The EA Animal Welfare Fund (AWF) invites you to Ask Us Anything. You can ask questions from now until next Tuesday morning, December 24. We will stop responding at 2:00 PM CET on Tuesday.
About AWF
The AWF’s mission is to alleviate the suffering of non-human animals globally through effective grantmaking. Since its founding in 2017, AWF has distributed $23.3M across 347 grants. This year, we’ve distributed $3.7M across 51 grants.
You can read about our 2024 year-in-review post and our request for more funding analysis to learn more about our recent work and future goals.
Why Now?
We believe now is an especially good time for an AMA because:
- AWF entered a new stage of growth, with a new full-time chair.
- We recently won the Forum’s 2024 Donation Election (alongside Rethink Priorities and Shrimp Welfare Project).
- We are seeking additional funding during Giving Season to continue funding promising new opportunities in animal welfare.
- We were recommended by Giving What We Can as one of the two best regrantors in the animal welfare space (alongside ACE’s Movement Building Grants), and by Open Philanthropy Farm Animal Welfare as the best donation opportunity for individual donors interested in animal welfare.
- We currently have an open application for AWF fund managers with a deadline of December 29 and an expression of interest form for a potential future role related to fund development.
We are open to questions from interested donors, applicants, past grantees, people interested in jobs at AWF, and others interested in animal welfare.
Our team answering questions is:
- Karolina Sarek, Chair
- Neil Dullaghan, Fund Manager
- Zoë Sigle, Fund Manager
We look forward to hearing your questions!
The number, is the difference between the first and second candidate in $ cost per h saved (given their salary and how much time they save). The difference would be $66 per h. Later, I accidentally omitted the $ sign in the text, and that indeed created a mistake in further calculations. It turns out that making BOTEC late in the evening is not a good idea, in my case. :) Thank you for catching that error!
To refine the calculations by fixing the error you spotted and adding more considerations:
I say earlier.
“Let's assume the 2nd best candidate is half as good as the 1st and therefore saves us half as much time. Instead of saving us 35h per week (40h - 5h management, meetings, review etc.), they save us 17.5h (requiring much more management and oversight to get the same results, which I actually think is conservative), for the same up to $120k spent on salary and benefits.
In the first case, we get 35 × 52 workweeks in a year = 1,820h, and in the second 910h. The cost-benefit analysis is $65 per hour for the first candidate and $131 per hour for the second, with a difference of $66 per hour.”
I was aiming to calculate the difference between the first and second candidates. The first would save 1820h (35h × 52 workweeks in a year), the second 910h (35h x 52 workweeks in a year).
The cost-benefit ratio of that time saved is: for the first, $65 per h ($120000/1820 hours saved per year), and for the second, it is $131 per h ($120000/910h saved), so the difference is $66 per h.
1820-910=910h difference in a year
And each hour, for the 2nd candidate, cost us $66 more than for the 1st.
910h difference, at $66 per h, the difference in cost is $60060.
Indeed, in that time, a senior fund manager could in theory, create 60 active grantmaking opportunities (910h/15h) at a cost of $60060.
So $60060/60 = $1001 difference in cost between candidates for generating one opportunity.
But you are right; we cannot generate 60 active grantmaking opportunities in a year, no matter the time spent. If we had an unlimited time (something I didn’t assume in the RFMF estimate), I think we could generate more than $2M estimated in the RFMF post, but indeed not 60 opportunities. My guess would be somewhere around 20-30. If we take those numbers and follow your reasoning, there is room for saving from 300h (=20*15) to 450h (=30*15), which could be achieved by hiring a candidate at least 16.4% (=300/(35*52)) to 24.7% (=450/(35*52)) as good as the best. While we have to remember to take into account the higher cost of generating that opportunity in the case of the 2ns candidate.
A significant limitation to that estimate is that we assume no increase in time when generating the next marginal opportunity. In fact, I expect that each marginal opportunity we generate will require a higher time investment to generate, simply because it will be harder to come up with ideas, find the right people who are not already busy, etc. So let me introduce this refinement to our estimate. For example, the first 10 opportunities may take 15h per idea, the next 10 can take 25h, and probably the next 10 would take significantly more, like 40h. If we take those numbers and the range for the number of potencial opportunities (20-30), the total time to generate 20 opportunities would be 400h (=(10*15)+(10*25)), and the time to generate 30 opportunities would be 800h (=(10*15h)+(10*25h)+(10*40h)). So the potencial of saving 400h-800h is generated by hiring a candidate at least 21.9% (=400/(35*52)) to 42.9% (=800/(35*52) as good as the best. While remembering that generating those opportunities by the 2nd best candidates would have a worse cost-benefit ratio. We also have to remember that in this case, we may need more than $2M for active grantmaking, which further complicates calculating the "better candidate to more funding trade-off".
However, I will stop this estimate now, because the time for the AMA is running out and I have to get ready for the beginning of the holiday that starts in Poland today. :) If you have any comments about the calculation above, let me know. If I happen to have some free time after the holiday, I may swing back to finish and further improve the estimate, but I cannot commit to that, especially if it would trade off against vetting and selecting the best candidates in the current hiring round ;) Thanks for this exchange and all your questions, Vasco!