We've been thinking about this a lot from the grantee perspective in a community-building context at the Jewish Social Impact Network. We are of course very glad to have EA funding support and think our work is highly promising and competitive with other opportunities for EA meta-charity funders, but we know that we are to some degree competing with other high-impact options. We're working on a fundraising strategy to determine how viable it is to support our growth with funding from the conventional Jewish philanthropy world, in part for strategic reasons but also in part because we feel really confident that the counterfactual improvement in the use of those funds would be enormous. I'd imagine most similar work in the EA community doesn't have an analogous, obvious alternative funding source like we do, but would encourage all organizations to at least consider if something suitable might be out there when working on development plans.
We're also more likely to be incorrect and influencing money in the wrong direction if we're advising people who already take an effectiveness-based approach! I think full-time, specialized impact evaluators are the best resource we have to improve our answers to these questions over time, but they're fallible people working on complicated questions and certainly they occasionally come to less-optimal decisions than other smart people working from the same principles and premises. By contrast, the "normie" foundation landing on a more cost effective answer than the impact-focused evaluators is probably rare as it would be something of an accident.
We've been thinking about this a lot from the grantee perspective in a community-building context at the Jewish Social Impact Network. We are of course very glad to have EA funding support and think our work is highly promising and competitive with other opportunities for EA meta-charity funders, but we know that we are to some degree competing with other high-impact options. We're working on a fundraising strategy to determine how viable it is to support our growth with funding from the conventional Jewish philanthropy world, in part for strategic reasons but also in part because we feel really confident that the counterfactual improvement in the use of those funds would be enormous. I'd imagine most similar work in the EA community doesn't have an analogous, obvious alternative funding source like we do, but would encourage all organizations to at least consider if something suitable might be out there when working on development plans.
We're also more likely to be incorrect and influencing money in the wrong direction if we're advising people who already take an effectiveness-based approach! I think full-time, specialized impact evaluators are the best resource we have to improve our answers to these questions over time, but they're fallible people working on complicated questions and certainly they occasionally come to less-optimal decisions than other smart people working from the same principles and premises. By contrast, the "normie" foundation landing on a more cost effective answer than the impact-focused evaluators is probably rare as it would be something of an accident.