The Lack of EA in US Private Foundations

My sense is that EA, and especially GiveWell, made some enemies in the early days by shining a light on how badly the philanthropic sector was performing. So you got stuff like Charity Navigator describing Effective Altruism as an “elitist philosophy”. Particularly early on, GiveWell was not shy about criticizing big incumbents like UNICEF or Kiva. This probably helped attract attention, but I doubt it helped make friends.

Maybe this is inevitable — maybe only an outsider movement would be able to accomplish what GiveWell has — but it’s not so surprising that an industry being disrupted has negative feelings about the disrupters.

Needless to say there is a sad truth here, that since most foundations are not accountable to effectiveness they can put their own feelings first.

Could the main difference be that TBP is a simple process change with reduced costs, while EA-style giving would fundamentally alter grant evaluation requiring more overhead from the funder.

I also think EA would involve extra costs to existing grantees, they will have to provide more evidence of their effectiveness or lose out to orgs that have those systems in place.

Separately I think it will be very hard to get existing foundations to shift to use more EA frameworks unless their main donors become interested in it. There is probably more to be gained by finding and helping the UHNW people/orgs that are inclined towards EA already.

I think this is a really important area, and one I've been doing some research / thinking about on my own as well. Two recommendations: CE/AIM has a grantmaker training program that does great work in this space. This also reminds me of a SSIR piece by Ian David Moss about expanding the remit of EA: https://ssir.org/articles/entry/in_defense_of_pet_causes. 

Super interesting. Based on my understanding of CE's thinking, would not doing something 5x more cost effective than the second best, in a cause area that falls a bit below the cost-effectiveness that EA is interested in, still be EA-aligned? I mean the counterfactual impact can still be huge if you are affecting thousands or millions of lives and moving large amounts of money/resources and doing this much more cost effectively than the best, existing player. A proof point would be a CE-incubated charity that now is absorbing significant funding from either something like USAID, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or similar.

My sense is that there is a lot of impact to be made from just convincing US foundations to donate to charities abroad, which is probably more tractable than selling EA as an entire concept, and is still very compatible with TBP.

(In my opinion they are basically correct about TBP and EA being incompatible!)

I think a place where there is a disconnect is that these PF basically think being EA-aligned means you have to be a major pain in the ass to your grantees.

The more I think about this, the more strange it seems to me. At least for the grant-making processes I'm familiar with, there is very little burden on the applicants/grantees. They will in a short (by the standards of grant applications) form that indicates what information is required, maybe answer a few follow-up questions (or maybe not) and then get the money with very few follow-ups. In contrast my understanding of government grantmakers is they require a lot more paperwork and are much more time consuming. PIs at major universities seem to spend a huge fraction of their time fundraising - that is not my impression of EA org leaders. If anything I think EA grantees would generally like more ongoing engagement and feedback from grantmakers.

This is very interesting, I hadn't heard of TBP before, thanks for sharing.

Interesting post!

these PF basically think being EA-aligned means you have to be a major pain in the ass to your grantees.

This surprised me. I wonder why this is the case? Maybe from early GiveWell charity investigations where they made the charities do a lot of reporting? My experience with EA grantmakers is that they're at least very aware of the costs of overhead and try hard to avoid red tape.

Extremely interesting article -and I'd love to see other posts exploring your assumptions!

I had a chance to meet a private foundation's leader in Europe recently (raising and donating several millions / year). Interestingly, they also mentioned TBP and I'm now wondering whether it was to somehow position themselves as opposed to some sort of highly demanding grantmaking.

I do think TBP and EA are compatible, to some degree. We should not confuse (1) "having a very high bar for anticipated effectiveness" and (2) "having a very high bar for evidence of impact". It is quite simple to apply for a grant from most EA grantmakers. In my (certainly limited) experience, if you want your grant to be renewed (and, supposedly, increased), you'll probably have to provide significant evidence, and I think it's fair enough.

I suppose non-EA funders might:
- Have actually little knowledge of EA or the EA funding landscape
- Be discouraged by the depth of analysis that they can see from GiveWell
- Be annoyed or discouraged by EA's frequent, strong claim of "making decisions based on evidence" (btw, this claim is so often advertized that I'd assume that it can be conflated with a reliance on frequent reports from and control over grantees).

Also, maybe it's be worth distinguishing different cases, in particular:

• Funders of "traditional" animal welfare or GHD charities;
• Funders of more "exotic" projects (global catastrophic risks, community-building, forecasting...), which usually cannot rely as much on historical data for evaluation.