• The two questions we listed should be thought of as “key specific questions to investigate,” not “key conceptual questions for decisionmaking.” Our framework for identifying a promising cause is similar to yours; see our previous post on the matter.And in fact we do have climate change on our short list of causes, as we wrote today.
• We thought about trying to include government funding in our “what is under-invested in?” analysis. But government funding is often fundamentally different from philanthropic funding; in fact, the presence of a lot of government funding in an area could be seen as an argument in favor of philanthropic investing in that area, since small contributions by philanthropic funding could lead to big changes in how government funds are spent.

  When investigating a particular cause, we think it’s important to understand the dynamics of government funding, but when trying to get a bird’s-eye view of all causes, we think including government funding would be more likely to muddle the picture than to clarify it (unless a lot of work were done to understand which government funding streams behave more and less like philanthropic funding).

  Bottom line – we agree with you that it’s important to consider government funding, and have left it out of our preliminary bird’s-eye-view investigation for practical reasons.

• We also agree that considering our own strengths and weaknesses, relative to other funders, is a relevant consideration; but we don’t have much understanding of this consideration yet, aside from the belief that we are relatively strong on transparency (which doesn’t seem to indicate that we should focus on one cause or another).

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and data sources on this.

I think that your two questions for strategic cause selection are on the right track but are too narrow. To me, they would be:

1) Where is it possible to have an impact?
2) Where are others trying to achieve an impact?
3) Given this, where might I have a unique impact?

The history of philanthropy is one key factor in identifying what might work, but if you looked only at the history of philanthropy, you would miss emerging needs and opportunities. For example, climate change adaptation would not on the radar if you had done a retrospective examination 20 years ago.

Once you establish the pool of potential ideas, which of those are getting funding? The key difference between my framing and yours is that I do not limit it to philanthropies — what looks like a strategic gap in philanthropy funding might actually be a cause dominated by government funding. If you are really going to get into the weeds (and it certainly looks like you are) you should also consider government-funded programs.

Finally, you have a list of high-potential ideas that are under-funded. What are your own “competitive advantages” as a funder that would allow you to bring unique value to those causes? For example, CIFF reportedly takes a far more active role in their investments than many other foundations. This will undoubtedly influence the types of causes and organizations they choose to work with. A foundation engaging in strategic cause selection needs to answer not only why is this cause right, but also why is it right for me?