This is interesting and I look forward to reading more.
A more negative reading of this information would suggest that the issue may not be lack of fundraising skill within the organizations but rather that many of the interviewed ACE selected charities don’t get the funding they want because most people, or the donors the charities care about, don’t agree with ACE’s or the CEOs’ self-assessments that the charities are worth funding. That is, these folks may not donate for reasons having to do with the organizations not because of lack of relationship building, marketing, etc.
It’s a different sort of concern and suggests a different line of research inquiry, but may be worth keeping in the back of one’s mind.
I worry that longtermism can be used to justify, or rationalize (depending on your view), too much. Imagine turning back the clock to when many of the things we consider morally wrong and abhorrent were more commonplace and were widely accepted: sexual harassment, marital rape, human slavery, etc., and sticking one’s neck out in opposition to any of them would at least cost some social capital if not more.
Does the longtermist in any of these contexts really not have any obligation to engage in any costly opposition to the wrongs because it would detract from their longtermist projects? It seems it would require an awful lot of confidence in the longtermist’s ability to affect the future to argue so. And it feels terribly convenient for the longtermist to argue they are in the moral right while making no effort to counteract or at least not participate in what they recognize as moral wrongs.
My view can be boiled down to this: First, we should be wary of arguments that tell us that doing things that we believe to be wrong are fine to do. Second, we should think hard about how much certainty we have about our ability to have longterm effects.