SoGive's 2023 plans + funding request

We at SoGive are excited about what we plan to achieve in 2023. We still have material funding gaps, so if readers are keen for these things to happen, then please get in touch by emailing [email protected].

Our work will involve the following:

1. EA-aligned research: We plan to do work akin to the research of organisations like Rethink Priorities. There are enough thorny questions about how to do good / give effectively that an enormous amount more research is needed, and the existing ecosystem would benefit from growing in both capacity and the number of voices, hence we are keen for SoGive to contribute.

Work which we plan to complete and publish in 2023:

• Strong Minds: 
  • SoGive’s founder identified Strong Minds as a possible high impact charity in 2015 when thinking about his own giving, and had an initial call with Sean Mayberry of Strong Minds then. We have been engaging with Strong Minds over some years and we plan to finalise a report early in 2023.
• No Means No:
  • An investigation of No Means No Worldwide was suggested to us by a member of the EA London community, who was excited to have an EA-aligned recommendation for a charity which prevents sexual violence. We have mostly completed a review of this charity, and were asked not to publish it yet because it used a study which is not yet in the public domain. 
• Pratham
  • We have been working on a review of Pratham, which works on education in the developing world. 

Note that our model involves having multiple pieces of analysis ongoing, and these may be progressed by someone working for 1 day per week.

Work which we plan to initiate in 2023:

• Redteaming of John Halstead’s report on climate change
• Counterfactuals vs credit-sharing/Shapley values

Note: this is not a comprehensive list, just a few examples. For a fuller list, see this public copy of our research agenda.

Past track record: People within the SoGive community have successfully written a number of valuable pieces of research.

• Cool Earth: In order to support SoGive’s work helping major donors, SoGive produced a review of Cool Earth which argued that the EA community had overvalued Cool Earth. It received an EA Forum prize, was nominated for a Review of Decade prize, and has been cited 14 times on the EA Forum and an unknown number of times elsewhere.
• Giving Green: A SoGive volunteer, with support from SoGive’s founder, wrote a piece critiquing the analytical approach of Giving Green. Prior to this write-up, there had been little critical analysis of the quality of Giving Green’s work.
• Malaria nets: We wrote a piece on GiveWell’s modelling of insecticide resistance, which argued that there were issues with the way that synergists were modelled (synergists are things which help nets overcome insecticide resistance). We also argued that GiveWell were missing an important source of data. GiveWell awarded this analysis an honourable mention prize.

If you would like to know more about SoGive’s research work, feel free to read our strategy document: section 1 covers our research work, section 1.3 explains how we set our research agenda, section 1.5 provides more examples of our track record of research, section 1.7 includes people from other EA orgs who are willing to serve as references.

2. Supporting the EA talent pipeline: Our volunteer programme was originally set up to help us analyse charities, however we are now leveraging our experience to serve orgs in the EA community who are looking to hire. In 2023, we aim to recruit c50-100 new volunteers, and of those probably a majority will remain for an extended period (more than a few months), and of those we plan for 3 people to end up in an EA job who would not have done so otherwise. Counting those 3 people alone would, we think, understate the benefit. This will be achieved at the cost of one staff member working full time on managing this programme. This will be done by building on and improving the volunteer programme which we have been running in this form for c.3 years. It will include a new training programme and substantial ongoing support for each volunteer, including plenty of peer support. We believe we are well positioned to deliver on this given our track record. Former SoGive volunteers have gone on to work at multiple EA organisations, including Open Philanthropy, Rethink Priorities, Founders Pledge, ACE, 80,000 Hours.

If you would like to know more about SoGive’s plans to support the EA talent pipeline, feel free to read section 2 of our strategy document. In section 2.2, we provide some volunteer testimonials. See section 2.5 for a quote from an EA org excited to collaborate with us. While it’s reasonable to be concerned about whether the counterfactual impact is legitimate, we tackle this in section 2.6, and argue that for at least some impact pathways, it is.

3. Supporting major donors, and running SoGive Grants: We provide some support to a small number of major donors, however most of them are at least EA-aware, and we don’t believe this work creates lots of (counterfactually adjusted) value. However it does synergise well with other work. We also believe that SoGive Grants (section 3.3) will allow us to provide further vetting capacity, diversify the EA funding landscape, and be a source of funding which provides feedback to all applicants.

Each of these three areas of work supports the other two, which is why it makes strategic sense for the three things to be done within the same organisation. This point is explained in section 0.2.

Our planned total spend in 2023 is £380,000. This could be reduced to £321,000. 

We believe that the best argument against funding SoGive relates to the counterfactual on the time of the people involved, who might otherwise be freed to work on other projects. You can read more about this in section 5 of the strategy document.