The GiveWell Blog

Update on GiveWell’s web traffic / money moved: Q3 2013

(updated on: ) | by Natalie Crispin

In addition to evaluations of other charities, GiveWell publishes substantial evaluation of itself, from the quality of its research to its impact on donations. We publish quarterly updates regarding two key metrics: (a) donations to top charities and (b) web traffic.

The table and chart below present basic information about our growth in money moved and web traffic in the first three quarters of 2013 (note 1).

Summary statistics: first three quarters

Growth in money moved, as measured by donations from donors giving less than $5,000 per year, remained above 100% through the third quarter. We base this figure solely on small donors because in the past we’ve seen that growth in small donors earlier in the year provides an indication of overall growth at the end of the year. However, because a significant proportion of our money moved comes from a relatively small set of large donors, we don’t place significant weight on this projection.

Website traffic tends to peak in December of each year (circled in the chart below). Growth in web traffic has generally remained strong in 2013. So far in 2013, there have been 638,978 monthly unique visitors (calculated as the sum of unique visitors in each month) to the website, compared with 348,602 at this time in 2012, or 83% annual growth.

Note 1: Since our 2012 annual metrics report we have shifted to a reporting year that starts on February 1, rather than January 1, in order to better capture year-on-year growth in the peak giving months of December and January. Therefore metrics for the first three quarters of 2013 reported here are for February through October.

Note 2: The majority of the funds GiveWell moves come from a relatively small number of donors giving larger gifts. These larger donors tend to give in December, and we have found that, in past years, growth in donations from smaller donors throughout the year has provided a reasonable estimate of the growth from the larger donors by the end of the year.

In total, GiveWell donors have directed $2,077,351 to our top charities this year, compared with $1,804,541 at this point in 2012. For the reason described, we don’t find this number to be particularly meaningful at this time of year.

 

The role of philanthropic funding in politics

(updated on: ) | by Holden

[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.]

As noted previously, I’ve been working on improving our broad understanding of the role that philanthropy can play in influencing and informing policy. One of the questions I’ve been focused on is “what sorts of activities can one fund in order to have an influence on policy?” I haven’t restricted myself to learning about activities permitted for 501(c)(3) charitable organizations; I’ve tried to get a broad understanding of the different activities that one can fund, from very direct (supporting candidates in elections) to very indirect (funding studies and analysis).

The range of possible activities is very wide, and due to the adversarial nature of policymaking, it may sometimes be the case that the most effective activities are the ones no one else has thought of yet. With that said, I’ve found it useful to make a rough list of what I perceive as the most common ways to translate funding into influence, to give a flavor of how (and in how many ways) money can play a role.

One of the ideas that I think emerges from this list is that the connection between money and policy change isn’t necessarily a matter of “quid pro quo” donations for actions. The connection can be very indirect, long-term, and complex – and is perhaps most powerful when it fits this description.

  • Lobbying – working directly with lawmakers to advocate for or against specific legislation or otherwise influence decisions – is what many people think of when they think of “putting money toward policy change.” However, I think many people imagine it to have more of a “quid pro quo” structure than it does. I think imagining lobbying as “subtly trading campaign contributions for influence” is less helpful than the “legislative subsidy” model described in this article (though both models may have elements of truth). In many cases, lobbyists’ strategy consists of working with people who share many of their core values, and providing expertise, analysis and arguments. In addition, by being expert in particular subjects, they are able to (a) spot situations in which a small and subtle legislative change can have major consequences, and advocate for this change; (b) find intersection between their goals and the goals of other interest groups, thus building coalitions around particular micro-issues.

    In addition to lobbying legislators in the hopes of influencing which laws get passed, it can also be important to lobby rule-makers on how laws get interpreted (more at this article). For more on lobbying, I recommend Lobbying and Policy Change by Frank Baumgartner (which focuses on lobbying legislators, and which I’ve found to be the most helpful book I’ve read on the subject so far) and Lobbying and Policymaking (which gives more discussion to lobbying rulemakers).

  • Think tanks and other producers of independent analysis. Think tanks produce a variety of policy-relevant analysis, including not only reports intended to inform and influence policymakers but also ideas for policies that can serve as compromises/reconciliations between different interest groups. One essay credits the latter type of work for a major role in health care reform:

    The effort that culminated in 2010 was the work of decades … The basic outlines of reform policies were worked out well in advance, in advocacy groups and think tanks, who delivered a workable plan to presidential candidates. Key interest groups who could block reform, such as small business, had been part of foundation-supported roundtables seeking common ground for years. Technical problems had been worked out.

    “Think tanks” is a broad category, and can mean many things. The Brookings Institution emphasizes its role in producing trusted centrist, informative analysis; other think tanks may see their roles as being to promote particular ideas, ideologies, and coalitions. For more, see a brief history of U.S. think tanks (I haven’t yet read the author’s book, but intend to).

    Funding academic research may be another way to influence policy debates, though the connection between academic research and policy is less direct than the connection between think tank work and policy.

     

  • Grassroots organizing is a broad term for doing the dedicated work needed to bring large numbers of people together so that they can become informed about, and express their views on, relevant policy issues. It can include community organizing (organizing people around local issues), online organizing (groups such as MoveOn.org, which use online petitions and other techniques to create email lists which they then solicit for donations, letter-writing campaigns, etc.), and building/staffing membership organizations around particular issues. At this point I’m personally most familiar with online organizing, as I have personal friends who work in this area. My impression is that this work often requires dedicated staff who can come up with ways – such as creative framing of news – to get large numbers of people to become aware of the relevant issues, share their contact information so they can be organized in the future, and take action (donating, writing in, attending rallies, etc.)
  • Litigation: seeking out, and funding, well-chosen lawsuits can have influence along a variety of dimensions. Litigation can raise the profile/media attention of an issue; it can result in law-altering decisions (such as the recent striking down of DOMA); and it can therefore serve as a source of leverage when negotiating with rulemakers (more on this in the early parts of my conversation with Steven Teles).
  • Influencing media: some of the above activities can be influential via their impact on media (which in turn can change public opinion and how public opinion is perceived by lawmakers). There are also organizations, such as Accuracy in Media and Media Matters, that explicitly focus on influencing media coverage.
  • Long-term investment in networks and platforms to bring together, and strengthen, people of particular ideological orientations (as opposed to targeting particular issues). Steven Teles has emphasized this sort of work in his writing and in his conversation with me. Examples include The Federalist Society and ALEC (and a younger organization, ALICE, intended to serve as a liberal counterpart to ALEC).
  • Direct effort to influence elections is – generally speaking – the most heavily regulated and restricted of the activities on this list. Assuming complete flexibility of structure (i.e., no commitment to working through 501(c)(3) organizations or to getting tax deductions) a funder can contribute limited amounts to individuals’ campaigns and to PACs, and can spend larger amounts on independent groups that may supplement campaigns’ work with their own advertising, get-out-the-vote campaigns, polling, media targeting, etc.

I believe that the connection between money and policy change is quite complex, though also quite strong. The strongest influence on a given politician isn’t necessarily (though it can be) a direct offer of money, or perceived public opinion among constituents. Politicians may also be influenced by how much they perceive constituents as caring about an issue (a small number of constituents who care deeply can be far more consequential than a larger number who care slightly, which is why relatively small numbers of letters and phone calls may be influential); they may be influenced by a desire to be in the good graces of particular interest groups, which can provide support in many ways (money, volunteers, help with how a politician is perceived broadly); they may be influenced by their desire to do what’s right according to their ideology. Money may be impactful through any of these pathways: it can help to organize and embolden passionate constituents, it can fund analysis that affects interest groups’ stands on issues, and it can affect (through a variety of mechanisms) what lawmakers perceive as the right thing to do. In many cases, the effect of money may be highly indirect and long-term, but very strong nonetheless.

The risks of adversarial philanthropy

I’ve long been wary of giving opportunities that involve taking on other people as adversaries, and I think a lot of our audience shares my misgivings. One reason for this is that projects with active, intelligent opposition are likely to have more difficult – and unpredictable – paths to success. Another reason is the potential difficulty of being on the right side. When working on controversial issues, one can easily be blinded by personal biases and ideology into believing a particular change is more desirable than it is, with the result that even a “success” can end up doing more harm than good.

While I still have these concerns, I’ve become more positive on the idea of philanthropic involvement in politics. Learning about the activities described above has highlighted the importance of natural asymmetries of money and organization between different sides on a policy issue. The side favored by a consensus of informed humanitarians can be significantly (and importantly) under-resourced relative to the side with a structural advantage.

One particularly vivid-seeming example is that of agricultural subsidies in the U.S. I don’t know of a conceptual or empirical public-welfare-based argument for many such subsidies (and they have been criticized as hurting the global poor as well). But because (as I informally understand it) the group that benefits from them (agricultural industry) is well-organized and -funded while the group that pays for them (the citizenry as a whole) is diffuse, such subsidies persist. Immigration policy involves a different kind of imbalance: many of those who would most benefit from less restrictive immigration policies are non-U.S. citizens, and so have no voice in the matter. A third way in which a structural imbalance can play out is when the inherent difficulty of changing the status quo (discussed in Lobbying and Policy Change) prevents important and needed changes from taking place.

At its best, I believe that policy-oriented philanthropy can provide organization and focus to issues whose advocates would otherwise be too diffuse or disempowered to make a difference. While doing so will always have risks – and the more controversial the topic, the riskier – I think it would be a mistake to let these risks take one of the most potentially powerful, versatile, leveraged tools of philanthropy off the table.

Exploring policy-oriented philanthropy

(updated on: ) | by Holden

[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.]

Over the last few months, I’ve been working on improving our broad understanding of the role that philanthropy can play in influencing and informing public policy. We feel that this is one of the major categories of philanthropy that we’re currently least well suited to understand.

This is the first in a series of posts. This post discusses:

  • Why we think it’s important to explore policy-oriented philanthropy.
  • What we’ve done so far in this exploration.
  • What our key questions have been.

First, a general note: there are cases in which philanthropists are legally constrained from funding certain types of policy-oriented activities, particularly (a) attempting to influence elections and (b) lobbying. (A summary of these constraints is discussed on page 13 of an Atlantic Philanthropies paper on supporting advocacy.) We haven’t yet focused on thoroughly understanding these issues, whose relevance may be limited since most of our audience has freedom to structure its giving as it chooses (i.e., we aren’t managing an endowment that’s locked into a particular organization type). When we refer to “influencing and informing policy,” we mean this statement to broadly encompass a variety of possible activities from lobbying and advocacy to general provision of information and education.

Why explore policy-oriented philanthropy?
From what we’ve seen, it’s very common for major philanthropists to seek some degree of influence on public policy. This sort of work is quite prominent in the previously discussed list of philanthropy’s success stories, and most of the major foundations we’ve spoken to put a fair amount of emphasis on influencing policy.

One argument we’ve heard for focusing on policy is the sheer scale of government as compared to philanthropy. To give a simple example: the U.S. government alone is estimated (by IHME) to spend more on global health aid than all foundations and NGOs (excluding GAVI and GFATM, which draw much of their support from governments) combined; the discrepancy grows if one considers other governments, multilateral organizations such as the World Bank and World Health Organization, etc. We believe this general pattern to hold across many sectors, such that a relatively small (percentage) impact on government spending could justify a huge expenditure in philanthropic terms. Of course, there are many ways in which the importance of policy can go beyond funding. For example, migration to the developed world appears to be an extremely effective poverty reduction measure, but in most cases, migration faces hard policy restrictions.

For nearly every cause we’ve looked into, influencing policy is one possible path to having as much impact as possible per dollar spent, and in some (such as labor mobility) it is the only clear path to impact.

However, influencing policy is unlikely to be something we can analyze using our traditional approach and criteria. Because it is inherently adversarial – advocating for any given policy change likely means advocating against someone else’s preferred policy – there are unlikely to be proven, repeatable interventions with easily quantified expected impact. We’ve been trying to understand what sorts of things philanthropists can do to try to influence policy, and under what circumstances one might expect these to be effective.

Our process for exploring policy-oriented philanthropy
We’ve come to believe that in the early stages of an investigation, when we often don’t know which questions to ask, the ability to have extended, repeated, friendly, low-stakes interactions to get “grounded in the basics” is crucial, and we’ve largely used referrals from existing contacts to get started. Our investigation has included:

Key questions we’ve focused on
While we’ve largely tried to keep our investigation open-ended, we’ve been particularly interested in the following questions:

  • What are the “tools” of policy-oriented philanthropists? What are the activities one can fund that have a chance of influencing/informing policy?
  • What is the track record of policy-oriented philanthropy? With what probability, and on what time frame, can one reasonably expect to have an impact on policy?
  • What are the best opportunities to make a difference within policy-oriented philanthropy today?

Each will be the subject of a future post.

Geoengineering research

(updated on: ) | by Holden

[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.]

We’ve completed a medium-depth writeup on geoengineering research – large-scale interventions in the climate to attempt to reduce climate change or its impacts – focusing on research around efforts to artificially cool the planet. This writeup outlines the basic case for why geoengineering research might be a promising cause for philanthropy, as well as listing all of the funded projects we know of in a spreadsheet. It is a medium-depth, rather than shallow-depth, investigation, in that it involved many conversations and represents our attempt to speak to a broad, representative set of relevant people (rather than the 1-3 conversations that typically constitute a shallow-depth investigation). With that said, it leaves many questions unanswered, and leaves us a fair distance from having a confident view on the value of philanthropic investment in geoengineering.

In this post, we first summarize why we’ve looked into geoengineering, what we’ve learned about it, and what we see as the pros and cons of geoengineering as a philanthropic cause. We then address a series of meta-questions: why are we pausing our investigation here? What would it look like to do a deeper investigation? What is a reasonable goal for a medium-depth investigation? Making progress on these sorts of questions is a key goal of our current ongoing research, which is why we’ve gone ahead with some medium-depth investigations of causes that we’ve had only very preliminary reasons to be interested in.

Why did we investigate geoengineering?
We’ve previously completed a shallow investigation of climate change, which concluded that (a) there is a substantial amount of giving around climate change mitigation; (b) one of the most concerning aspects of climate change is the uncertainty around forecasts of potential effects, which cannot rule out the possibility that climate change could be far more catastrophic than mainstream projections anticipate.

At the same time, we had read about the possibility of geoengineering: a broad term for large-scale efforts to modify the climate, which (a) was alleged to be overlooked by traditional environmental funders and nonprofits; (b) could be extremely risky but could also conceivably be our best option if facing a far-worse-than-anticipated catastrophe. As of the time when we completed our shallow investigation of climate change, geoengineering research was the most promising-seeming aspect of climate change philanthropy we had identified, based on the combination of having little attention from philanthropists and of having potentially crucial importance in the worst case. Because of this, and because climate change is one of the causes most widely held to be of paramount importance, we decided to put some further time into investigating geoengineering research as a philanthropic cause.

After a number of conversations with experts in the field, and attending a conference devoted to geoengineering research, we feel that our initial narrative of limited funding and potentially large importance continues to hold up. However, there are many questions that we would like to answer before committing funding to the field, and we expect that they will be fairly difficult and time-consuming to answer. We accordingly decided to pause and write up our current views.

What have we learned?
Details are at our writeup. In a nutshell:

  • We focused on a particular category of geoengineering, solar radiation management, that we perceive as riskier, potentially faster and cheaper (and thus more useful in a severe catastrophe), and less well-funded than the other major category (carbon dioxide removal).
  • It appears that this type of geoengineering could bring extreme risks, both environmental and political (through e.g. disputes over who has the right to intervene in the global environment). Funding research into it could conceivably do major harm by causing it to be perceived as a more viable option by policymakers.
  • At the same time, it is plausible that, in the event of a far-worse-than-projected climate-change-related catastrophe, this type of geoengineering could relatively quickly halt or reverse global warming. Better information about the costs, benefits, and best methods of implementation could therefore be highly valuable in such an event.
  • We haven’t found any funders – governmental or philanthropic – spending large amounts in this area now, and the field appears relatively small with relatively little in funding. (Our attempt to identify funded projects and funding sources around the world that explicitly include a significant solar geoengineering component came up with a total of about $11 million/year in funding, though we believe that figure is more likely than not to underestimate the total resources devoted to solar geoengineering research.)
  • There also doesn’t appear to be much in the way of “shovel-ready” funding opportunities, and it isn’t immediately clear how a funder would contribute to the field. Promoting more discussion of whether geoengineering research should be expanded – and how to handle the governance issues (e.g., who has the right to carry out experiments that may affect the global climate) – could be a better strategy than simply funding more research. A funder’s involvement in this area could be in the category of “field-building” – funding and organizing convenings and encouraging more people to enter the field – rather than supporting existing organizations.

Pros and cons of geoengineering research as a philanthropic cause
We see major reasons to be positive on the value of geoengineering as a philanthropic cause, and major reasons to be negative.

Positive:

  • The relative lack of existing philanthropic (and governmental) funding is striking. When comparing geoengineering research to other causes we’ve done shallow investigations on (including those in progress), the total dollars in the area seem very low, and the dollars are spread out among an assortment of funders.
  • Climate change is one of the most compelling global catastrophic risks we’re aware of, and in the event that climate change is far more catastrophic than currently projected, it seems that having better information on geoengineering could make a crucial difference – whether that information enables and improves geoengineering (which could be the only viable option for mitigating global catastrophe) or whether it prevents geoengineering from being carried out (by strengthening the case that the costs outweigh the benefits).
  • As a more minor point, it isn’t necessarily the case that better information about geoengineering will be fully useless in a more “normal” (closer to mainstream projections) scenario. Studying the methods and consequences of intervening in the global climate could produce insights with a variety of applications.

Negative:

  • The experts we spoke with were not uniformly encouraging about the value of getting involved in this space, and in some cases expressed ambivalence on the basis that increased attention for geoengineering could cause harm by (a) making risky geoengineering interventions more likely; (b) lowering the perceived importance of carbon emissions reduction. We’re extremely wary of getting involved in any cause in which some of the people with the most inside knowledge are ambivalent/less-than-enthusiastically-positive about seeing a new funder enter.
  • The case for geoengineering research being important hinges on a highly specific long-term set of conditions. It hinges on the idea that our involvement now would cause more progress on generating useful information than would be achieved otherwise over a very long time frame (a risky proposition since improved technological tools and greater attention to the issue in the future could swamp what can be accomplished in earlier years); that climate change presents enough of a problem in the fairly far future for geoengineering research to be relevant; and that the marginal “useful information generated” by philanthropy over the next few years turns out to be important for policymakers.

Why are we pausing our investigation here?
The general principle we’re trying to follow with investigations is, “Pause an investigation when the effort required to significantly improve our understanding is significantly beyond the effort we’ve put in so far.” For our shallow investigations, we generally talk to 1-3 people; for medium-depth investigation, we generally try to talk to enough people to create a preliminary landscape of the cause. In the case of geoengineering, the cost of achieving the latter relative to the former seemed relatively small, so we went ahead. But from here, substantially improving our understanding would likely have to mean gaining a deep understanding of the scientific and/or political issues, which could take months or even years, and the returns to a few more conversations seem unlikely to be high.

What would it look like to do a deeper investigation?
It seems to us that a funder in this area would have to make difficult judgment calls about controversial questions, such as whether the benefits of more discussion around geoengineering outweigh the costs. This is the sort of endeavor that we feel is likely to require true subject-matter expertise, and for that reason the next step in investigating geoengineering would likely to be to seek out a full-time employee to specialize in it, or to hire someone who already has considerable expertise. This is consistent with our strategy, described earlier this year, of focusing our efforts on finding causes to recommend developing philanthropic capacity in, rather than on finding projects to recommend funding directly.

We are currently experimenting with working with a consultant (who has a substantial relevant background) to make more progress on this cause.

What is a reasonable goal for a medium-depth investigation?
We’ve been eager to move forward with investigations of causes that seem unusually promising to us, even if they seem promising for highly intuitive and not very thoroughly researched reasons. This is because we are seeking to learn about what to expect from an investigation as much as we’re seeking to learn about the causes themselves.

In this case, we feel that coming to a bottom line on whether and how a philanthropist could accomplish good by supporting geoengineering-related activities would take a great deal more investigation – so much so that it likely requires at least one dedicated full-time person over an extended period of time. In other words, we don’t feel that a medium-depth investigation has been sufficient to identify or assess specific giving opportunities.

However, we think the medium-depth investigation has given us important information that will be useful in determining the value of a deeper (full-time-person) investigation. We’ve established a more confident view that geoengineering is in some sense a “neglected” area of philanthropy; we’ve established that funding it would likely require a “field building” type effort rather than simply supporting existing organizations that are already ready to scale; we’ve established that there is controversy within the field and that an investigation would have to be thorough and careful in order to reach a well-grounded bottom line on whether and how to get involved.

Armed with this level of information about many causes, a funder would be able to make much more informed decisions about which causes to make commitments to (whether in the form of hiring people to investigate them more deeply, or in the form of funding existing organizations, or both). This doesn’t mean that there would be any particular formula for making provably, or quantifiably, optimal decisions, but it does mean that such decisions would likely be more rational than the way most funders choose causes. That’s the goal of strategic cause selection.

Discrepancies between our views and our website

| by Holden

There are times when the views expressed on our website can become out of sync with the internal views of staff. Because of the way we run our process, this effect is most pronounced in October and November, just before our annual recommendations refresh. At that time of the year, we’re generally taking the final steps to make decisions about e.g. adding new recommended charities or downgrading existing recommendations.

While we would ideally like to keep our website and internal views in sync in real-time, this is infeasible for a variety of reasons:

  • It’s often the case that we have an intuition that an investigation will turn out a certain way, but because details can matter dramatically (for example, a small discrepancy in data can lead to a major rethinking of how the data was put together and what it represents), we don’t want to close the investigation until we’ve nailed down all the details we can.
  • Writing up our views, with support, takes time, and we often change our views in the process.
  • We have a general practice of running potentially sensitive content – as well as any content that references not-already-public materials – by the relevant charities before publishing it. This can often lead to substantial delays.
  • Our top charities recommendations are particularly high-stakes, and we believe that a public announcement that we’re even strongly considering a particular change could affect an organization (and thus affect our relationship with it). We’ve made the determination that it’s generally best to feel fairly confident in a change before indicating publicly that it’s taking place; this may mean discussing the change with our Board and others, as well as the charities involved, first.

The approach we’ve chosen to take is to focus on having our recommendations be maximally up-to-date at the time of year when they are maximally relevant (December). This means identifying final contenders in August or September and planning deep-dive activities such as site visits at that time, and focusing in October and November on finalizing and writing up our findings.

In October and November, it’s generally the case that we’re finishing our investigations, and it’s not a good time to take on the work (of carefully communicating and discussing our thinking) that publicly previewing our changes would involve. Once we complete our investigations, our focus shifts.

If we were highly confident in a major change, we would announce it quickly. But generally, the longer it’s been since our last refresh, the more likely it is that we are finalizing some changes that aren’t yet public.

Because of this, we’re adding a note to our top charities page alerting users to this issue and pointing to this post.

Deep investigations of new causes

(updated on: ) | by Holden

[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.]

As discussed previously, GiveWell and Good Ventures have identified several philanthropic causes that seem like promising candidates for “deep dives” – investigations deep enough to be headed toward major giving recommendations. (In this post, as in the previous one, “we” should be taken to refer to both GiveWell and Good Ventures.)

We’ve had a lot of internal discussion about how we might investigate a new cause at this level of depth. Much of our discussion has centered around the idea of a “program officer” or “program director” – a staffer who is dedicated full-time to a particular cause, and therefore can invest very heavily in getting to know the relevant people, organizations and literature. However, at this time, (a) we don’t feel that we can spare any of our generalist staff for a full-time investigation into a particular cause; (b) there aren’t yet any people we’re ready to hire as cause-specific program officers. So we’re thinking about what we can do in the meantime to find potential program officers, as well as potentially make progress on “deep dives” in other ways.

Below are some of the possibilities we’ve considered. Many involve the possibility of expenditures in the range of $100,000 – whether grants or research consulting expenses – and we address this issue in a later section.*

Possible ways to move forward on “deep dives”

  • Consulting arrangements with potential program officers. Along the lines of the “trial hire” approach we’ve mentioned before, we might work with people who seem like potential fits for the “program officer” role (we’re still not sure just what constitutes a good fit, but are generally interested in people who show both interest in the work and background that could be highly relevant to the cause) on a consulting basis – retaining them to source possible giving opportunities and/or outline strategies for sourcing such opportunities. An arrangement like this could lead to a full-time hire.
  • Consulting-only arrangements. We might work with a consulting group in order to develop a strategy for sourcing giving opportunities (and for narrowing our focus) within a cause of interest. This option could be more expensive and less directly connected to finding program officers than the above strategy, but we are interested in trying it, as it appears to be relatively common among major foundations.
  • Funding “working groups.” We might fund several people who have relevant background in a cause to collaborate on a proposed strategy; this is another suggestion that was made by a major foundation.
  • Exploratory grants (in the general range of $100,000, though possibly more or less) to small organizations, startup organizations, academics and others with spare capacity, and/or cause-relevant departments of existing organizations. These grants would not be vetted as thoroughly as our typical recommendations; rather, as with the above options, they would be treated as learning opportunities. If we can find people who have concrete ideas now about how to spend money productively (or who form concrete ideas after finding that we’re open to such grants), we believe that funding them and checking in on their progress could be as good a way to learn about the cause – as well as to refine our views of which people and organizations can most effectively use funding to accomplish good and communicate to us about their progress (the major qualities we’re looking for in a program officer) – as the above options.
  • Exploring key questions ourselves. For some of our causes of interest – specifically malaria control and geoengineering – we’re less interested at this stage in “growing the field as a whole” than in answering particular key questions. In these cases, we might explore these questions ourselves, while keeping an eye out for anyone who is particularly helpful in our exploration and could be retained as a consultant or (down the line) as a program officer.

In general, we aim to take an attitude of

  • Eagerness to experiment: when opportunities arise that seem reasonable and not overly expensive (more on expenses below), we plan to take them without a large amount of due diligence, in the hopes that we’ll learn more from trying than from investigating these possibilities.
  • Selective followup: our guess is that many of the things we try will not lead to much in the way of outcomes or learning, and that if we aren’t selective about how we spend our time, we will risk sinking a lot of time trying to get good information from uncommunicative grantees and/or partners (this intuition is based partly on our past experiences trying to get information from potential top charities). We explicitly reserve the option to stop following up on any given grant, consulting arrangement or other project if we feel that we aren’t learning enough for it to be worth our time. Conversely, if a particular grant or arrangement leads to an important-seeming question, we may open an in-depth investigation.

The financial costs of learning
Most of the above approaches involve funding somewhere in the range of $100,000 per project over the next year (note that we could potentially fund several projects within a single cause). We are comfortable with this, and believe it is appropriate to engage in promising projects along these lines without much hesitation, whether they involve consulting engagements, grants, or both.

If, over the next year, we engage in 50 projects (grants, consulting engagements, etc.) with an average budget of $100,000 each, that would constitute a total of $5 million in grants – a fraction of a percentage of Good Ventures’s projected lifetime giving, alone. If those funds can have any noticeable impact on (a) our learning, and thus ability to find better giving opportunities in the future; (b) helping people and organizations build capacity that can productively absorb later funds, they will be well spent. Note that we see success at (a) and (b) as increasing (and not just improving) our future money moved – we believe that we will have more influence if we are able to point to better giving opportunities.

Currently, we’re very short on capacity – we have more to do than we have people to do it – while the total amount of money being spent is relatively small in the scheme of what is and (hopefully) will be available. Therefore, we think it’s appropriate and important to move further away from our historical insistence on deeply investigating all grants before they’re given, and instead move closer to an attitude of “money that might help us learn and build grantee capacity is money well spent.” We still don’t think it makes sense to spend money where there isn’t at least a reasonably large chance of our following up on it and deriving value from it, but in cases where there are real potential benefits of the kind detailed above, we think it’s appropriate to make grants without much hesitation. And we think that requiring ourselves to deeply investigate and/or write about each grant would sustain the current imbalance between funding (of which there’s more available than we’re using) and capacity (which we’re short on).

A couple of other notes:

  • We believe that being willing and ready to spend money, in and of itself, could have substantial benefits for our ability to attract potential consultants, program officers, and giving opportunities.
    • Consultants and program officers are likely to be more interested in working with us if they perceive us as ready to put funding into a cause.
    • In the past, we’ve had the experience of having people bring funding opportunities to us based on their understanding of what we’re interested in. On the other side, we’ve looked for funding in the past by seeking out funders that support others in our space.
      By committing funding in a cause of interest, we hope that we’ll make ourselves easier for people interested in this cause to find.
  • Along the lines of being ready to commit funding when it could improve future giving opportunities, we are also looking for cases in which seed grants could help create better giving opportunities by our traditional criteria. If, today, we ran across a giving opportunity like GiveDirectly’s early $100,000 grant via the Unorthodox Prize – a chance to help a potential future top charity get off the ground, and in the process gain benefits similar to those detailed above – we would take that opportunity as well.

*Grants will likely be funded by Good Ventures. There may be cases in which GiveWell is an intermediary.