Rethink Priorities' funding needs

By Rethink Priorities, Marcus_A_Davis, Kieran Greig @ 2024-11-15T17:28 (+93)

As part of "Marginal Funding Week" for the 2024 Giving Season on the EA Forum, we would like to share how Rethink Priorities (RP) would use additional funding beyond what we anticipate we will receive from our major funders. RP has many well-defined, high-impact projects that could greatly benefit from extra resources. Even after factoring in support from current large donors, we have substantial room to transform further funding into impact.

Gratitude and growth: Support our momentum into 2025

As we wrap up another year, we feel a deep sense of gratitude for the support from the community of individuals and groups that support and use our work. RP was able to make meaningful progress—from conducting research that advances new areas to supporting projects that shape the future of effective altruism (EA). Donor support at the end of last year made this possible. With this backing, we have strengthened our team and delivered high-quality, independent research and implementation support.

Looking ahead to 2025, we are in a position where additional funding is essential to keep this momentum going. But the fundraising environment remains challenging and unpredictable at times, and we may need to make adjustments if we cannot secure the support we need. With sufficient funding, we will be able to continue prioritizing community-focused research, as well as pursue promising new ideas. If you have valued our work, now is an excellent time to contribute to help us enter 2025 on strong footing. Thank you to everyone who has been part of RP’s journey—we would not be here without your collective support.

Please join us in building on this progress as we head into 2025. 

How RP creates impact 

RP is strategically positioned to advance priority areas. Our distinct approach may offer several compelling reasons for support: 

1. Focus on high-impact, neglected areas: We prioritize progress in critical, overlooked fields to inform decisions by funders, policymakers, and leading organizations.
2. Analytical excellence: We conduct in-depth, high-quality analyses that enhance research accuracy and relevance.
3. Action orientation: We translate complex research into concrete strategies and practical solutions that decision-makers can implement quickly.

4. Transparency in uncertainty: We proactively address and communicate uncertainties to inform balanced, evidence-based decisions.^[1] 

5. Scale and accessibility: We are a major provider of open-access rigorous research that contributes to progress on global priorities.
6. Incubation of high-impact projects: We inform, incentivize, and accelerate promising new initiatives, turning ideas into action.

We provide empirical and practical guidance to decision-makers, and position them—and us—to take informed and effective action. Across global priority areas, we enhance the strategic and on-the-ground decisions of grantmakers, foundations, NGOs, and government actors, contributing to initiatives with the potential to shape entire fields.

We strive to deliver actionable insights on critical, often-overlooked questions, such as: 

• What policy options should be advanced in order to mitigate risks from advanced AI, and how can we strengthen the field to address them effectively?
• Which invertebrates may be sentient, what is the potential harm to them caused by industrial farming practices? What actions can be taken to reduce harm?
• What high-impact opportunities exist in global health and development (GHD) beyond those identified by major evaluators? How can prominent grantmakers enhance their portfolios accordingly?

• How should moral weight be assigned to different animal species? How could this shape funding decisions by governments and foundations?^[2]

• More broadly, how can we model key factors for resource allocation across global catastrophic risks, global development, and animal welfare?

Our focus on these issues stems from their essential yet underexplored role in guiding strategic decisions for a range of key stakeholders. We are committed to delivering useful guidance and solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges and are pleased to see the impactful outcomes our research has already helped drive.

Learn more about our impact across areas such as: Global Health and Development, Animal Welfare, Surveys and Worldview Investigations.

2024 at a glance

Over the course of 2024, RP is projected to have invested USD 10.3M into our research and implementation efforts, with a permanent staff of 61 employees.^[3] 

The allocation across areas throughout the year was^[4]:

• 38% on global challenges related to advanced AI
• 25% on animal welfare
• 20% on worldview investigations as well as on surveys and data analysis, which encompasses various cause areas
• 17% on global health and development (including climate change)

Some of our key achievements from this year include:

	A private global health report we shared through our network helped influence an individual philanthropist to move tens of millions of dollars in funding to a more impactful field.
	We developed two new tools to assist philanthropic decision-making and resource allocation under moral uncertainty.
	We facilitated a shift in shrimp welfare policies from a retailer that, if actually implemented, is expected to benefit 5 billion shrimp annually.
	We provided operational support and fiscal sponsorship to seven different projects such as Epoch AI, Apollo, and Consultants for Impact.
	We conducted 31 surveys and analyses (most of them privately commissioned) that inform actions of key decision-makers, including how to frame future challenges for broader appeal to thought leaders and policymakers.

Read a more comprehensive summary of our outputs and achievements in 2024 here.

How your individual contribution makes a difference for our work 

Innovation through early support

Individual donors are essential for us to reach our bold goals. While large foundations and funds provide crucial backing, it is individual contributions that often ignite our most innovative work. These donations enable us to launch new research projects that can help establish cutting-edge fields or provide vital data for others. In contrast, major institutional funders often may wait until ideas are more developed, leaving earlier-stage concepts overlooked. With your support, we can take those initial steps and unlock new possibilities for meaningful progress.

Advancing neglected areas

A strong example of these dynamics in action is our early work on invertebrate sentience and welfare. Four years ago, issues like shrimp and insect welfare were largely overlooked. Today, thanks in part to our research, these topics are gaining recognition as important areas of concern. Similarly, our research on risk in cause prioritization and our cross-cause comparison model, as well as our nascent work on digital minds, have the potential to influence key decision-makers. Yet, as with many of our early initiatives, these projects were made possible by individual donors who trusted us to explore and expand understanding in emerging fields.^[5] Rather than increasing their support for frontier research areas, large funders are backing off from funding us for such work.^[6] Therefore, contributions of individuals play an increasingly important role this year for our work to not be curtailed. A diverse group of dedicated donors at all levels can empower us to pursue some of our boldest ideas. Your collective support can keep it possible for us to set ambitious goals and work toward achieving them.

Pro bono work empowering high-impact communities

We are dedicated to offering insights and support that empower decision-makers across a wide range of causes. Much of our work is intentionally crafted as a public good benefiting larger communities and movements. However, we often need to self-fund projects with these aims, with one prominent example being most of our worldview investigations work that can be pivotal to strategic decision-making about resource allocation. 

We also work with clients who lack the resources to fully commission our services; subsidizing and adapting this work to make it publicly accessible, thereby creating additional value for broader communities. This mission relies significantly on support from individual donors like you.

Your contributions help bridge funding gaps, allowing us to deliver impactful, innovative, and independent research and support on neglected issues to wider audiences.

2025 strategy and research plans

In this section, we outline potential ways RP could utilize additional funding in 2025, along with brief rationales for each. These projects are indicative, as our priorities may shift in response to evolving landscapes and emerging needs. Some key considerations about RP’s overall strategy and approach for 2025 remain largely the same as those for 2024, but we also want to place greater emphasis on external communication, in order to further diversify our funder base and target audiences.       

Animal Welfare

We aim to drive impactful, evidence-based change for animals through rigorous research,  coordinating with advocates, funders, and policymakers around better options, and piloting novel interventions. Our focus is on developing solutions to help the most numerous but neglected individuals, identifying short-term interventions while maintaining a long-term perspective. Some of our key goals for 2025 include collaboratively developing a more cost-effective intervention for fish, continuing piloting novel ideas for insects, advancing critical knowledge to help shrimp, and aligning on key milestones for farmed animals.

However, recent changes in funding pose significant challenges. A few months ago, Good Ventures (the main funder behind Open Philanthropy) decided to exit grantmaking on farmed invertebrates and wild animals. Most of our work on these areas over the last 18 months has been supported by Open Philanthropy^[7]. While The Navigation Fund stepped in and committed to sustaining our insect welfare portfolio through 2026, that is not the case for other invertebrate work or projects to help wild animals. These areas are at severe risk without additional support, which would now make a significant marginal impact–it can be the difference in whether we can sustain it or not.

We are aiming to raise $920,000 to be able to maintain the team at the size of 9 with at least 12 months of runway.

Some specific ways we could use additional funding

$30,000 to identify promising policy levers to advance shrimp welfare in Europe. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) is set to evaluate the scientific evidence on crustacean welfare by 2028-2030 for their potential inclusion in EU laws. This project will evaluate the feasibility of the EFSA issuing a positive scientific opinion that recommends animal welfare protection for crustaceans, as well as potential pathways and barriers to increase this likelihood. 

$50,000 to identify viable on-farm welfare improvements for shrimp. While current advocacy has greatly focused on acute but short-term suffering, such as slaughter practices and eyestalk ablation, little is known about welfare-centric recommendations to address other challenges that affect these animals’ lifespans. This project will develop critical on-farm recommendations based on current knowledge and viability assessments by retailers and producers; it will also identify areas where further empirical studies are needed.

$50,000 to $100,000 to quantify and prioritize fish species-specific welfare threats to point to issues where a fish ask could have a greater impact. This project will focus on farmed species commonly consumed in Europe, our pilot region, and aims to inform improved cost-effectiveness of advocacy efforts. It will also help identify knowledge gaps that, if addressed, could meaningfully contribute to improving fish welfare. This project’s scope will be adjusted depending on available funding.

$100,000 to fund empirical studies aiming to uncover the most humane pesticides for common insect species in agriculture. If insects are sentient, replacing current pesticides with more humane ones could alleviate a significant amount of suffering. We are developing an empirical research agenda to unravel this issue, and additional funding will be allocated to talented entomologists to address the priority empirical questions we are identifying and, thus, to make critical progress toward an intervention with high-impact potential.

$150,000 to assess the cost-effectiveness of methods to control populations of urban wild animals. As human populations expand, conflicts between humans and wild animals have likely become more common. To move away from traditional lethal population control methods, scientists have been developing more humane alternatives, focusing on fertility control for rodents, birds, wild boars, and other animals. These methods might offer more tractable ways to alleviate wild animal suffering in the short term, given shared interests in managing human-wildlife conflicts. This project therefore aims to better understand the cost-effectiveness of these alternatives.

$75,000 to $150,000 to figure out what the future for farmed animals might hold: Through a horizon scanning and scenario planning exercise, this project will explore key trends and uncertainties regarding farmed animals over the next 10, 20, and 50 years. By analyzing technological, economic, and environmental shifts, we aim to identify various likely scenarios, point to plausible high-impact opportunities, and anticipate challenges like genetic modification and selective breeding of animals, and plausible AI risks, among others. The final output will include detailed scenario reports and actionable recommendations to ensure that advocates and funders can take timely action on critical future risks and opportunities.

Global Health and Development

In 2025, the GHD department’s strategic focus will center on three interconnected elements:

• We will engage with more traditional funders to help them redirect significant philanthropic budgets toward more cost-effective interventions. We think this work could potentially be 3-10x as cost-effective to fund as directly giving the money to GiveWell top charities, as we have argued previously.
• We aim to serve as a centralized research institution to support EA-aligned GHD work, addressing the needs of funders and organizations that need to outsource research capacity.
• We will pursue our own independent research agenda targeting topics with potential for high impact to enhance GHD grantmaking, leveraging our track record in identifying neglected areas like lead exposure.

Collectively, these pursuits constitute a cohesive strategy designed to maximize our impact within the GHD community. All three heavily depend on GHD unrestricted funding to build relationships with traditional funders, position ourselves as a research hub, and set an agenda for the most high-impact work, as opposed to being bound by short-term commissioned projects.

Some specific ways we could use additional funding

$50,000 to support the continuation of fungal diseases research: In previous research, we projected that deaths and DALYs related to fungal disease could grow to approximately 2-3 times the current burden until 2040. Unfortunately, data on the global fungal disease burden is poor, and estimates are mostly based on extrapolations from the few available studies. All experts we talked to agree that current burden estimates (usually stated as >1.7M deaths/year) likely underestimate the true burden. Not knowing the true current burden can obscure the importance of the disease and limit the amount of resources going to fighting it. An extended version of this work, possibly in collaboration with active researchers in the field, could help us narrow our uncertainty over the current burden of fungal diseases, and calibrate expectations for the diseases’ trajectory. Ultimately, we would aim to shift global health organizations’ and funders’ sense of the importance of the issue and help to inform global funding into fungal disease.

$125,000 to investigate uncertainty in IHME’s Global Burden of Disease (GBD) estimates: Many organizations rely on GBD estimates. Yet our past work has found that several of these estimates rely on heavily criticized models or exhibit significant discrepancies with other data sources. We propose a systematic investigation of these potential inaccuracies, geared toward delivering practical implications for funders using these estimates in health-focused cost-effectiveness analyses, and in exploring and prioritizing funding opportunities. We aim to focus on 2-4 diseases or problems in order to identify sources of uncertainty specific to the GBD estimates, and draw broader lessons for identifying inaccuracies in other estimates. Our methodology will involve: evaluating existing uncertainty metrics, independently assessing data sources, and analyzing patterns in GBD figures. By providing the tools for funders to account for uncertainty in these figures, our report will facilitate significant improvements in the impact of grantmaking, both for major EA funders, and in the wider global health landscape.

$140,000 to explore cost-effective climate and global health cross-causal impacts: Rethink Priorities is in talks with Giving Green to undertake joint research that will culminate in a report identifying the most cost-effective giving opportunities at the intersection of global health and development and climate change. From our experience, there is outsized interest in funding this intersection from donors who are impact-minded but unassociated with the EA movement. Currently, there are no EA resources to help donors find cost-effective opportunities at this intersection, as EA analysis is cause-area-specific. We believe that a research product grounded in EA principles could be extremely influential, and move large sums of money toward organizations with significant intercausal impacts.

Core funding to build research infrastructure for the impact-focused community: Many EA funders and implementing organizations express a need for more research, yet lack the capacity to do it themselves, or the budget to contract this work at its most impactful scope. The community could therefore benefit from a centralized research team that enjoys economies of scale and is flexible enough to tackle various actors’ research problems as they arise. Core funding would allow us to subsidize our rates with these partners, making it financially viable for us to provide this valuable service to the EA GHD community.

If you’re interested in collaborating on a similar project, please reach out to us.

Surveys and Data Analysis

The Surveys and Data Analysis team will continue to work on a combination of private commissions and consulting for high-impact organizations, alongside independent projects of their own. This includes thorough message testing experiments, polling public attitudes, academic publications including expert surveys, surveys of the EA community, data analysis consultation, and impact assessments.

If you’re interested in commissioning a project from us or partnering on a project, please reach out to us.

We aim to primarily focus on meeting the needs of core mission-aligned organizations by providing rapid, on-demand surveys and data analysis to inform high-priority strategic questions.

However, we think there is significant value in providing support for the team to pursue its own research agenda:

• Our private commissions are almost never published, meaning that they do not inform the wider community. Even where an organization would be happy for us to make public our results, the extra work to produce these public reports is not funded.
• Private commissions often have a narrow and/or short-term focus. We are often approached to address questions that organizations are facing right now, but not to address broader questions of long-term importance to the community (e.g. how large is the community? How many people have heard of EA and what are their attitudes towards EA? What do the public think about AI?).
• Working only on privately commissioned projects (often measured in hours or days) leaves the department with a permanently unpredictable funding situation, and limited capacity to pursue valuable longer-term projects.

Only with additional funding can we work on the independent projects we think are the highest priority, and make these findings available to the community at large.

Below, we outline a number of independent projects we are interested in pursuing.

$46,000 for non-EA survey: Existing data on why people "bounce off" or drop out of effective altruism (EA) is largely limited to anecdotal data that is heavily influenced by survivorship bias. We propose to recruit people no longer engaged in EA, via soliciting referrals, to complete a survey or interview, so that we can better understand what factors are turning people away from the community. This may highlight important factors which are driving people away, and potentially distorting which groups the community recruits from.

$60,000 for exploring public perceptions of digital sentience: Conduct a comprehensive survey on U.S. public attitudes toward the potential sentience of AI systems, including their beliefs on rights for digital beings and regulatory preferences. This project seeks to reveal how the public perceives the ethical implications of digital sentience, comparing attitudes towards purely synthetic intelligences and ‘uploaded’ human minds, with potential insights for policy and existential risk management in the AI space.

$75,000 for AI Attitudes surveys: We have previously completed a number of well-received surveys examining public attitudes towards AI. With more funding, we could continue this work to examine how these views have changed over time, explore quantitatively what reasons most influence people to not be concerned about AI safety and how this differs across different groups, and explore the most effective ways to communicate about AI safety.

$34,000-150,000 for animal moral weight surveys: Surveys demonstrating how much members of the public value welfare improvements for animals may be an important part of ensuring and allowing government agencies to assign value to animal welfare in their policies. We propose a number of surveys (which could be funded separately), including: 

(1) Willingness to Pay for neglected animals (e.g. fish and invertebrates)

(2) Direct animal pain comparisons in different conditions (taking into account public and expert views)

(3) Replicating international surveys in a US context examining how many Americans believe policy should assign weight to animal welfare.

Worldview Investigations

We plan to continue to make several contributions to the broader conversation about global priorities, and how large foundations may allocate their portfolios, and the inputs to cross-cause cost-effectiveness models. We have three main areas of work proposed for 2025, outlined in our three research agendas:

• Foundational work to inform resource allocation decisions, including through the development of new tools, as well as theoretical work on areas such as the value of trajectory change for the long-term future
• Projects in digital welfare, including a digital consciousness model, theoretical work on key cruxes regarding digital sentience, and a shallow review of the potential scale of digital welfare by 2040
• Extending our work in animal moral weights, to address new areas such as non-hedonist theories of welfare, moral weights under uncertainty, and applying moral weights in benefit-cost analyses.

Sample projects that you can support with your funding include:

$33,000 for expanding the Cross-Cause Cost-Effectiveness Model: Enhance the existing model by incorporating additional frameworks for various cause areas like global health, animal welfare, and existential risk, as well as new areas under consideration.

This expansion will allow for greater flexibility and precision by accommodating different assumptions, parameters, and uncertainties unique to each domain. By introducing tailored models, users can better explore the specific dynamics and potential impacts of diverse interventions, ultimately making this tool a more versatile and realistic resource for prioritizing funding and resources across multiple causes.

$33,000 for incorporating animal welfare into benefit-cost analyses: Develop methodologies for including animal welfare in government benefit-cost analyses, which currently lack robust ways to quantify animal interests in monetary terms. This project aims to create practical tools based on Rethink Priorities’ Moral Weight Project that can be used to evaluate the welfare of animals, particularly in legislative and regulatory contexts.

By providing a way to systematically incorporate animal welfare into these analyses, we hope to influence policy decisions that are more reflective of the public’s concern for animal welfare, thereby broadening the scope of what is considered in policy evaluations.

$20,000 for the scale of digital welfare concerns in training vs deployment: AI models undergo massive runs before being deployed for use by consumers. Some commentators have suggested there might be welfare issues tied specifically to the training process, owing to the incomplete status of the models or details in the training procedures. We propose to write a report on the relative concern warranted by training and deployment: how plausible are the specific welfare issues associated with each context and how disproportionate are their computational scales?

Special Projects

In 2025, the Special Projects team plans to onboard two new projects to which they have already extended offers for fiscal sponsorship largely focused on work to curtail risks from AI. We also plan to launch another call for new project proposals. The team will likely hire one additional FTE to provide more flexibility supporting current and new projects. While we aren’t actively seeking funding, if you are interested in helping us offer support within this ecosystem please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Why we need your support 

As mentioned above, our most impactful projects and initiatives often crucially depend on the support of individual donors, rather than major grants. While large-scale funding is crucial for many of our priorities, there are several high-potential opportunities that may not align well with the priorities or constraints of institutional grantmakers. For some areas of work, we heavily depend on funding from individuals like you to sustain our work at the current level and aim for even higher impact.

A contribution of $1,000 - $10,000 each from a handful of individual donors can directly shape which innovative programs move forward next year. These programs tackle neglected but crucial challenges that few others are addressing. Donations of any size help us investigate breakthrough solutions that might otherwise go unexplored. And, for those able to give $50,000 or much more, you could personally determine whether an entire promising program launches or is able to continue its vital work.

Despite our growing impact, we have structured our work so individual supporters like you remain essential. Each donation, regardless of size, incrementally helps us identify and unlock solutions to pressing problems that others overlook. Your support doesn't just add to our work, it determines what critical research and programs are possible.

With your funding, our impact could be boosted in the following ways: 

• Advancing cutting-edge, early-stage work: We could pursue some of our most innovative but early-stage work that helps build up entire new fields. (Read more about how unrestricted funding has enabled impact and why we need it.)  
• Exploring new frontiers: We will have the capacity to venture into uncharted territory in emerging fields, such as digital consciousness.
• Providing research support to others: We will be able to provide value through our surveys and our research also to the community of smaller organizations and committed individuals who don’t have the resources to pay for our services.
• Support for emerging projects: We would have more capacity to administratively support promising new projects so that they can focus on their core mission, often around shaping policy to make AI developments safe for all.
• Expanding partnerships: We would have the resources to seek out new partner organizations outside our current networks that we could support to allocate their resources in more cost-effective ways and impact more lives, both humans and animals.
• Broadening audience reach: We would be able to adapt our research outputs so that they can speak to a larger audience that is currently unfamiliar with our work.

Our CEO Marcus A. Davis is happy to offer a call or connect you with a researcher in the area of your interest if you have further questions.

Find more information about our specific funding gaps at the end of our 2024 report. 

Please consider donating to us here. There are various ways of making tax-deductible donations from several countries.

You enhance our impact. Thank you!

Acknowledgments

Rethink Priorities is a think-and-do tank dedicated to informing decisions made by high-impact organizations, funders, and policymakers across various cause areas. This post is authored by Kieran Greig and Janique Behman. Thanks to Marcus A. Davis, Daniela Waldhorn, John Firth, David Moss, Hannah Tookey, Whitney Childs, and Henri Thunberg for having made significant contributions leading up to this text. Thanks to Ula Zarosa and Rachel Norman for editing.

1. ^{^}

    For more of an introductory version of how we can help navigate uncertainty and create impact please see this.

2. ^{^}

    Oxford University Press recently published a book, Weighing Animal Welfare, based on our work and edited by the lead researcher on the project.

3. ^{^}

    We will have made 8 new hires over 2024 and are working with a total of 61 permanent staff at year's end, corresponding to 57 full-time equivalent (FTE) staff, in addition to using a few tens of contractors throughout the year.

4. ^{^}

    This does not include funds invested by the special projects we administratively support, but it does include work at the AI project we incubated. To learn more about their work, feel free to reach out.

5. ^{^}

    Specifically, for instance:

   One donor provided us with unrestricted funds, allowing us to support otherwise unfunded work by our Worldview Investigations Team. This backing gave us the freedom to address what we thought were the most impactful questions, rather than pursue only more narrowly commissioned work from foundations.

   Another donor, passionate about advancing digital minds research, funded us to create a model estimating the probability of digital consciousness. This field remains underfunded and immature, making their support especially critical.

6. ^{^}

    See this example. More on how this impacts us in footnote 8 below.

7. ^{^}

    Going forward, Open Philanthropy will continue to provide the same level of funding for our core farmed animal work, with exclusions for projects focused on invertebrates and wild animals.