lauren_mee
Posts 6
Comments33
I understand this feeling, and I myself certainly felt that way previously.
I think the way that I reconciled this was weighing up how important neglectedness of a cause area was to me vs. certainty of impact. And I landed on neglectedness being the most important because it can facilitate and accelerate change not just for one organisation but often have second order effects for the entire cause area.
I think there is an issue cross comparing global health with animal welfare which seems really unfair. Global health and development has orders of magnitude more money but yet we compare it like for like with the animal space but that seems incorrect to me. it’s really easy to underestimate how much the lack of funding can have on the infrastructure of a space and therefore a charities ability to do good. How can they attract the best talent without funding that then drives how effective the organisation is? They often have significantly less staff in their team to do the same amount of good as a well funded charity but also just like how corporate campaign results are a combined victory, many global health and development organisation benefit massively from Givewell, 80,000 hours etc. that historically have helped them to get to the stage they are now.
So I guess my point is what is driving you to want to donate to animals in the first place? Because it might be that just the top recommended charities aren’t the right solution and it also might just help you answer comparing across very different cause areas.
Well i think that's the point of the post to debate this! And i think there are relevant trade offs in regards to maintaining the impact of the organisations which are seeking to diversify funds that aren't usually considered so maybe "far more counterfactually" seems too strong.
I think there’s an important nuance here regarding what truly constitutes a 'healthy sanity check' when it comes to funding. Simply having a non-EA funder interested in your project doesn’t necessarily validate its impact. For instance, if a funder’s motivation is based on personal affinity, like finding the team charming or being impressed by the organization for non-impact reasons, this might not confirm that the project is the best use of resources.
To me, a real sanity check comes from the support of funders who prioritize impact and apply a high bar to their investments. If a highly discerning funder with a strong emphasis on impact independently chooses to support the project, regardless of whether you accept their funding or not, that’s a stronger endorsement than diversification for its own sake.
Great post!
I think one other major complications of funder diversification is managing multiple competing interests. So in some ways it’s great to have more funders so you aren’t reliant on them to agree with all of your strategic choices but you can just do the most impactful thing and get one of the funders to back it but sometimes that also works in the opposite way with funding diversity. I think this is less the case for AIM as you are more established, but in the early stages of funding diversification there aren’t actually that many EAA funders to chose from, people often argue that its a higher counterfactual to have non EA funders but on the flip side you then have to manage those funders priorities and if they are less EA they often want you to invest more in a less impactful thing in order to fund you. So being that the funding options are so small in the EAA movement I’m not sure that funder diversification nets out as positive for all organisations or that we should all strive for it.
<< Needing more than one funder provides a healthy sanity check on if the project is really the best use of funds>> Also to this point… doesn’t it heavily depend on the funder? If the funder isn’t impact driven I’m not sure it’s a great sign they want to fund you?
Additionally less important but it also takes up much more time to report and communicate with non EA donors. For us for example they don’t care or understand ICAPs (fair enough) so then you have to spend time translating your work to what they care about. I think this is fine but it’s a bit more of a time sink when they care about things that you don’t actually think are important to track in regards to impact eg vanity metrics.
I do however firmly agree with this your point on increasing funding in itself not being an aspirational goal and wish more organisations would be firmer with capping their funding goals if they will likely decrease their impact per dollar significantly consistently in the future, particularly in contrast to other organisations. So I agree with the conclusion but perhaps not that funding diversification is a prerequisite for it. Is it not possible that organisations can just reject funding over a certain amount regardless of funding diversification?
Thanks for writing this!
I’ve really struggled with this when writing AAC’s mission and vision statements. Historically our vision and mission statements have been much more pragmatic and realistic like speeding up the end of animal suffering through increasing talent density etc etc. and I agree with Emres point on the difficulty of communicating what we are doing to a broader audience. These kind of static vision statements whilst being pragmatic seem to be less inspirational to external stakeholders, staff and smaller donors.
So I’m leaning towards changing AAC to have a more broad directional vision statement because I think this is more likely to inspire actions and isn’t that the point of visions? So I guess my question is, do you think that organisations are really genuinely aiming for this goal with the thought that we should strive to achieve it in our lifetime and in their plans or do you think we are just trying to inspire action and that really our theories of change are more in line with the things we do have power over. If AAC was able to increase talent density in the movement and fix the talent bottlenecks I’d be pretty happy with us an organisation and think we’ve done “our bit” but I don’t think that would inspire my staff.
I just want to say thank you for highlighting this Vasco!
I am a big fan of SMA but my largest concern is their quit your job tag line. Firstly, I can only speak for the animal advocacy space but there are a very limited number of high impact roles for people to pivot into…. secondly, if it’s in the non profit world they are directing them too it will take some time to pivot (so try to not be unemployed first) thirdly, many of these people are in great companies where they could potentially do much more if they were activated or ETG.
Anecdotally I’ve had a handful of people come from them asking for career advise who had quit their job and tbh my first thought is can you get your job back….