Correction: I wasn’t 100% clear on the definition of funding constrained. I stand by my claim that EA orgs should at the margin think about fund raising more.
Is Effective Altruism Funding Constrained?
I posed this question to few folks at EA Global 2018 and got almost exclusively “No’s” in response. Many claimed that charities that work on AI risk are talent constrained— for example they weren’t sure MIRI could hire many more people if their funding 5X’d. I made the counterclaim that surely GiveWell was funding constrained, and was told that they weren’t because of their relationship with Good Ventures and OpenPhil. I’m not sure this is the case.
Good Ventures started with an endowment of $8.3 billion, which is no doubt a lot of money. Annual giving to US charities alone is approximately $400 billion. So even if GV/OpenPhil/GiveWell gave away all of that money tomorrow, EA giving would amount to less than 5% of annual giving by US charities.
Perhaps taking this relative approach isn’t exactly what EAs normally mean when they say funding constrained. But considering that the United Way—the largest charity in the US—gives away $3.5 billion per year, it’s probably time to start considering how to take share from organizations with good intentions but bad execution.
Fundraising likely receives too little attention from EAs because many are more technically oriented and fundraising feels at best fluffy and at worst like sales and marketing. As anyone who has worked in an engineering culture knows, sales is not respectable, at best it’s a necessary evil. Marketing is where buzzwords come from. Given these sorts of aesthetic predispositions, it’s not that surprising EAs have neglected trying to take share from less effective organizations.
But that doesn’t mean it’s the optimal strategy. Especially considering the low hanging fruit of simply copying the most effective fundraising strategies that look a lot like B2B enterprise sales motions. There are strategies that look more like marketing than sales which I may explore separately, but given the cost of sales is predominately time this is a place where EAs with sales aptitude could put in direct work and generate big results.
What Effective Fundraising Would Look Like
Direct Corporate Social Responsibility
Many Fortune 500 companies give away lots of money to causes that are somehow connected to their business and the communities they work in. These large causes have to be approved by very senior executives who are used to making decisions based on businesses cases that show ROI. Winning over CHROs and then the rest of the executive team would by no means be easy. Based on experience I’d guess it would take over a year of conversations.
The initial step would be to have folks with sales aptitude to try to book appointments with junior folks in a few target firms’ Corporate Social Responsibility departments and have big names from EA organizations give presentations.
Indirect CSR
Most F500s have some list of approved charities that they’ll match donations to. The list was created so that there would never be a PR scandal about an organization accidentally matching a donation to a terrorist group or similar. The strategy here would be to first get on those lists, but then to also try to shape criteria going forward for other orgs to get on the list (and perhaps for staying on the list). Those criteria would include effectiveness metrics to benefit EA orgs and steal share.
Government Grants
Getting government grants is a sales process I’m mostly unfamiliar with, but lots of people are and USAID gives away lots of money that EAs aren’t accessing right now.
Why Take Market Share?
EAs may generally be underconfident about their ability to deploy more money effectively, but surely we should be more confident that we can deploy a large share of global charitable giving more effectively than the least effective decile of charitable dollars which are actively harming people and communities. Additionally, creating a fundraising side of EA gives folks with sales and marketing aptitude a role in the community outside of earning to give. On the whole, taking market share from ineffective organizations would at least reduce harm caused, create new opportunities for EA orgs to deliver today, and more optimally utilize the human capital of the EA community.