lauren_mee
I believe these are the most effective organisations and will use the money wisely
Well i think that’s the point of the post to debate this! And i think there are relevant trade offs in regards to maintaining the impact of the organisations which are seeking to diversify funds that aren’t usually considered so maybe “far more counterfactually” seems too strong.
I think there’s an important nuance here regarding what truly constitutes a ‘healthy sanity check’ when it comes to funding. Simply having a non-EA funder interested in your project doesn’t necessarily validate its impact. For instance, if a funder’s motivation is based on personal affinity, like finding the team charming or being impressed by the organization for non-impact reasons, this might not confirm that the project is the best use of resources.
To me, a real sanity check comes from the support of funders who prioritize impact and apply a high bar to their investments. If a highly discerning funder with a strong emphasis on impact independently chooses to support the project, regardless of whether you accept their funding or not, that’s a stronger endorsement than diversification for its own sake.
Great post!
I think one other major complications of funder diversification is managing multiple competing interests. So in some ways it’s great to have more funders so you aren’t reliant on them to agree with all of your strategic choices but you can just do the most impactful thing and get one of the funders to back it but sometimes that also works in the opposite way with funding diversity. I think this is less the case for AIM as you are more established, but in the early stages of funding diversification there aren’t actually that many EAA funders to chose from, people often argue that its a higher counterfactual to have non EA funders but on the flip side you then have to manage those funders priorities and if they are less EA they often want you to invest more in a less impactful thing in order to fund you. So being that the funding options are so small in the EAA movement I’m not sure that funder diversification nets out as positive for all organisations or that we should all strive for it.
<< Needing more than one funder provides a healthy sanity check on if the project is really the best use of funds>> Also to this point… doesn’t it heavily depend on the funder? If the funder isn’t impact driven I’m not sure it’s a great sign they want to fund you?
Additionally less important but it also takes up much more time to report and communicate with non EA donors. For us for example they don’t care or understand ICAPs (fair enough) so then you have to spend time translating your work to what they care about. I think this is fine but it’s a bit more of a time sink when they care about things that you don’t actually think are important to track in regards to impact eg vanity metrics.
I do however firmly agree with this your point on increasing funding in itself not being an aspirational goal and wish more organisations would be firmer with capping their funding goals if they will likely decrease their impact per dollar significantly consistently in the future, particularly in contrast to other organisations. So I agree with the conclusion but perhaps not that funding diversification is a prerequisite for it. Is it not possible that organisations can just reject funding over a certain amount regardless of funding diversification?
Thanks for writing this!
I’ve really struggled with this when writing AAC’s mission and vision statements. Historically our vision and mission statements have been much more pragmatic and realistic like speeding up the end of animal suffering through increasing talent density etc etc. and I agree with Emres point on the difficulty of communicating what we are doing to a broader audience. These kind of static vision statements whilst being pragmatic seem to be less inspirational to external stakeholders, staff and smaller donors.
So I’m leaning towards changing AAC to have a more broad directional vision statement because I think this is more likely to inspire actions and isn’t that the point of visions? So I guess my question is, do you think that organisations are really genuinely aiming for this goal with the thought that we should strive to achieve it in our lifetime and in their plans or do you think we are just trying to inspire action and that really our theories of change are more in line with the things we do have power over. If AAC was able to increase talent density in the movement and fix the talent bottlenecks I’d be pretty happy with us an organisation and think we’ve done “our bit” but I don’t think that would inspire my staff.
No it’s helpful thank you for flagging I can update accordingly ☺️
2024-2030 may be a unique “make or break” period for animal welfare
Animal welfare is neglected in a particular way: it is fragile
Thank you Jessica 💚 I guess the next challenge will be can we maintain the good outputs over time and if our team grows!
It’s nice to know other people are also excited about our work.
I would love more people to share progress updates on what their orgs are up to too.
Thank you Vaidehi, this means a lot, it’s always such a trade-off between the amount of time it takes to write a post that is understandable to other vs. using our time on something else, so this was really nice to hear.
Would be curious to hear what intuitions you have that resonated the most with this post? And any that you have that weren’t mentioned 👀
Thank you 💚 it was a team effort and I appreciate all the advice and feedback you have given. It would be hard to do this in a silo.
The world is burning 🔥 happy to contribute where we can to putting a little of it out
Five Years of Animal Advocacy Careers: Our Journey to impact, Lessons Learned, and What’s Next
Thanks for everything you do! We wouldn’t be here without you.
What do you think is the most neglected, potentially high-impact career opportunity that could make significant progress for farmed animals.
Thanks for sharing!
I really agree with this too, i think there is a lot of pressure in the EA community to get a job in EA to feel part of the community and this often leads to people just trying to get jobs immediately, when often you can do the most good by gaining some experience first. I will caveat that i still think there is a spectrum of certain jobs where you can learn more or less and it is still important to try to find those ones or have some idea of what you want to try your fit for first. In addition its not the case for all roles, e.g. i think campaigners in the animal space would be better going into this role straight out of university-ish because a lot of it is learning on the job/ from others and there aren’t many campaign type jobs in for-profits :)For me personally, even though I think I had the steepest learning curve in my current role as a founder, I learnt a lot in my previous years of work that was transferable. More importantly, I built up financial stability that helped me take bigger risks, like starting my own organisation (I am PRETTY certain i would not have done this if i didn’t have the buffer i had and a fall back job)
I wonder how as a community we can help people to feel okay about this and less pressure to get an EA job straight away? More case studies?
Also just want to add that lobbying is a very sought after skill in some EA cause areas (like animals) where there is a skill gap so you could also consider getting a role in an animal advocacy non profit after to help them make progress and not have to pay extortionate PA prices.
+1 to direct impact being underrated. But i do think that its not just any role that can be useful and that most of working in government is what you make out of it (networking, finding the highest leverage opportunities and connections etc.) not just getting a role.
I have also heard this but i have also heard the complete opposite, that gov taught them to be able to do things quickly and not perfectly under pressure which is very valuable. I also think in general it has a high variability depending on personal fit and which department and manager you have. I will add that particularly in the animal space most organisations don’t know how to lobby due to a lack of people getting this insider experience. So i think civil service is great for SOME people and maybe more valuable for certain cause areas than others. But i tend to agree that we should lean into more people testing their fit to figure out where they land on working there or at least exploring this as a great career option and talk to some people before hand to work out whether they are likely to be a good fit
Jumping in here just to say @Probably Good I think its great to have extra exposure to the animal welfare roles! Thanks for doing this.
In regards to having the same roles as 80k i think this is unrealistic as we have different parameters on what roles and organisations we are monitoring so that seems unlikely to happen, even though I agree it would be good.
Firstly, I want to acknowledge that this comment has probably been pretty valuable in terms of sharing feedback for the CE team about perceptions that maybe a lot of people were unaware of, so thanks for raising some concerns that you and others might be having. I’ll also just say as a co-founder of a CE-incubated charity, I am far from impartial, but I think sharing some inside information could be helpful here.
My main response is to the first 2 comments because I have no real knowledge of the last point.
CE is setting a norm for using research or evidence (however limited) as a basis for starting a charity.
CE actually uses research & evidence to inform starting charities in the animal welfare space. This is not the norm! I think even establishing this as what you should be looking at is relatively new to the animal welfare space and should be acknowledged and praised. Currently the majority of charities that are started in the animal welfare space are not backed by research or significant evidence, from what I have observed usually founders think something is a good idea are relatively charismatic and subsequently get funding. So even though I agree that the research can be improved and I think it’s helpful to flag this to Karolina and Joey, I think that the starting point of CE charities is a lot more than that of other charities in this space. So, really, I think we should commend CE for trying to establish any kind of research as the norm and basis for starting a charity. (I think the animal rights movement could be much better if this was a standard all new charities adopted).
CE was never extremely confident with their own research internally to incubated charities, it was merely a foundation. They also established failure mode thinking into our impact assessments which is another great norm.
I can only talk about cohort 1 which was FWI and AAC. In this cohort, CE presented the research that they believed there was the potential for something really impactful to happen in something generally in this space. It was then up to the co-founding team to go out and do deeper research including getting more external feedback to validate the research, whether the charity was really worth starting and how to execute it best. CE also embedded into our thinking that we shouldn’t necessarily expect that our charities would succeed and that we should have clear failure points to assess whether it’s worth it to continue it, taking into consideration the counterfactuals of the movement’s money. Again i think this is a great norm to establish, many charities in the animal welfare space and in other sectors do not do this. They merely carry on without these assessments. Healthier Hens declared shutting down because of this and i think this should be celebrated not used as a signal of poor research. So basically, I think actually if you are mad about new charities not collaborating enough, I think that’s on us, not CE.
I think your main point (Which is a valid concern) is whether CE charities are net a good use of movement resources. To date just speaking about AAC we estimate adding over $2,000,000 of counterfactual value to other animal welfare organisations with a spend of just over 750,000 in under 5 years.
I agree with Haven’s point that the animal movement needs to do better and be better. But as you and others have said, I still think CE charities are some of the best in the movement. If we don’t try to create new good organisations addressing gaps in the movement, I don’t think we are going to realistically accelerate towards ending factory farming. The question is, do you know a better incubator programme to start new organisations than CE, or do you just want them to improve a bit?
SWP, Animal Ask, Healthier Hens, FWI and AAC have all been supported by either EA animal welfare fund or Open Phil or both (in the case of most of us) so I would be really surprised if there were that much difference between the alternative funding perspective you are suggesting here.
From AAC’s point of view, I would be interested to know your concerns on scalability because I think there are infinite ways we can scale; it’s more about us selecting the right one. I’d love feedback on this so feel free to DM me from your anonymous account. We have supported over 150 organisations in increasing talent into critical positions they were struggling to hire for with 90 landing positions and have also brought in $408,000 of counterfactual funding to other organisations. Currently, we estimate (conservatively from most donors feedback) for every 1$ we spend a $2.5 of value is added to the movement. Which suggests we are net positive to the movement. We have plans to double this ratio by the end of this year.
In conclusion, of course, CE has areas to improve, as we all do. Still, I think this is a pretty harsh analysis of an organisation adding a considerable amount of value and norms to the animal advocacy movement on founding charities. I think they would add a lot of value to bringing these values and norms into the donor landscape as there is a gap and CE has a pretty good track record in doing this in other donor circles like the Meta Funding Circle etc.
Lauren
(transparently co-founder of AAC)
Yes sorry I think we are actually saying the same thing here, I meant your former statement not the later. I’m not saying we shouldn’t investigate things but the 300 plus comments on the 3-4 nonlinear posts doesn’t seem an optimal use of time and could probably be dealt with more efficiently, plus the thousands of people who have probably read the posts and comments is a lot of time! Maybe these things shouldn’t be handled in forum posts but in a different format.
I fully agree that these things have to be dealt with better my main concern about your point is over the consensus idea which I think is unrealistic in a community that tries to avoid group think and on topics (ftx aside) where there doesn’t seem to be a clear right or wrong.
I have also recently been thinking alot about “how should we want to deal with a scandal” but mostly in terms of how much time is being devoted to each of these scandals by a community who really advocates for using our minimal resources to do the most good. It makes me really disappointed.
<<i’m not sure the community even agrees internally on Bostrom, the Time article or Nonlinear>>
Forming a consensus additionally seems against the values of the EA community, particularly on quite complicated topics where there is alot of information asymmetry and people often update (as they should) based on new evidence, which is again an important part of the EA community to me at least. So I think I disagree and think it’s unrealistic to have a community as large as EA “to find agreement on these,” and I’m not sure how this would help.
But i fully agree it would be great if we had a better process or strategy of how to deal with scandals
The ones I voted for, I thought this showed up in the comments, but obviously not. I voted SWP, EAAWF and THL.