Nonprofit accounting researcher. I mostly study private foundations and how donors use accounting information in their giving decision-making. My agenda aligns strongly with the effective giving topic.
Trustee at CEEALAR
Kyle Smith
Karma: 518
Redirecting private foundation grants to effective charities
I’ve thought about something similar. I’m surprised no one has done it yet.
I was thinking you could click on a bunch of different organizations, and it will show the resulting QALY or whatever metric.
Like for example, there’d be a bunch of orgs with nice ‘cost to save a life’ information, then if you clicked on donating to your university it will display something like the annual interest of your donation as part of the endowment..? Just as a way to illustrate differences in impact.
Project Idea:
While completing the EA intro course, I was thinking about how private foundations give $60b a year, largely to ineffective charities. I was wondering if that may present an opportunity for a small organization that works to redirect PF grants to effective charities.
I see two potential angles of attack:
Lobby/consult with PF on making effective grants. Givewell does the hard job of evaluating charities, but a more boutique solution could be useful to private foundations.
I have a large dataset of electronically filed 990-PFs, and I thought it may be useful to try to identify PF that are more likely to be persuaded by this sort of lobbying. For example, foundations that are younger, already give to international charities, and give to a large number of charities (there’s a lot of interesting criteria that could be used). A list could be generated for PF that are more likely to redirect funds which could be targeted.
Target grantmakers by offering training, attending conferences, etc. on effective grantmaking. (maybe some other EA aligned org is doing this?)
Givewell says they have directed ~$1b in effective gifts since 2011. Even if only a small number of foundations could be persuaded, the total dollars driven could be pretty large. And for a pretty small investment I think.Short introduction: My name is Kyle Smith, I am an assistant professor of accounting at Mississippi State University. My research is mostly on how donors use accounting reports in their giving decisions. I have done some archival research examining how private foundations use accounting information, and am starting up a qualitative study where we are going to interview grantmakers to understand how they use accounting information in their grantmaking process.
Does anyone know of any orgs specifically working on this problem?
Kyle Smith’s Quick takes
Perfect!! Thank you.
Does something similar exist for orgs looking for board members? I’m interested in joining a board.
Hi Ben, thanks for the note. It does appear these two orgs are doing something fairly similar, primarily offering bespoke consulting for large donors.
I’d agree these two aren’t taking a systematic approach, which is really what I had in mind. I think I’ll reach out to both to figure out their scope.