Hi! There's no labels on the slider bar so it's initially unclear which side is agree vs disagree.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/sciwrite is a great course for someone looking to make their writing clearer.

I do believe that, from a purely expected-impact-maximising perspective, CG should scale up faster than they are currently doing by directing more of their money from GiveWell charities -> fundraising organisations for GiveWell charities. There's a whole bunch of opportunities above 1x they are intentionally missing out on, and also opportunities above their 5x funding bar they are trying to create and then intentionally miss out on. I believe that their current limit here is primarily reputational, and that altruism at this scale is not an efficient market.

The reputational considerations being that CG does not want to be seen using too much of its global health allocation paying for fundraisers, because someone could write a hitpiece on "a billionaire wants you to give money to help the extreme poor but won't give any himself".

Anyone who is not CG is not bound by the reputational considerations of CG, and can take advantage of a significant arbitrage opportunity.

I am confident that CG running more RFPs, committing multi-year scale-up funding, branching out into diverse initiatives, and other such things with its increased EGI budget allocation is a very clear sign that it believes there is both high impact and absorbency here. And knowing that their previous RoI has been 5x, I doubt this one will end up substantially lower. I reckon they'll use about the same judging criteria, the pot just won't run out so fast. Which means that I do think funding an EGI funded by CG is more cost-effective than GiveWell.

£5x and £5y refer to only money moved by fundraising in that year (or in the case of a pledge-based organisation, to pledges collected in that year multiplied by the estimated future money moved from a pledge). I believe this is standard for an organisation reporting its giving multiplier.

They do not account for total overall impact in the year (of a mature effective giving organisation), which would also need to account for a whole bunch of other things like

• The intrinsic value of having a stable effective giving organisation next year as a place to put money with a substantial giving multiplier
• The organisation acting as an entry point to the EA community and people who see an effective giving advert and get into EA for effective giving reasons then going on to make career changes
• People who give effectively turning up to EA meetups and being great sources of career networking and advice, improving the value of the meetup.
• People who start by giving effectively through an organisation, then transition to earning-to-give in a way that the organisation doesn't capture.
• Any formal or on-the-job training in doing effective fundraising the organisation provides its staff or volunteers, who then may leave to work at another effective giving organisation.
• Positive reputational effects on the EA brand from advertisement of doing a fairly well-regarded politically neutral activity (though plenty of people don't want to donate to the Against Malaria Foundation, you would be somewhat hard-pressed to find anyone who is pro-malaria and thinks someone who donates to AMF is evil).

I think certain effective giving organisations also have large impact through these fuzzier things too. Though it's hard to measure, effective giving organisations that involve a significant amount of volunteer coordination and thus training delivery, or that reach larger numbers of people (giving smaller amounts per person) so introduce more people to the concepts of EA, seem like they'd do more on the fuzzy impact side. Whereas paying a few staff who already know how to fundraise well to pitch at millionaires, less so.

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I think CoGi have previously left a lot of impact on the table by not funding the expansion of effective giving enough (while consistently directing a lot of their money to GiveWell, implying they would have wanted to do so if they'd known they should be diverting more of that to incubating effective giving). The time between the pivot to careers in 2017 until the FTX crash in 2022 when the EA community narrative was "we're talent-constrained not funding-constrained" was a massive chokepoint for effective giving. Check out https://coefficientgiving.org/funds/effective-giving-and-careers/#featured-grants and look by year - before and after 2022 is a huge difference in grant allocations to effective giving organisations.

And if that chokepoint hadn't have happened we'd be a hugely different and probably much bigger and better EA community today. (To be clear, I don't think it was at all obvious at the time that incubating effective giving was a good strategy! It's only become so in hindsight.)

Even now I think we could scale up faster (and hugely welcome this scale-up post). But I understand that CoGi has a certain amount it wishes to allocate, and its strategy to maximise impact is allocating that in such a way as to create clear high-giving-multiplier funding gaps for other GiveWell-aligned donors to be able to step in and fill.

A great reply!

I'll note CoGi has a different funding philosophy for early stage funding, where it will often provide 100% of funding for a few years to allow the testing and development of new strategies. This talk is specifically about mature effective giving organisations.

It is true that the 50% of funding applied by CoGi across years for scale-up may be more useful to the organisation establishing itself, and thus ultimately higher-impact taking into account uncertain future effects. (Indeed I assume that's why CoGi does this).

However, it's still true that if an organisation raised £5x for effective charities this year at an operations cost of £x, its marginal effect on its yearly fundraising total of you giving it £y could be greater than £5y due to economies of scale. (It's just that the effect of CoGi giving it its first £z for the year is also greater than £5z due to future effects).

If one is willing to tolerate uncertainty in one's giving, long time horizons, and a significant evaluation burden, you can probably do better by signing up to the Meta Charity Funding Circle and hashing out which organisations could make best use of startup and core scale-up funding that don't already have it, at which point you really are looking for highest-impact otherwise-unfunded opportunities, so the evaluation burden to find and fund them gets large. If you're not, then picking something CoGi funds at 50% and donating to its operations costs is a great way to "save 5 lives for £4000 rather than 1".

I will present a mathematical example:

Effective Giving Antarctica has a core activity - a website that encourages Antarctic residents to donate to effective charities as a mark of national pride - and a marginal activity - social media ads that cause people to click through to the website. EGA has two available strategies:

• A bare-bones functional website that links through to GWWC for £10k, which allows fundraising at a 4x manner by buying social media ads
• A fancy website optimised for user experience with integrated payment system and donations advisor chatbot for £100k, which allows fundraising at a 6x multiplier by buying social media ads.

If EGA has £200k funding, it could raise £190k x 4 with a bare bones website (3.8x) or £100k x 6 with a fancy one (3x).

If EGA has £500k to spend, it could raise £490k x 4 with a bare bones website (3.92x) or £400k x 6 with a fancy one (4.8x).

Raising the budget £200k -> £500k raises the optimal strategy giving multiplier 3.8x ->  4.8x, meaning the marginal giving multiplier is higher than the overall one.

This is just standard economies of scale: investing in technology (like a great website) that improves your productivity at a fixed outlay is more feasible at higher budgets.

There will be other forces acting on an effective giving organisation like market saturation (not that many residents of Antarctica, they'll get sick of social media eventually). But there would definitely be situations where economies if scale would dominate and the marginal giving multiplier ends up higher than the overall one.

Hi Vasco!

On the contrary, I think that for at least some effective giving org structures, the marginal multiplier is actually above the total multiplier. This is because effective giving org structure costs sometimes break down into

• Costs of maintaining a platform/brand (software technical upkeep, reputation management, etc) - where you'd expect more core funding to go
• Costs of using the platform/brand to promote effective giving - where you'd mostly expect marginal funding to go

There's a degree to which, once the costs of the platform/brand are covered, it becomes more effective (on the margin) to use it. (Or at least you'd hope - assuming it's any good!)

Hello! It's amazing that your funding allocation to these areas has gone up so much. Let's hope it leads to good things in future!

Here's my question:

I know that when you fund more mature effective giving organisations, you often limit yourselves to 50% or so of their operating costs in a hope to encourage funding diversification and ongoing sustainability of the effective giving field. This means an organisation (like e.g. Giving What We Can) can have both a really strong giving multiplier and a genuine operating costs funding gap.

This is in strong contrast to the average EA intuition developed by observing other areas, where "funding gap" is often thought of as "below the funding bar", with a certain negative reputation attached to it. I've had multiple conversations with people in EA who believe that if CoGi hasn't fully funded an effective giving organisation, its marginal giving multiplier must be close to 1x (that is, low). It seems that this rather widespread belief is hurting your aims of encouraging funding diversification.

Are you planning to publish summaries of at least some effective giving organisations you partially fund, confirming that you both estimate them to have a high marginal giving multiplier and also a genuine further funding gap? It would help my attempts to encourage people who give effectively and want to maximise their impact to direct more of their donations to the operating costs of effective giving organisations, if I had something official-looking to point to.

You want to send people like this to https://probablygood.org/ , the generalist careers navigator.