Bio

I currently lead EA funds.

Before that, I worked on improving epistemics in the EA community at CEA (as a contractor), as a research assistant at the Global Priorities Institute, on community building, and Global Health Policy.

Unless explicitly stated otherwise, opinions are my own, not my employer's.

You can give me positive and negative feedback here.

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calebp
· 2y ago · 1m read

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Answer by calebpDec 13, 202219
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Hi Markus,

For context I run EA Funds, which includes the EAIF (though the EAIF is chaired by Max Daniel not me). We are still paying out grants to our grantees — though we have been slower than usual (particularly for large grants). We are also still evaluating applications and giving decisions to applicants (though this is also slower than usual). 

We have communicated this to the majority of our grantees, but if you or anyone else reading this urgently needs a funding decision (in the next two weeks), please email caleb [at] effectivealtruismfunds [dot] org with URGENT in the subject line, and I will see what I can do. Please also include:

  • Please also include the name of the application (from previous funds email subject lines),
  • the reason the request is urgent,
  • latest decision and payout dates that would work for you - such that if we can’t make these dates there is little reason to make the grant.

You can also apply to one of Open Phil’s programs; in particular, Open Philanthropy’s program for grantees affected by the collapse of the FTX Future Fund may be particularly of note to people applying to EA Funds due to the FTX crash.

I'm interested in examples of this if you have them.

Oh, I thought you might have suggested the live thing before, my mistake. Maybe I should have just given the 90-day figure above.

(That approach seems reasonable to me)

I answered the first questions above in an edit of the original comment. I’m pretty sure when I re-ran the analysis with decided in last 30 days it didn’t change the results significantly (though I’ll try and recheck this later this week - in our current setup it’s a bit more complicated to work out than the stats I gave above).

I also checked to make sure that only looking at resolved applications and only looking at open applications didn’t make a large difference to the numbers I gave above (in general, the differences were 0-10 days).

Oh, right - I was counting "never receiving a decision but letting us know" as a decision. In this case, the number we'd give is days until the application was withdrawn.

We don't track the reason for withdrawals in our KPIs, but I am pretty sure that process length is a reason for a withdrawal 0-5% of the time.

I might be missing why this is important, I would have thought that if we were making an error it would overestimate those times - not underestimate them.

I'm not sure sorry, I don't have that stat in front of me. I may be able to find it in a few days.

Empirically, I don't think that this has happened very much. We have a "withdrawn by applicant status", which would include this, but the status is very rarely used.

In any case, the numbers above will factor those applications in, but I would guess that if we didn't, the numbers would decrease by less than a day.

We do have a few processes that are designed to do this (some of which are doing some of the things you mentioned above). Most of the long delays are fairly uncorrelated (e.g. complicated legal issue, a bug in our application tracker ...).

I think it could be good to put these number on our site. I liked your past suggestion of having live data, though it's a bit technically challenging to implement - but the obvious MVP (as you point out) is to have a bunch of stats on our site. I'll make a note to add some stats (though maintaining this kind of information can be quite costly, so I don't want to commit to doing this).

In the meantime, here are a few numbers that I quickly put together (across all of our funds).

Grant decision turnaround times (mean, median):

  • applied in the last 30 days = 14 days, 15 days 
    • this is pretty volatile as it includes applications that haven't yet closed
  • applied in the last 60 days = 23 days, 20 days
  • applied in the last 90 days = 25 days, 20 days

When I last checked our (anonymous) feedback form, the average score for [satisfaction of evaluation process] (I can't quite remember the exact question) was ~4.5/5. 

(edit: just found the stats - these are all out of 5)

  • Overall satisfaction with application process: 4.67
  • Overall satisfaction with processing time: 4.58
  • Evaluation time: 4.3
  • Communications with evaluators: 4.7

I'm not sure that these stats tell the whole story. There are cases where we (or applicants) miss emails or miscommunicate - but the frequency of events like this is difficult to report quickly and also accounts for the majority of negative experiences (according to our feedback form and my own analysis).
 

On (b), I really would like us to be quicker - and more importantly, more reliable. A few very long-tail applications make the general grantee experience much worse. The general stages in our application process are:

Applicant submits application -> application is assigned to a fund manager -> fund manager evaluates the application (which often involves back and forth with the applicant, checking references etc.) -> other fund managers vote on the application -> fund chair reviews evaluation -> application is reviewed by external advisors -> fund chair gives decision to grantee (pending legal review)

There's also a really high volume of grants and increasingly few "obvious" rejections. E.g. the LTFF right now has over > 100 applications in its pipeline, and in the last 30 days < 10% of applications were obvious rejections).

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