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In 2020, the Centre for Effective Altruism hired Luke to run Giving What We Can (GWWC), and Jonas to lead EA Funds.
We think that they have both made strong progress in the past year. For instance, Luke revamped GWWC’s website and saw the number of new pledges triple compared to the same period in 2019. Meanwhile Jonas improved EA Funds’ capacity to make more effective grants and addressed some issues affecting donor satisfaction.[1] In addition to the above, we closed EA Grants, redirecting applicants to EA Funds.
As planned, both EA Funds and GWWC now operate independently of my supervision as Executive Director of CEA, while continuing to receive operational support from CEA and oversight from our board. This is similar to 80,000 Hours’ position relative to CEA: they make decisions independently and have their own leadership, but CEA provides operational support and they are legally part of the same entity.
We are delighted that these projects now have the freedom to grow independently, while CEA is able to focus on nurturing the community’s discussion spaces.
As mentioned in our public plans for 2020:
In 2019, Giving What We Can members logged over $20m in donations to the charities that they believe to be most effective, and 528 people took a 10% lifetime pledge, bringing the year-end total to 4,454 members. EA Funds facilitated grantmaking of $8.5m through the four main funds, as well as $3.4m to other effective charities.
I think that both of these programs are important for EA because:
- They direct a significant amount of money to effective charities.
- They provide an opportunity for individuals to take important, concrete actions based on EA principles.
However, these projects have a fairly different focus from CEA’s other projects (which focus on community engagement rather than charitable donations), and we think that with more focus and staff time they could achieve more.
We'd like to move towards a state where these projects have the latitude and resources to accomplish more, and where CEA can focus on a narrower range of projects. Over the last few months, I’ve been working with trustees and staff to plan for the future of these projects, using surveys of users and members to inform our thinking.
We’ll initially search for someone who can lead an independent Giving What We Can [...] If we find a leader for Giving What We Can, we’ll help to onboard and advise them, and we will continue to provide operational support to both EA Funds and Giving What We Can for the foreseeable future. Once we’ve completed our hiring round for the Giving What We Can director, we will consider focusing more on plans for hiring an executive for and/or spinning out EA Funds.
Giving What We Can (GWWC) aims to create a culture where people are inspired to give more, and to give more effectively.
This year:
2020 Cost: $61,000
FTEs: 1.0 (from Q3 2020)
2021 Budget: $246,000[2]
We hired Luke in July 2020. We have been impressed with his results, as well as with the energy, nuance, and experience he brings to the role. In October, he passed probation and began to report to CEA’s board, thus spinning GWWC out of core CEA.
From January to October, we:
Many of these numbers have increased more rapidly since Luke joined in June (e.g. in his first three months, the rate of new pledges tripled).
We are relatively confident that the member retention rate is somewhere between 10% and 86%, and we expect it is more than 50%.
We’re planning to get more data by sending reminders for people to update their donation dashboards, and by working with other donation platforms (e.g. EA Australia) to get a better sense of members’ giving.
GWWC aims to increase the number of pledged members who have reported giving 10% of their income to effective charities in the last year. Luke is currently focused on a pledge drive, and will be making more detailed plans for 2021 in the new year.
Effective Altruism Funds (EA Funds) aims to be an easy and effective way to donate.
This year, we hired Jonas to lead the program, addressed key donor complaints, and saw strong growth across a number of metrics.
2020 Cost: $190,000
FTEs: 2.0
2021 Budget: $229K baseline, $280K expansion
We hired Jonas in July 2020. We have been impressed with Jonas’ grantmaking judgement, written communication, and ability to improve Funds’ processes. In December, he passed probation and began to report to CEA’s board, thus spinning EA Funds out of core CEA.
The most recent survey results (N=504) suggest that people’s average rating (on a 1-10 scale) for the question “How likely are you to recommend EA Funds to a friend or colleague with interests similar to your own?” was 8.5, up from 7.1 (N=535) at the beginning of the year. However, last year’s question asked about a “friend or colleague”, while this year’s asked about “a friend or colleague with interests similar to your own”.
Donor satisfaction with the actual grantmaking (rather than the donation interface, etc.) is 8.2 for the Global Health and Development Fund and Animal Welfare Fund, 7.5 for the Long-Term Future Fund (LTFF), and 7.3 for the EA Infrastructure Fund.
Key criticisms in 2019 were that:
The last three reports from the LTFF received less negative feedback than previous reports did.
Increased donation value to the four Funds by 45% to $6.5m. Increased donation volume to other organizations (via regrants) by 64% to $1.9m.
New donor signups, year on year
The number of new donors using the platform has grown markedly this year (as of June), likely driven by greater cross-promotion through other CEA websites (primarily Giving What We Can) and referral traffic from a number of EA-affiliated blogs.
We also:
We are working to make more high-quality grants by generating more applications and improving the evaluation process.
We received a record number of LTFF and EA Infrastructure Fund applications. For example, the LTFF received 114 applications, versus a previous record of 91. However, the number of high-quality applications seems to be increasing more slowly, if at all. We contributed to this growth by adding more prominent calls to apply on our website and the EA Forum, and by reaching out to promising applicants even before they applied.
Jonas gave more hands-on advice to fund managers, which seems to have helped to improve grant outcomes in a few cases (it’s hard to share the details, which are personal).
We began to survey fund managers and grantees about their experience, and changed application forms and processes to better suit their needs. Overall satisfaction among grantseekers was 8.3/10 (N=26). Among accepted grantees (N=14), it was 9.4/10.
Immediate plans:
In the longer term, we will aim to decide between the following three models for EA Funds:
If none of these projects seems particularly promising, it’s likely that we will maintain our current strategy without investing in growth.
This program was closed in early 2020. We now direct applicants to EA Funds. We are not budgeting for any further grants in 2021.
Grants in 2020 mostly honored commitments from prior years. We also made some small bridging grants to organizations waiting to receive funding from other donors.
2020 Cost: $76,000
2021 Budget: None
We think that this constitutes significant progress towards addressing two of CEA’s main past mistakes: running too many (disparate) projects without a clear overall mission, and underinvesting in Giving What We Can. We plan to update our mistakes page accordingly.
More importantly, we are delighted to see the progress that these projects have made over the last year, and we think that they are now set up well to continue to grow their impact in the future. We think that this will lead many more people to commit to giving effectively, and give those people an opportunity to use those donations to fund high-impact grants.
There also was a 45% increase in the amount of money donated via Funds. We think some of the growth at GWWC and EA Funds was due to other factors — such as background growth of the EA movement and Sam Harris discussing the GWWC pledge on his podcast — but we are also inclined to attribute a significant share to the efforts of the incoming executive directors. ↩︎
Both EA Funds and GWWC currently have strong reserves, so they are not fundraising right now. Next year, they will begin to accept donations (via the CEA legal entity), and to fundraise independently of CEA (operational entity). ↩︎
Based on an estimated counterfactual value of $73,000 for a pledge ↩︎
This is really exciting. Especially the sucess of Giving What We Can over the last year - suggests there is a lot of scope for effective growth here.
On the EA funds, are things like the 'guidelines for avoiding harmful grants' going to be visible to the public? Can see pros and cons to transparency about working documents like, that but I lean in favour (and I am curious to see).
I personally am very much in favor of sharing internal documents, both to increase transparency and accountability to donors, and also to help others who are running similar projects and generally advance EA discourse. So my current plan is to publish these guidelines. That said, there's some chance I end up concluding that preventing misunderstandings and responding to questions/comments is too much work (e.g., with these guidelines, I worry that people may come away thinking we're more risk-averse than we actually are), so I'm not sure whether I'll actually publish them.