Big news from Open Philanthropy Coefficient Giving today:
Today, Open Philanthropy is becoming Coefficient Giving. Our mission remains the same, but our new name marks our next chapter as we double down on our longstanding goal of helping more funders increase their impact. We believe philanthropy can be a far more vital force for progress than it is today; too often, great opportunities to help others go unfunded. As Coefficient Giving, our aim is to make it as easy as possible for donors to find and fund them.
(For more on how we chose our new name, what’s changing, and what’s staying the same in this next chapter, see here.)
The linked essay, from Coefficient CEO Alexander Berger, shares more about the change, our approach to giving, and why we’re focused on growing our work with funders outside of Good Ventures.
I also wanted to highlight some details that might be of particular interest to a Forum audience. If you have other questions, leave a comment and I’ll do my best to respond!
Any changes to your relationship with EA?
Nope. While we do lots of work outside traditional EA cause areas, we still see EA as a community of people who share many of our goals and do many things we’re excited to support. We have no plans to narrow the scope of our giving (and in fact, plan to grow our partnership with Good Ventures) and will still fund orgs like CEA that work on helping that community grow and thrive.
Can you say more about EA community funding?
Like the rest of our grantmaking strategy, this isn’t affected. Our former focus areas are becoming funds. The Effective Giving and Careers Fund will continue to support work in the space with a global health and wellbeing focus. The Global Catastrophic Risks Opportunities Fund will support EA work with a GCR focus (as well as cross-cutting and foundational GCR work that isn’t related to EA).
The work previously conducted under our GCR Capacity Building program is now split between the Navigating Transformative AI Fund and the GCRO Fund, but the team's members and structure haven't changed. Nor have the things they work on; that program always had a mix of AI-focused work and capacity-building work that cut across different risks (including EA community work).
How will working with new partners change your priorities?
- Good Ventures plans to keep scaling up its giving, so we expect to continue all the work they’ve been funding.
- We are maintaining our approach to strategic cause selection, which we see as a core part of our value proposition to potential partners.
- But one part of allowing partners to support specific funds (as opposed to Coefficient Giving as a whole) is that their allocation across funds may deviate somewhat from what we think would be abstractly optimal by our lights, and we’re comfortable with that.
Regarding that new name... did people actually confuse Open Phil for other orgs?
Yup. We’ve had meetings with journalists who thought we were part of OpenAI and potential grantees who thought we were from the Open Society Foundations. (To say nothing of all the confused people on Twitter.) You can read more about how we chose our new name here.
If you read this far, you might also be interested in:
- This post on how we chose our new name, plus what’s changing and what isn’t.
- Today’s Vox story on Coefficient’s future.
- The new websites for Coefficient and Good Ventures.
Thanks for the update, and the reasons for the name change make s lot of sense
Instinctively i don't love the new name. The word "coefficient" sounds mathsy/nerdy/complicated, while most people don't know what the word coefficient actually means. The reasoning behind the name does resonate through and i can understand the appeal.
But my instincts are probably wrong though if you've been working with an agency and the team likes it too.
All the best for the future Coefficient Giving!
I feel the same. I’m also generally wary when a name (or design) needs extensive reasoning to justify it. Most people will never hear the reasoning, so their gut reaction/ ability to remember it matters more. I’m not sure how the name agency worked, but I’d be more optimistic if I knew the name had been tested with your target audience vs. had a background story that made sense?
Fwiw, I also think the name is a bit complicated, and less memorable than Open Philanthropy. Here the reasoning from the Vox interview:
There are some more details from cG here (also linked in Aaron's post):
yes i think the name is clever and i like the reasoning that led to it, but the end product "coefficient giving" feels a bit nerdy and clunky and I'm not sure it will have broad appeal.
Do you think CoGi need broad appeal if they're mainly looking for multi millionaire donors?
The broad appeal applies to multi-millionaires as well. Most multi-millionaires are not into clunky nerd stuff.
I don't think broad appeal is the most important thing, but i think multi millionaire donors would be more likely to join up if public branding and appreciation is good.
I would think it's more peer appreciation than public appreciation that matters.
Expecting "cogi ergo multiply" merch now...
I like CoGi...
As someone who just participated in a name change recently I can assure you the pros and cons of this name with other contenders was probably discussed ad nauseam by the team involved, and they decided on this name despite the nerdy and clunky vibe.
Agreed!
My two cents:
For an org like Coefficient Giving, the name doesn't matter that much, beyond ensuring they are distinct from nearby organisations, and being memorable. They don't need to be easily understood from their name. The second you've heard what they do, that matters to you much more than their name.
Kind of relevantly - it's a weird thing with even the most famous podcasts, that you generally can't guess what a podcast will be (will it be interviews, group discussions, narrative reporting) from its title. This implies that the name doesn't matter much, as long as it's memorable enough for word of mouth spread.
Maybe the name doesn't matter that much, but it will still have some effect. If we're still early on in the name change process then the cost to change to a better name is basically nothing. So the cost-effectiveness of getting it right is actually extremely high.
I think the point where the "cost to change to a better name is basically nothing" has long past, at the point where they have published a brand new set of digital assets, done journalist interviews, etc. :)
(I am expecting the new name is going to stick around!)
Totally agree. But I am bothered by a broader trend in startup/organization naming where it’s one nerdy dictionary word: Constellation, Conjecture, Cohere, Covariant, and that’s just the C’s.
They should call it something like, I don’t know, The Dharma Initiative… wait… no…
Haven't yet decided whether I approve of this name change. But it is certainly good news for the Nigerian economy (and maybe also the Republic of Congo) :) I just snapped up the coefficientgivi.ng domain name (inspired by shortened URLs like spoti.fi and youtu.be). Let me know if you want it (for free of course)!
Thanks for the update Aaron!
One of the oddities of the EA forum is people voting disagree on posts like this... I can understand downvoting if you thought it was a bad change (though this seems a bit mean-spirited to me), but it seems hard to imagine thinking that the core point of the post is false!
When announced, the function of the agree/disagree axis was somewhat generically stated as "whether you agree with the contents of the comment." That's broader than just the truth value of the explicitly stated propositions.
For a post that announces an organizational decision, using the axis to communicate agreement/disagreement with the decision being communicated strikes me as an appropriate use. Such posts uinclude an implied claim that on net, this is a good decision. Otherwise, the axis has no value for a post like this.
(I have no votes of any sort on the top-level post.)
I think it's better to try to keep the upvote/downvote and agree/disagree axis more distinct - to express normative vs positive evaluation. So in this case I would think that downvoting would be the natural way to express disapproval.
I think a downvote-as-disapproval wouldn't work in this case, I would want to use upvote+disagree to express "this is an important change that the community should know about, but I disagree with the decision". A downvote de facto communicates "I don't want people to read this post".
i upvoted the post and disagreed based on @Jason's reasoning below. I agree with @Larks that's not technically correct but still feel ok about doing the opposite of what he suggested.
The post is great so it feels wrong to karma downvote it that's for sure.
The core point of the post is, in fact, true! (And all the other points, to the best of my knowledge.)
I always appreciate you pointing this out.
I don't point this out very often, so it seems pretty plausible that you might always appreciate it, so I will agree-vote your comment!
Congratulations!
The name has six syllables—is there an official line on what the conversational abbreviation should be?
Looks like they're using just "Coefficient"
I'm defaulting to co-egg...
co-give is nicer?
Might be confusing with SoGive.
I can imagine "co-eff" being sticky.
I agree that "co-give" is nice but it's sufficiently harder to say that I predict it won't catch on.
yeah co-eff is nice