(I work at RP, as well as at FHI and the EA Infrastructure Fund, but I'm writing in a personal capacity and describing activities I did in a personal capacity.) 

On a similar note, there have been at least two times in the last few months  when I think I provided quite useful advice to someone who was recently started an organisation or plans to do so soon, basically just via me describing aspects of how RP thinks and works. And probably >10 times in the last few months when I provided quite useful advice to researchers or aspiring researchers simply by describing aspects of how RP generates ideas for research projects, prioritises among them, plans them, conducts them, disseminates findings, and assesses impact.*

I'll also be delivering a 1-hour workshop that partly covers that latter batch of topics to participants of a research training program soon,  and would potentially be open to delivering the same workshop to other groups as well. (You can see the slides and links to related resources here. Note that this workshop is something I'm doing in my personal time and expresses personal views only; it merely draws on things I've learned from RP.)

I say "quite useful" based on things like the people wanting the calls to run longer, asking for followup calls, writing up strategy docs afterwards and asking for my feedback on them, etc. I don't yet have much evidence of actual good outcomes in the world from this.

This all increases my enthusiasm about the idea of more people trying to copy or draw on good bits of RP, including via: 

• people reading public writeups of aspects of RP's strategy (e.g. here and here)
• RP producing more such writeups (though as Luke's post implies, there are many other projects competing for our staff time!)
• Maybe RP people delivering some workshops on aspects of this, like I'm now dipping my toes into doing
• people having calls with RP staff to talk about these things

(I also of course think there's a lot I and RP could usefully copy or draw on from elsewhere, and I've indeed already "imported" various things from e.g. CLR and FHI into RP or at least my own work.)

Basically, I'd be excited for lots of orgs and individual researchers to operate as anything on a spectrum from "good RP clones" to "very much their own thing, but remixing good aspects from RP and elsewhere". I think there's a lot of room for this.

I'm also now a guest fund manager at the EA Infrastructure Fund, and the version of me that wears that hat would likewise be excited about funding more people to do that sor tof thing. (That of course doesn't mean that I'd want to fund every application like this, but I'd want to fund some and would be excited to have more such applications coming our way.)

(Again, just writing in a personal capacity.)

*I also have my own in-my-view-useful thoughts on these topics, but even if I had deleted all of those from the conversations and just described RP thinking and processes, I think the conversations would've been quite useful.

Thanks so much Peter!  READI could never compete with Rethink Priorities but we might be interested in some coopetition :) I will send you an email!

Thanks Ozzie, these are good suggestions. To add some thoughts: I think we may benefit from someone building a directory of aspiring freelance consultants .This can help solve coincidence of wants issues (i.e., knowing who wants to hire/be hired) and help provide the scale and critical mass needed for many person consultancies to form and grow. 

It would need to be low effort as now many potential consultants are doing very well in their work lives and don't really have time to engage with EA groups and organisations. Even something like this which we have for the behaviour science community would be a big help to start.  https://www.eac-network.com/ might be worth contacting  as they could be good people to lead something.

Some advanced market commitments (i.e., organisations publicly committing to pay for consulting services if they are offered) might also be helpful. Related to that, some sort of EA wide survey of what consultants orgs need and will pay for might help to catalyse the development of a market. I wonder if RP could do something like that in the next survey round?

RP and others offering incubation support and grants might also help.  The EA infrastructure fund drive probably helps but most people still don't know much about how to set up and run an organisation.  I think that charity entrepreneurship has a good model to learn from in that regard.  You get in, you learn, then if it goes well you will usually get funded.

To give some context: I am one of the people who set up READI in 2019 to potentially  provide behavioural/social science research support and consulting services related to pressing social issues. Our most notable so far is probably the SCRUB project which has been funded (through BehaviourWorks Australia, where three of us work) by the government for over a year. We have also finished two literature reviews on promoting philanthropy and  reducing animal product consumption, both of which are in review for journals.

My experience with that has been that it isn't easy to know what EA orgs want and would pay for without reaching out directly, which is a lot of effort for full time professionals and also quite low efficiency.  It's also hard to know how to effectively structure and run such an org. Hence many of the ideas above.

Thanks for your thoughtful comment!

Re: reluctance. Can you say more about the concern about donor perceptions? E.g. maybe grantmakers like me should be more often nudging grantees with questions like "How could you get more done / move faster by outsourcing some work to consultants/contractors?" I've done that in a few cases but haven't made a consistent effort to signal willingness to fund subcontracts.

What do you mean about approval from a few parties? Is it different than other expenditures?

Re: university rules. Yes, very annoying. BERI is trying to help with that, and there could be more BERIs.

Re: "isolated to Open Phil." Agree that the consultancy model doesn't help much if in practice there's only one client, or just a few — hence my attempt (mostly in the footnotes) to get some sense of how much demand there is for these services outside Open Phil. Of course, with Open Phil being the largest funder in the EA space, many potential clients of EA consultancies are themselves in part funded by Open Phil, but that doesn't seem too problematic so long as Open Phil isn't institutionally opposed to subgranting/subcontracting.

(Even within Open Phil, a bit of robustness could come from multiple teams demanding a particular genre of services, e.g. at least 3 pretty independent teams at Open Phil have contracted Rethink Priorities for analysis work. But still much safer for contractors if there are several truly independent clients.)

Re: prices. Seems like an education issue. If you find you need additional validation for the fact that contractors have good reasons for costing ~1.3x to 2x as much as an employee per hour worked, feel free to point people to this comment. :)

Re: subsidizing. Yes, this would be interesting to think more about. There's even a model like Founders Pledge and Longview where donors fund the service entirely and then the consultant provides the services for free to clients (in this case, donor services to founders and high-net-worth individuals).

I'm struggling to parse "Many contractors that organizations themselves come from those organizations." Could you rephrase?

Definitely agree that understanding the internal needs of clients is difficult. Speaking from the side of someone trying to communicate my needs/desires to various grantees and consultants, it also feels difficult on this end of things. This difficulty is often a major reason to do something in-house even if it would in theory be simpler and more efficient to outsource. E.g. it's a major part of why Open Phil as built a "worldview investigations" team: it's sort-of weird to have a think tank within a grantmaker instead of just funding external think tanks, but it was too hard to communicate to external parties exactly what we needed to make our funding decisions, so the only way forward was to hire that talent internally so we could build up more shared context etc. with the people doing that work. That was very expensive in staff time, but ultimately the only way to get what we needed. But in other cases it should be possible (and has been possible) for clients to communicate what they need to consultants. One person I spoke to recently suggested that programs like RSP could be a good complement to consultancy work because it allows more people to hang out and gain context on how potential future clients (in that case FHI, but also sort-of "veteran hardcore longtermists in general") think about things and what they need.

When you have only one client, being an employee is generally a better deal than being a contractor (with the exception that sometimes they pay significantly more to compensate). See the recent ridesharing contractor debate as an example.

i think that depends hugely on the industry. in software, where i work, everyone i know who is a freelancer prefers to stay that way, even if they work for an extended period for just one customer, and german law (which puts up a number of rules about contractors working for a single customer) is seen as a nuisance by them (though it’s no doubt good for contractors who have less negotiating power).

I agree, the EA Infrastructure Fund seems like a great source of funding for launching potential new EA consultancies!

I don't think that would play to Open Phil's comparative advantages especially well. I think Open Phil should focus on figuring out how to move large amounts of money toward high-ROI work.

If anyone's thinking seriously about doing as Linch suggests and would like to talk about the nuts and bolts of consulting, feel free to get in touch. I've been consulting independently for four years and am happy to share what I know/discuss potential collaborations.

The problem I'm trying to solve (at the top of the post) is that (non-consultancy) EA organizations like Open Phil, for a variety of reasons, can't hire the talent we need to accomplish everything we'd like to accomplish. So when we do manage to hire someone into a specific role, I think their work in that role can be highly valuable, and if they're performing well in that role after the first ~year then my hunch is they should stay in that role for at least a few years. That said, we've had staff leave and become a grantee/similar instead, and I could imagine some staff leaving to become an EA consultant at some point if they think they can accomplish more good that way and/or if they think that's a better fit for them personally.

Another option is if you're an established consultant/independent researcher within the EA sphere and you want to leverage this to start a consultancy group. 

+1 to all Jona writes here - with the caveat that consulting firms like McKinsey or BCG can also help you scope the project and prioritize what’s most important to work on. This of course requires some level of trust (like in all professional services where the client may not know their exact needs), which strengthens the case for using EA consultants at least for pilot projects until norms around using consultants are well-established.

Posting as an individual who is a consultant, not on behalf of my employer

To complement:

I think the discussion would benefit from a more clear distinction between research on the one hand and (strategy) consulting on the other.
Of course, research is often part of a consulting project, but there is a different skillset required in order to a) perform diligent quant. / qual. reserach, or b) strategically steer decisions and projects.

From the discussion and RP's positioning, I observe that there definitely is a need for a) research.

I would be interested in how much there is a need for b) (strategy) consulting. Below is a list my (bold) hypotheses of potential projects that might be interesting to EA-aligned organisations:

- Developing a marketing strategy for NGOs
- Developing a recruitment strategy for NGOs
- Optimizing cost structure of NGOs
- Project management
- Influencing senior decision makers / policy makers
- Facilitating workshops

I would highly appreciate if you could falsify  / verify the need for these types of projects, or complement the list as you see fit - thank you! 

Thanks, I didn't know this!

Thanks! I might use this in the future :)

Yeah, I originally had the same thought, and I considered e.g. web development, event management, legal services, and HR services as not benefiting enough from EA context etc. to be worth the opportunity cost of EA talent, but then several people at multiple organizations said "Actually we've struggled to get what we want from non-EA consultants doing those things. I really wish I could contract EA consultants to do that work instead." So I added them to the list of possibilities for services that EA consultancies could provide.

I'm still not sure which conditions make it worth the opportunity cost of EA talent to provide these kinds of services, but I wanted to list them as possibilities given the feedback I got on earlier drafts of this post.

See also footnote 18.

A related confusion to me is why there is EA comparative advantage in policy/research, like naively you'd expect external policy groups, consultancies, and academia to do a fine job of it. Yet in practice I think many EA orgs have paid academics to investigate questions of interest to EAs, and while there's a lot of interesting work, the hit rate is lower than what we might naively have expected (moderate confidence, lukeprog and others can correct me on whether this gestalt view is correct). 

So maybe this is a useful reference class to consider. 

Your question:

Why is it reasonable to assume the best people to hire for web development, marketing or events management would be EAs rather than a standard web dev org?

Answer from the post:

Web development projects for which EA context and habits are helpful, e.g. for new EA discussion platforms, forecasting/calibration software, or interactive visualizations of core EA ideas.

I think the emphasis is on the relationship with the EA community. You do not need to be an EA-dedicated consultancy team, but you should have some group dedicated to serving EA interests.

I believe this is what all consultancy firms do. They take care of their customer organisations, by becoming familiar with the expectation, aspirations, and goals. (And it is easier  if the people carrying out the work share the same aspirations of the organisations they serve,  just because they are likely to be more receptive)

Here, the post is only asking new or old consultancy to give some attention to the EA community.

Other Rethink Priorities clients (including at Open Phil) might disagree, but my hunch is that if anything, higher quality and lower quantity is the way to go, because a client like me has less context on consultants doing some project than I do on someone I've directly managed (internally) on research projects for 2 years. So e.g. Holden vetted my Open Phil work pretty closely for 2 years and now feels less need to do so because he has a sense of what my strengths and weaknesses are, where he can just defer to me and where he should make sure to develop his own opinion, etc. That's part of the massive cost of hiring, training, and managing internal talent, but it eventually gets you to a place where you don't need to be so nervous about major crippling flaws (of some kinds) in someone's work. But a major purpose of outsourcing analysis work is to get some information you need without needing to first have built up months or years of deep context with them. But how can I trust the work of someone I have so little context with? I think "go kinda overboard on legibility / reasoning transparency" and "go kinda overboard on quality / thoroughness / vetting" are two major strategies, especially when the client is far more time-constrained than funding constrained (as Open Phil is).

Another read of this is maybe RP is leaving a bunch of gains on the table by not trying to be higher quality. 

I think right now (as you know) while we'd like to have higher quality (and we expect to improve naturally somewhat by gaining more experience both as individual researchers and in research management), we're prioritizing organizational resources more towards scalability/output than quality.

I'm also interested in whether this is mistaken. 

For example, David and Jason's report on charter cities was completed in 100 hours, a reasonable fraction of which was extra legwork for external writeup/following up with affected parties, after the original report was delivered to Open Phil. My impression is that the bulk of the work was done on a fairly short calendar time cycle too, in ways that may be hard for external parties to replicate. But naively the report would still be useful to Open Phil and cost-effective to fund if it took 200 hours to complete and 3x the calendar time.

Just to clarify, the 100 hours was actually just for the original report and doesn't include any of the extra leg work for the public version, because I forgot to update that time taken estimate in the public version. The extra work for the public version was an additional 10-15 hours of work from the two of us, but there was also work from others reviewing the report. This extra work took place over 5 weeks of calendar time.

This is now ready for proofreading for anyone who's interested.  I've left a handful of questions as comments on the doc that I'd be particularly interested in opinions/support on. Part 1 is here - there are five parts, each part linking to the next:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WbMzIQBNKw_2RN0O5hNM_mLuRSnlWHYxcOMxqXNgiYI/edit

just adding to this, there is the ea consulting network whose members are all, well, ea-aligned consultants, though i don’t know exactly what competencies most people have.

=> https://www.eac-network.com/

Thanks for the great discussion on this thread! I noticed that there hasn't been much mention of development consulting firms that fall somewhere between pure management and EA. IDInsight in particular is pretty EA-aligned. Others like Bridgespan and Dalberg also work with social sector clients. There is still a lot of room for development consulting being more "EA-first" and wonder if there an opportunity to orient existing firms to EA principles. 

Agree. We already organized several events with 180° as part of the effective altruism and consulting network (as well as several 180° consultants supporting us to build the network). I believe there is room for more collaboration and synergies as people were super excited about the EA mindset