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!
One way to BOTEC this is by looking at how much time it saves us and what can be done with that time. 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.
As discussed in our room for more funding post, we currently believe we could conduct more active grantmaking to a value of $2M. If we assume that with 15h, a more senior staff member whose time we saved by hiring can generate an active grantmaking opportunity that costs $200k, and assuming its cost-effectiveness is $1.4 per DALY ( I took the RP CCM DALY estimates (which you helpfully listed here in DALY/k$, and I reversed to be $/DALY), where the Cage-free Chicken Campaign was $1.4 per DALY.), that means 142k DALYs difference. In the 66h difference between candidates, we get 4.4 such opportunities, so 624k DALYs are lost due to hiring the 2nd best candidate. At $1.4 per DALY, that's ~$873k.
Therefore, if the 2nd best candidate is half as good as the first, we would need $873k more to offset it. This could be a conservative estimate, because a half-as-good staff member might simply not generate as good evaluations no matter how much management time they get. Or it could be liberal because we may need more than 15h to generate the next marginal active grantmaking opportunity, or the 2nd best candidate could be more than half as good as the first. I think a range of $500k-$800k is reasonable.
That was a fun exercise; thanks for your question!