On deference to funders

By abrahamrowe @ 2025-03-03T18:23 (+174)

This is a post I drafted in November 2023, then updated for an hour in March 2025. I don’t think I’ll ever finish it so I am just leaving it in this draft form for draft amnesty week (I know I'm late). I don’t think it is particularly well calibrated, but mainly just makes a bunch of points that I haven’t seen assembled elsewhere. Please take it as extremely low-confidence and there being a low-likelihood of this post describing these dynamics perfectly.

I’ve worked at both EA charities and non-EA charities, and the EA funding landscape is unlike any other I’ve ever been in. This can be good — funders are often willing to take high-risk, high-reward bets on projects that might otherwise never get funded, and the amount of friction for getting funding is significantly lower.

But, there is an orientation toward funders (and in particular staff at some major funders), that seems extremely unusual for charitable communities: a high degree of deference to their opinions.

As a reference, most other charitable communities I’ve worked in have viewed funders in a much more mixed light. Engaging with them is necessary, yes, but usually funders (including large, thoughtful foundations like Open Philanthropy) are viewed as… an unaligned third party who is instrumentally useful to your organization, but whose opinions on your work should hold relatively little or no weight, given that they are a non-expert on the direct work, and often have bad ideas about how to do what you are doing.

I think there are many good reasons to take funders’ perspectives seriously, and I mostly won’t cover these here. But, to name a few, I think it is genuinely the case that it could be good to listen to grantmakers because:

• They are looking at the forest, and not the trees: they’re thinking about how your work fits into an ecosystem, and not just your project. They are also usually somewhat more focused on long-term goals rather than short-term success.
• They are comparing your project to others, and hopefully making good judgments on how your project stacks up against alternate options.
• They aren’t you, so they aren’t inherently biased towards thinking you are going to successfully do the things you expect to do.
• They’ve thought a lot about the issue you’re working on (hopefully!) and that might mean they have useful input.

But, I’m not going to focus on the upside, because I think the default state in the EA ecosystem right now is to take the upside too seriously — deference to the opinions of funders is often the default. This post also simplifies a bunch of really complicated issues. Some funders might be better than others! And deference varies in degree!

Deference is everywhere

I’m not going to make a particularly in-depth point that deference is the default, because it seems widely known. Here are things I’ve observed in the last few years:

• An organization made a major strategic pivot based on a handful of sentences of feedback from a funder — maybe 3 sentences of writing at most. No conversation with the funder or anyone else occurred before this pivot.
  • Another organization I know of seemed to do a similar pivot based on what seemed to me like equally little feedback, but I had less insight into the decision-making process.
• A major policy funder in one EA cause area is seen as a direct detriment to progress on policy work but demands to be deeply engaged because they are funding it. No one does anything about this due to their funding.
• I’ve seen funders push heavily for projects that everyone involved thought was a bad idea, but due to the funder thinking it was a good call, did it anyway.
• I was told explicitly, on two occasions, by two different people in leadership positions in EA organizations, things along the lines of, “I don’t think I fully grasp this argument, but [funder] thinks it, and seems to think about this a lot, so I’ve updated heavily toward their position.” In both cases, this was highly consequential as a decision.
• A major grantmaker in an EA cause area relied primarily on another funder's opinions when conducting “evaluations”. Their end result was clearly bad, and the programs they were funding didn’t end up getting anything done, for reasons that were obvious to everyone on the inside ahead of time.

I recognize these are vague, primarily for me to preserve the confidentiality of groups/people. But I think it seems relatively common as a phenomenon and situations like the above seem to be regularly discussed.

Funders often lack information you have access to

A fairly common view within EA is that funders have access to more information than you might have as an individual. This is probably true in a bunch of important ways — funders have heard of many different ways of doing direct work from different applicants, and probably talk to lots of different people in general. They also probably tend to talk to people globally, while an organization might just network with people in their region or ecosystem.

But this misses a critical detail: funders also lack information you have access to. In particular, they often lack negative information about projects and people.

Funders don’t hear as many negative things about projects

Funders, especially monopolistic funders, hear a lot about either how well things could go, or how well they’ve gone in the past. The organizations providing information to funders have strong incentives to not tell funders about downside risks or realized failures accurately, or tell funders accurate information about mistakes they’ve made. With a fairly monopolistic funder like Open Philanthropy, the stakes are even higher. If a group messes up a pitch or conversation with Open Philanthropy, their entire organization could lose their jobs and the project will stop. The incentives of organizations are very heavily skewed towards providing distorted, inaccurate information about projects or past work.

I think the degree to which this impacts what information funders get varies by EA cause area — I'd guess it is more pervasive in the animal welfare and global health organizations (more traditional) than in the more GCR-inclined communities (more likely to be comfortable doing something negative for the project if it is better epistemically), but I suspect this dynamic is widely distorting funders’ views of projects across EA cause areas. I’m not suggesting that this is intentional misleading of funders — most of this is distortions happening due to how things are framed, or what information is or isn’t presented.

Additionally, funders don’t hear from projects accurate negative impressions about other projects. There are social incentives for individuals to not provide accurate pictures of other groups — you don’t want to seem uncooperative or like you’re trying to negatively portray a competitor for funding to improve your position. My impression is that there are multiple instances where this has led to organizations that are better at “playing politics” with funders ending up getting a lot more funding, relative to the (perceived by other people in their ecosystem) impact/effectiveness of their organization.

My own experience doing animal advocacy has consistently been that achieving things like corporate campaign victories isn’t the biggest barrier to success — it’s trying to coordinate with other groups. Often, there will be a group involved who has a reputation among their peers for being disruptive and unproductive, or able to take credit for things they didn’t achieve. But, because of these dynamics, this reputation doesn’t reach funders. Or, the ecosystem strategy will be dictated by people who funders trust, because they have leverage over the other groups (via their trust with and relationship with a funder), and even when they make bad calls will get their way across an ecosystem.

Funders don’t hear negative things about people

Similarly, funders get far less negative information about individuals than people in the in-group gossip circles, for similar reasons to the above. This is probably good in some respects — funders are insulated from false or out-of-context rumors. But, they also don’t seem to hear about things that are widely known and useful information. For example, my understanding is that pervasive sexual harassment from some individuals was widely known about by employees at many animal welfare organizations, especially senior staff, but that information didn’t reach major funders for several years.

Funders often don’t share your values

Funders don’t share your values and often don’t hold the values they publicly state.

The most prominent example of this in EA is Open Philanthropy. There broadly seems to be an impression among EAs that Open Philanthropy is a highly rational, welfare-optimizing foundation. But, their revealed actions seem to consistently demonstrate that while they might be highly aligned with EA in many regards, they also regularly drift from what EA consensus seems to be.

Examples of their lack of alignment with the EA community as a whole have been their minimal (relatively speaking) focus on animal welfare, their past focus on criminal justice reform, and more. This is fine! Open Philanthropy can have the values it wants to have as a private grantmaking entity and make whatever grants it wants! However, there seems to be a widespread impression that Open Philanthropy is directly responsive to the EA community and EA values — this doesn’t seem true (see past discussion on this here).

This shouldn’t be a major issue, but because Open Philanthropy’s actions are often taken as being guiding for the community, there is some level of risk for the community as a whole. Open Philanthropy seems much more like an adjacent, but only somewhat-aligned organization — they aren’t focused directly on impact from a pure EA lens, but instead are doing a broad suite of things, some of which might be considered “EA” while others might not be.

Funders have experience in grantmaking. That is different from experience doing the work.

Funders have skills in grantmaking. This is likely very different from experience in direct work. A given employee at an EA-aligned organization will often have significantly more experience in doing the work they are doing than an employee of a funding organization.

This again seems like a fine division of labor. However, given that funders often give active feedback on the projects they fund or even directly shape the strategies of groups, experience with the work itself could be valuable.

For example, the EA Animal Welfare Fund has ~1.5 out of 6 managers experienced with any experience in direct animal welfare work (sorry in advance for my career judgments if wrong). While I think the EA AWF does great work, I also think that they also make a lot of wasted grants that they wouldn’t make if more of the grantmakers had some level of direct experience in animal advocacy.

Grantmaking is a different skill than doing direct work, and just because a funder has the opportunity to evaluate many proposals for direct work doesn’t mean that they will do a better job, especially if they aren’t drawing on their own expertise.

There are also obviously ways where having experience in direct work is biasing. I’m not sure exactly how to balance this. But I think that my general experience is that at least within animal welfare funding, the grantmakers are currently worse at evaluating projects than many people I know doing direct work. This might vary a lot by cause area, and it’s unclear to me if the average grantmaker is worse than the average person doing direct work in animal welfare. But, it's the case (in my opinion) within animal welfare that the best grantmakers seem worse at evaluating projects for impact than the best direct workers. Edit to add: But, it doesn't seem ideal for the best direct workers to give up their work to become grantmakers either.

What can we do to make this better?

March 2025 note: I never finished anything past here.

• More funders
• More regranting and projects that distribute grantmaking decision-making across more people
• Less deference to grantmakers on strategy
• More deference to (some) organizations
  • This has lots of issues though, like relying on information from ineffective organizations
• Better and more evaluators
• More pipelines to grantmaking for more talented people

There are lots of issues with over-updating on this!

• Lots of direct work organizations might also have bad ideas about how to do the work.
• People involved in direct work might be biased toward their own friends, interventions they've tried, or own values.
• Organizations are thinking about different goals (e.g. long-term survival) than grantmakers, and might not focus on pure impact.