One suggestion: For participants currently in grantmaking roles, I wonder if there would be value in having them fill out a quick survey at the outset about their practices, then readminister the same survey two and then five years post-participation in an attempt to measure the extent to which participation affected actual grantmaking behavior (or at least the participant's perception thereof).
This sounds like a fantastic concept! I can't wait to see how this gets refined and scaled up to improve how more major foundations go about making grants (maybe even $100M/Year+ Foundations).
I had a quick question about the types of foundations involved in your pilot. What kind of limits, if any, did they have on where they can disburse funds or what kind of people (or animals) they can aid?
A lot of foundations I've seen are only able to make grants in a particular state or city, usually in a developed country where $1 fundamentally goes less far than giving to an international charity. Did you end up having conflicts between the participants' desire to maximize impact, and any limitations they might have been subject to?
Charity Entrepreneurship (CE) has run our first foundation training program. This program looked less like traditional philanthropic advising, and more like our classic charity incubation program. Instead of recommending specific charities, we aimed to teach skills that would allow foundation leaders to work as informed, independent, full-time grantmakers, equipped with a suite of decision-making tools. Despite seeing many areas where we could improve the program, we consider the pilot to have been very successful. We are excited to run this program again and believe it could provide impact comparable to that of our charity incubation program.
At the beginning of 2022 we announced that CE would be running a pilot training program for grantmaking foundations. The pilot program finished several months ago, and so we wanted to follow up on how it went and what we learned.
Five foundations (represented by six people) participated in the pilot. Once these foundations have launched and scaled, their combined annual donations are expected to be approximately $60M/yr. Participants had a wide range of grantmaking experience (from none to many years), foundation maturity (from yet-to-exist to fairly established), EA knowledge (from novice to expert) and expected annual dollars granted (from $100k to >$10M).
The program was a pilot, and as a result it was quite rough around the edges. Despite this, we think the program was very successful! From our perspective, the aspects of the program that went particularly well were the group discussions, the mock grantmaking exercises and the final project at the end.
We circulated an anonymous feedback form after the program to better understand how it went from the participants’ perspectives:
It’s too early to estimate the impact of the program pilot with much confidence, however our early attempts suggest that this program generates impact that is in the same order of magnitude as our Incubation Program, if not significantly higher. These estimates were generated by comparing scenarios; we compared how much and how impactfully the participants plan to donate after having undertaken the program with how they would have donated had they not participated.
We have decided to continue the foundation program in 2023, developing the pilot into something more polished. We plan to run the program over a longer period of time (~10 weeks) to make the workload less intensive. The new format will be closer in form to a book club, with weekly readings and one weekly project, which will be discussed together as a group. The majority of the program will be remote, with ~one week in person. Our new handbook, How to Launch a High-Impact Foundation, will be improved and published as both the program’s primary resource and for the general public’s consumption.
Our vision is for a thriving community to be built off the back of the foundation program. As the alumni support one another and share their experiences, we hope the network will grow into a valuable ecosystem. The graduates from our charity incubation program not only benefit from our ongoing support, but from relationships formed with a much wider group of impact-minded people; we hope for something similar for the foundations. For example many of our alumni became part of the recently launched mental health funding circle and we can imagine many more circles like this in the future.
Whether you are just starting out, or have many years experience, the 2023 Foundation Program can likely add value to your grantmaking. It is suitable for those who want to maximize the impact of their foundation in the future but could use a community and the structures to do so. It is a particularly good fit for those who want to be highly involved in grantmaking or in setting the direction for the foundation and hiring program officers to execute on it. To express your interest and discuss further you can email [email protected]
We are hiring a Programs Officer to join the department that creates program content, project manages and implements our programs and leads their continuous improvement (for both our Charity Incubation Program and our Foundation Program). An excellent first Programs Officer hire will allow us to scale from one to three programs each year and to continue to improve our program quality, which will (in expectation) more than double the impact that Charity Entrepreneurship can have in the world.
Full job description here.
Apply here before 1st February (it only takes ~30 minutes).
Sounds great!
One question I have is about the extent to which this is counterfactually better than just advising foundations to dump money into GiveWell charities; or, if one thinks GiveWell is too risk adverse or too short-termist, there are other cause/intervention/charity evaluation organizations out there like CE or Open Phil or 80k etc.
I would be fairly sceptical that smaller grantmaking organizations will be as accurate at identifying cost-effective or promising opportunities relative to the established organizations like GiveWell (who have big teams and a process that has been refined and improved over the years), or even compared to smaller organizations like CE/HLI/CEARCH doing cause prioritization (whose research teams are presumably by people whose interests/abilities meant they self-selected into cause prioritization work, rather than people who by good/bad luck are put into a position where they have to disburse e.g. one's inheritance, or the family office funds).
Having spoken to some EA-sympathetic family offices, this is basically what they've said (i.e. they largely prefer to outsource the decision-making, subject to non-philanthropic/political considerations like giving locally etc).
In any case, keep up the great work, as always.
Thanks for the thoughtful question Joel!
I'll take this question in three parts:
(1) Why not just give the money to strong existing foundations whose values match your own?
It contributes to worldview diversification within EA, and reduces the chance that important cause areas go unfunded (more on this below).
The world is big - there are a lot of problems to solve, a lot of potential solutions to consider funding, and a lot that needs to be learned to do this well. As a result, most foundations make the wise decision of limiting their scope by some combination of cause area, geography and recipient organization size/maturity (e.g. GiveWell focuses on mature global health organizations that can absorb many millions in funding). In aggregate, the scopes of these foundations do not sufficiently cover all of the most important areas (see Joey's post on specific funding gaps for example). So we need more organizations and more grantmakers working on figuring out what to fund!
I'd love to see new foundations started that address some subject matter gaps, e.g. "GiveWell, but for policy interventions" or "GiveWell, but for family planning". I'd also love to see some foundations started that fill functional niches within the funding landscape, e.g. a foundation that specialises in regranting (i.e. where their comparative advantage is in vetting people, rather than projects).
(2) Shouldn't we be skeptical of smaller/newer grantmaking organizations because it's hard to compete with the likes of GiveWell on accuracy?
(3) Shouldn't people who have ended up in the position of disbursing funds by random chance (e.g. through inheritance) just defer to others to make the grantmaking decisions?
Thanks Joel, I think your arguments are good, but on balance I think more EA aligned foundations can be a good thing.
As another kind of side note in general I think EA might need to be careful in the long term about the (almost) monopoly or at least high market share Givewell has on development focused cause prioritisation at the moment. You're right that their processes and institutional knowledge makes it hard to imagine anyone else could do it better (although organisations like HLI are trying which is great). It's interesting that something like 70% of the money given by CEA members went to a Givewell fund. I think there is inherent value in managing risk and potential error through foundation diversification but that is obviously arguable (this has been discussed before in forum posts). Imagine (hypothetically) that there was a corruption or sex scandal within Givewell and the overwhelming damage that might do the EA movement. That might be mitigated if there were a bunch more big orgs. I think it's healthy to have more diversity than we do at the moment.
That strategy is contingent on the foundation's donor being open to spending money on the types of programs GiveWell (or another elite evaluator) recommends. Many are not. If they are not, then the expected value of that approach is zero. Rather, we need to meet those donors closer to where they are and help them more effectively achieve their own goals (with some nudges toward highly effective organizations, to be sure). They have lots of other people who are happy to give them free advice on how to spend their millions, and "you should jettison all your goals/thoughts and adopt ours 100% instead" is unlikely to help win market share in the market of already-funded foundations.
For those donors, say that these foundations will be handing out $60MM per year as per the report, and that the training increased the mean cost-effectiveness of their donations from 0.1 GiveWells to 0.2 GiveWells (i.e., it only brought them 11% of the distance from where they were to full GiveWell). I think there's a decent chance that the mentored foundations will devote at least a few percent to GiveWell-level charities on average, and that the rest of their portfolio will move in a somewhat more cost-effective direction. That produces an amount of good equivalent to $6MM in new funds that would have blown on something totally useless going to GiveWell instead. And that's in a single year. So even if you think the effect size is much more modest, 0.1 GiveWells to 0.12 GiveWells would still be $1.2MM GiveWell-equivalents every year.
Compared to the marginal cost of re-running this program, that seems like a great investment.