeing digital fundraising success in a space / with asks similar to EA orgs’ fields/asks—I don’t know if I can think of an example of this, even among our non-EA partners.
I think there are many cause-agnostic donor communities but not ideology-agnostic donor communities, if that makes sense, and I don’t know of any donor networks with an EA ideology. Maybe EA city groups and the funding circles in the comments have some of the same functions?
there was a post about this last year: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oFcLqTETnC8rajxeg/advisors-for-smaller-major-donors
tl;dr is (1) a lot of evaluators will do this for their cause area (can’t speak to every one but Giving Green is happy to advise donors of any size, just shoot us an email); (2) look into giving circles inside or outside EA
I’d add that it’s probably worth seeking a financial advisor for the tax law and will writing type questions—a lot of EA advisories offer free initial services, but I’ve been told that total assets >100k is generally the point at which it makes sense to find an advisor
Thank you for this! I had promised a couple of friends that I’d write up something for their upcoming spinouts and I’m very glad that someone who knows more than me has done it instead :D
Two caveats I’d suggest to future nonprofit-starters, just because they’re currently a giant headache for me:
Decide early on what your physical address will be for any use cases that don’t accept virtual mailboxes, knowing that said physical address might be something you need to share—for example we need a physical address on file with our bank, they didn’t accept our virtual mailbox, and this is also an address we need to give to donors because some giving platforms ask for address on file with the bank. But use your public mailing address for the 1023 because this gets scraped by DAFs.
You can breeze through the bylaws and policies if you’re in a rush, but you will likely need to amend them later for insurance and/or grants compliance purposes.
I love that High Impact Engineers is back and I generally like a forum-style place over Slack, but I want to push back specifically on “many engineers have a GitHub account”—especially since your goal is to be welcoming to non-software-engineers, I wouldn’t make this assumption! I was a materials engineering undergrad and none of my classes/internships/research projects used GitHub. Maybe it’s really taken over in the last 10 years or something, but if not, you might want to consider being a bit more 101-level with the GitHub stuff, e.g. not using jargon like ‘pull’ or ‘repo’ without explanation—when I see that kind of thing, at least personally my immediate reaction is “oh, this is a space for software engineers”.
in addition to everything already said, I think this can be bad from an organizational sustainability perspective—if you decide to leave / get hit by a truck / etc, the organization now doesn’t have the budget to hire someone new to do the work, meaning that some commitments will need to be dropped. Some funders will see this type of thing as a bad signal about the management of the organization.
Another way of leveraging your relative class privilege could be taking a part-time job and doing impactful volunteer work!
interestingly i’ve talked to a couple of other asian women in EA who have sort of an opposite experience—we (including myself here) feel like EA ideas and communities fundamentally don’t capture things that are important to us as asian women, and so that actually forces us to be more balanced and draw our values from multiple places, rather than holding ourselves to a standard of being a more-optimized EA. one very literal example someone mentioned to me is that western cultures and traditions of thought emphasize breaking down systems into discrete parts and optimizing on single goals, and eastern cultures/traditions value more holistic thinking and balance.
i can also 100% see where you’re coming from, as someone who grew up in a very competitive asian/immigrant community myself—i’m sharing another experience not to discount yours, but more to highlight alternate ways of thinking about your own relating to EA that might help you find that balance!
as a former optimizer: #1 thing that helped was therapy
the most commonly soundbited research on this is Chenoweth’s 3.5% rule if you want a place to start
Hmm. I think once we get into the territory of “plan to use”, though, you end up with the same types of criticisms that apply to carbon credits and RECs, no?I really think that a nonzero price is not a good enough signal here! Polluters don’t have perfect information about future climate regulations, future technologies, future market demand for their products, or even necessarily the future of the cap per Ville’s point below. I read Making Climate Policy Work recently, which is a really thorough critique of the compliance markets; could be useful to see which of their criticisms apply to retiring allowances.
Giving Green hat on: if you want relatively certain and near-term emissions reductions at this price point, we usually recommend Tradewater. However, generally we would argue that unconstrained donors (i.e. not meeting some kind of net-zero reporting requirement) should donate to nonprofits working on policy or other systems change; GG’s cost-effectiveness analyses land about an order of magnitude lower in $/ton than most allowances or credits, and I think also Founders Pledge’s climate fund’s analyses do as well.
I think people should keep re-releasing this idea because this community dynamic very much still exists! I’ve also seen extremely smart and motivated friends engage with and then “bounce off” EA because of this.
Gotcha. Since you’re already in the UChicago network I think it’s definitely worth getting in touch with someone about Climate Vault, as in the early days they were aiming at permanent retirement—I don’t know the specifics of why they pivoted away from that model but I imagine you’ll learn something useful.
Giving Green briefly looked into some brokers with similar models here as well; ultimately we’re pretty skeptical. Even if your marginal additionality is 1 for small purchases, it’s inherently not a scalable model. If the core of what you’re doing is funding public goods and not selling carbon allowances, you should pitch that more! There are more cost-effective ways to just reduce emissions :)
yeah not sure unfortunately!