[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 is the track record of policy-oriented philanthropy?” Specifically:

• Are there compelling cases in which a major policy change can be partially or fully credited to philanthropic efforts?
• How often have philanthropic efforts succeeded in bringing about change? Often enough to imply a good “return on investment?”

I’ve concluded that answering these questions reasonably well could require an enormous, long-term effort. This is true both because the questions are inherently difficult to answer – many of philanthropy’s claimed impacts on politics are highly long-term and diffuse, such that it is difficult to confidently isolate impact – and because there has been little academic work on the subject.

Below, I first list salient examples I’ve seen in which philanthropy is believed (by some) to have had an important impact on public policy. I think the nature of these examples illustrates some of the challenges with isolating the impact of philanthropy. I then discuss our understanding of the current state of the literature on this topic, and what we would do to make more progress. For the purposes of this post only, “success” is defined as causally impacting public policy, not as having positive social impact, since the goal is to determine how and when philanthropy has been effective in changing policy (the question of how policy should be changed is a different question).

Many of the claimed success stories of policy-oriented philanthropy involve long-term (sometimes 10+ years), diffuse impacts. Pages 4-8 of The Elusive Craft of Evaluating Advocacy, by Steven Teles and Mark Schmitt (both of whom we’ve spoken with – see conversations notes for Teles and Schmitt) give a good feel for this kind of story, and cover some of the cases we’ve frequently heard reference to: the role of Atlantic Philanthropies and others in laying the groundwork for the Affordable Care Act, the role of (presumably philanthropy-backed) church and student groups in “claw[ing] back the application of the death penalty,” the repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, and impact of the conservative Federalist Society, which is claimed to have magnified the impact of other organizations on law. We excerpt the part about health care reform, as an example:

The effort that culminated in 2010 was the work of decades, including a previous, high-profile failure in the early 1990s, multiple waves of state-based reform and numerous incremental efforts at the national level. Advocates invested hundreds of millions of dollars on initiatives ranging from media initiatives such as encouraging television producers to include stories of the uninsured, multiple coalition-building projects, university- and think tank-based research and well-funded grassroots initiatives.2 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. And tens of millions of dollars had been set aside as long ago as 2007 for politically savvy grassroots advocacy initiatives targeted at key legislators. After a very long slog, the outcome was the Affordable Care Act.

Another very long-term, diffuse impact that has been cited to us is the case of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s efforts to reduce tobacco use.

• Activities included funding research on the impact of policy on tobacco use (page 13), funding early-career researchers in the hopes of developing a stronger set of professionals focused on the issue (page 17), creating the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids (page 17), and indirect support for state-level lobbying (page 20).
• The program started in 1991 and had reached ~$20 million per year by 1993 (page 12), but its goals – changing policy to be more discouraging of tobacco use and ultimately reducing smoking rates, particularly among minors – don’t seem to have shown much progress until after 1996 (see pages 36-38 for policy change indicators, page 26 for smoking rate data).
• Given the number of different initiatives RWJF created and invested in, the number of states it worked in, and the long-term nature of some of its investments (building organizations, funding research and researchers), evaluating the extent to which its funding can be “credited” for reductions in tobacco use could be an extremely challenging project.
• The Foundation spent ~$700 million in this area over time (page 12); if one assumes it reduced the number of smokers by 10 million (its evaluation estimates 5.3-14.2 million, page 28), then the total cost of the program was ~$70 per “person stopped from smoking,” which would compare favorably to our estimate of ~$80 per life-year gained for our top charity if smoking causes one to lose multiple years of life. The point of this calculation isn’t to praise the program – we haven’t vetted these figures and realize there are a substantial number of questions here – but to illustrate that the sort of claims made about policy impact imply potential competitiveness with our top charities.

We have also seen claims of shorter-term, more tangible impact of funders and nonprofits on public policy, though usually at smaller scale. Change Philanthropy goes through several such cases, including a movement in which lawsuits were brought against states alleging that they needed to invest more in education to comply with their own constitutions. The Center for Lobbying in the Public Interest also lists smaller-scale success stories. I’ve heard multiple informal claims that online advocacy groups had tangible, extremely rapid impact on halting (a) passage of the Stop Online Piracy Act (b) construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.

While we’ve seen many claims of impact, none appear easy to assess. Moreover, the most prominent and largest-scale claimed impacts generally appear the hardest to evaluate.

We’ve asked multiple people (including Frank Baumgartner, Mark Schmitt and Steven Teles) whether there is a literature that might help us in this endeavor. It appears that we aren’t going to find any work systematically looking across a large number of philanthropic efforts to change policy, such that we could get an idea of aggregate return-on-investment. We may be able to find case studies on specific policy changes.

We don’t see a clear or easy path to assessing the question, “Can policy-oriented philanthropy have a high enough probability of success to make the cost-effectiveness competitive with our top charities?” We expect our History of Philanthropy project to generate better information on particular, high-profile claimed successes (perhaps via reviewing existing case studies, perhaps via generating new ones focused on the role of philanthropy). If it does, we may consider a more systematic project aiming to catalogue and investigate the policy-oriented work of a representative set of foundations. But it could be a long time before we have useful estimates of the “good accomplished per dollar” of policy-oriented philanthropy, and in the meantime, we will be moving forward on exploring good opportunities within policy-oriented philanthropy.

One rough, heuristic-based reason that I’m optimistic about policy-oriented philanthropy (in terms of “impact per dollar”) is that it generally seems like a given amount of money “means more” in the context of policy-oriented work than in other contexts.

• According to IHME, total global health aid is in the range of ~$30 billion a year, with ~$1 billion coming from the Gates Foundation alone.
• Within the U.S., the National Institutes of Health spend ~$30 billion a year on scientific research, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute alone spends ~$700 million a year.
• Total U.S. lobbying spending is about ~$3 billion a year. If a philanthropist spent $1 billion a year on policy-oriented work, this would exceed the combined budgets of the top 18 think tanks in the US according to the Center for Global Development.

There are many reasons that this comparison could be unfair or irrelevant, but it syncs with my general impression that the amount of money it takes to be a “significant player” is smaller in policy-oriented work than in direct aid or scientific research.

[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.

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.

[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.

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.

• A multi-participant meeting on the history of philanthropy’s involvement in politics, as part of our history of philanthropy project.
• A conversation with Dylan Matthews of Wonkblog, who suggested reading Lobbying and Policy Change by Frank Baumgartner; several of us read this book, and I spoke with the author as well.
• Reading Lobbying and Policymaking and The Unheavenly Chorus, both recommended by Prof. Baumgartner.
• An extended (~7-hour) conversation with Steven Teles, author of The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, who was recommended to us by multiple sources as a political scientist who has focused a fair amount on the role of philanthropy.
• A conversation with Mark Schmitt, who was recommended to us by a major foundation contact. I also read Change Philanthropy, a book he pointed me to that gives case studies of philanthropists’ work on influencing policy.
• A conversation with Gara LaMarche, whose work with the Open Society Foundations was mentioned in Change Philanthropy (and by Mr. Schmitt), and who also served as President of the Atlantic Philanthropies for a significant part of its effort on health care reform (mentioned in more than one of the above conversations as a prominent example of potential philanthropic impact in influencing policy).
• Conversations with the heads of Center for Global Development and the Brookings Institution, as well as conversations on particular issues with other people at these institutions.
• Reading papers that came up in these conversations and via scans of foundations’ websites, including Why Supporting Advocacy Makes Sense for Foundations by Atlantic Philanthropies, The Elusive Craft of Evaluating Advocacy by Steven Teles and Mark Schmitt (both mentioned above), and an account by Theda Skocpol of the relatively recent failure to pass climate change mitigation legislation in the U.S.

• 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.