Country and/or domain specific career advising webcontent
80000 Hours and Probably Good are great but their advice can be off putting, irrelevant or not useful enough for many people who are not their main audience. Having content about potentially many impactful careers in medicine, academia, or engineering, in Japan, Germany, Brazil, or India can be much more useful and engaging for those people who are in these categories. This can also be done at a relatively low cost—one or two able and willing writers per country/domain.
2. “Budget hawk” organisation/consultancy that aims to propose budget cuts to EA organisations without compromising cost-effectiveness.
There is a lot of attention towards effective giving like %10 pledges. Another way of achieving similar outcomes is to make organisations spend less (%10 again?). We tend to assume that EA organisations are cost effective (which is true overall) but this does not mean that every EA organisation spends each penny with %100 cost-effectiveness. It is probable that many EA organisations can make cuts to their ineffective programs or manage their operations/taxes more efficiently. A lot of EA organisations have very large budgets, more than millions of dollars annually. So even modest improvements can be equivalent to adding many GWWC pledgers.
3. Historical case studies about movement or community building
Open philanthropy had commissioned some reports. But most of them are about certain policy reforms. Only a few are about movement or community building. I think more case studies can provide interesting insights. Sentience Institute’s case studies were very useful for animal advocacy in my opinion.
4. Grand strategy research
This might be already being carried out by major EA organisations. But I can imagine that most leadership and key staff members in EA organisations typically focus on specific and urgent problems and never have enough time and focus on taking a (lot of) step back and think about the grand strategy. Other people might also have better skills to do this too. By the way, I am also more in favour of “learning by doing” and “make decisions as you progress” type of approaches but nevertheless at least having “some” grand strategy can reveal important insights about what are the real bottlenecks and how to overcome them.
5. Commissioning impact evaluations of major EA organisations and EA funds.
I think the reasons for this are obvious. There are of course some impact evaluations in EA- GWWC’s evaluating the evaluators project was a good example (But note that this was done only last year, once—and from my perspective it evaluated the structure and framework of the funds, not the impact of the grants themselves). I definitely think there is a lot of room for improvement—especially on publicly accessible impact reports. I think this is all the more important for EA, since “not assuming impact but looking for evidence” is one of the distinguishing features of it.
Hi there!
I would say my Kafessiz Türkiye (Cage-free Turkey) cofounding experience followed this pattern, at least partially. Of course, these weren’t the only reasons but I think things could have been different if funding schemes were different. As for Animal Advocacy Careers, I don’t really have a senior position to talk authoritatively about this issue but my subjective view is that again, different decisions about hiring (and increasing size) might have happened if funding schemes were different.
I guess AIM startup space might be a bit different since in AIM there is a significant “education” period that can teach founders to not to fall for “founder mistakes”. Another reason might be that AIM provide a good amount of seed funding that can provide a long runway—something that other organisations don’t have.
Looking at this again, I guess my observations are mainly focused on animal welfare space—which is something that I should have mentioned in the post (thanks for this). It may be that GHD funding is not like this.
But aside from that, the main argument of the post depends on the fact that most grants are annual or biannual which explains certain dynamics.