"We presently have to turn down some large commissions due to lack of staff capacity, and lack of funds in place to expand our team (or to maintain the team at its current size)."
Do you charge for your commissions? I'm struggling to get my head around why the ability to take commissions could be constrained by both lack of funding and staff capacity.
Thoughts I have about what might explain it / what you might mean:
you don't actually charge and so more commissions just means more work for free. (Or you accept low paid commissions.)
commissions don't always come at convenient times so sometimes there are bursts of too much work to do / too many requests, compared to some quieter periods where researchers have to focus more on their own independently generated projects.
you have both the research talent and the funding, it's just that there's a time delay for hiring, onboarding etc before you can convert both components into increased capacity.
Clarification on which of these, if any, seems closest to RP's situation would be welcome. Thanks!
The short answer is simply that the vast majority of projects requested of us are highly time sensitive (i.e. orgs want them completed within very fast timeline), so we need to have the staff already in place if we’re to take them on, as it’s not possible to hire staff in time to complete them even if they are offering more than enough funding (e.g. 6 or 7 figures) to make it happen.
This is particularly unfortunate, since we want to grow our team to take on more of these projects, and have repeatedly turned down many highly skilled applicants who could do valuable work, exclusively due to lack of funding.
Still, I would definitely encourage people to reach out to us to see whether we have capacity for projects.
Thanks for writing this up! Really appreciate the clear and transparent writeup across hiring, output, and financial numbers, and think that more orgs (including Manifold!) should strive for this level of clarity. One thing I would have been curious to see is how much money came in from each funding source, haha.
I set up a prediction market to see how RP will do against its funding goals:
Very cool, thanks, Austin! We will publish another post on the Forum with updated funding goals by mid-November at the latest. I'm curious to see how our plans and ambitions might have changed by then. [Note: I'm working as Rethink Priorities' Director of Development.]
I'm a bit confused by this bit:
"We presently have to turn down some large commissions due to lack of staff capacity, and lack of funds in place to expand our team (or to maintain the team at its current size)."
Do you charge for your commissions? I'm struggling to get my head around why the ability to take commissions could be constrained by both lack of funding and staff capacity.
Thoughts I have about what might explain it / what you might mean:
Clarification on which of these, if any, seems closest to RP's situation would be welcome. Thanks!
The short answer is simply that the vast majority of projects requested of us are highly time sensitive (i.e. orgs want them completed within very fast timeline), so we need to have the staff already in place if we’re to take them on, as it’s not possible to hire staff in time to complete them even if they are offering more than enough funding (e.g. 6 or 7 figures) to make it happen.
This is particularly unfortunate, since we want to grow our team to take on more of these projects, and have repeatedly turned down many highly skilled applicants who could do valuable work, exclusively due to lack of funding.
Still, I would definitely encourage people to reach out to us to see whether we have capacity for projects.
Thanks for writing this up! Really appreciate the clear and transparent writeup across hiring, output, and financial numbers, and think that more orgs (including Manifold!) should strive for this level of clarity. One thing I would have been curious to see is how much money came in from each funding source, haha.
I set up a prediction market to see how RP will do against its funding goals:
Very cool, thanks, Austin!
We will publish another post on the Forum with updated funding goals by mid-November at the latest. I'm curious to see how our plans and ambitions might have changed by then.
[Note: I'm working as Rethink Priorities' Director of Development.]
FYI this link gives me an "Access Denied" error.
It should link to the section above, we'll fix it. Thanks!