Rethink Priorities 2022 Mid-Year Update: Progress, Plans, Funding

By Rethink Priorities, Janique @ 2022-07-26T14:33 (+112)

Key points 

Our mission

Rethink Priorities’ mission is to generate the most impact we can for others in the present and the long-term future. Using evidence and reason, we identify where resources would be most effective and help direct them there. We do this by conducting critical research to inform policymakers and philanthropists, and by guiding the development of new organizations to address key problems. Our work covers important and neglected cause areas, including animal welfare, artificial intelligence, climate change, global health and development, and other work to safeguard a flourishing long-term future. We also aim to understand and support effective altruism–the community of people focused on these issues.

We described how we see our path to impact in our strategy post at the end of last year. The next impact assessment is due in late 2022. 

In the upcoming months, we strive to keep high quality standards for our work and aim at increasing the number of research reports that can be published in academic journals. We believe that our strong operations and ability to hire remotely and internationally help our efforts to scale by finding and integrating the best researchers. At the same time, we hope that providing opportunities to early-career researchers will grow effective altruism by getting more talented people skilled at working on important problems. Having capable managers and leaders will continue to be integral to the organization’s success as we grow. 

Staff growth

In our last hiring round, we received 2,172 applications from 1,636 people for 17 different roles, approximately one third of whom we estimate are committed EAs. Since late 2021, we have hired 16 permanent staff members and seven fellows, and will have nine more permanent hires joining by the end of August. Another four people have accepted offers to start permanent positions by the end of October. We are currently working with 28 contractors, including 12 for the Moral Weight Project and eight for various Special Projects. Six of RP’s new managers are internal promotions, another five are external hires. 

Kieran Greig joined RP as Chief Strategy Analyst this month. We also started hiring executive research assistants for our Co-CEOs as well as research assistants for every team. This strengthened capacity allows executive staff to free up more time for high-level strategy work. 

You can see our team page here.

At the time of publication, our staff count is planned to have reached 48.8 full-time equivalents (FTE) by the end of 2022. Our staff total corresponds to 38 FTE focused on research and 10.8 FTE on operations.

In the first half of 2022, we spent 38% of our time working on research relevant to animal welfare (farmed animals, wild animals, and invertebrates), 27% on longtermism, 12.5% on surveys (including EA movement research), 16% on global health and development, and 6.5% on other research projects. Although the proportions have changed relative to last year, each single team has been able to expand its research capacity. 

We have spent USD 2,618,633 so far this year.

Strategic updates

RP is starting a new Special Projects Team (housed within the Operations Department) to support new initiatives, which will include: 

At the moment, we are fiscally sponsoring and operationally supporting projects like 

Research

Some of our departments or teams have already published on the EA Forum or elsewhere, while others have been doing substantial work behind the scenes. Our researchers are preparing more reports for publication in the next few months. The following list contains a few highlights, but does not consist of a comprehensive overview of all of RP’s research projects.

Longtermism Department

General Longtermism

AI Governance and Strategy

Surveys Department

Animal Welfare Department

Moral Weight

Global Health and Development Department

Climate Change

(Note: Public versions of the reports of this department will be available later this year.)

Worldview Investigations

Funding opportunities

Rethink Priorities’ most urgent funding need is for unrestricted donations, which would help ensure that we have the ability to direct funds to where they would be most effective and that we can react quickly to new opportunities that arise. We have often had the greatest impact when we had the flexibility to explore new potential avenues of research, and we’ve only been able to do this through unrestricted funding.

However, given that we’re often asked about our current funding needs in each of the cause areas in which we work, we have included the below chart.

We indicate the approximate amounts of funding we’d like to raise by year-end 2022 to sustain and continue our work, as well as our goal for fundraising to grow each program. These figures will be updated on our donation page every month. We are making plans for further growth that we will talk about on the EA Forum in our next impact and strategy post in November. 

Research Area

Low (USD)

High (USD)

Animal Welfare

$0.88M

$2.88M

Longtermism

$1.3M

$1.5M

Surveys

$1.1M

$1.8M

Global Health and Development

$0.78M

$0.8M

Worldview Investigations

$0

$0.93M

Total

$4.06M

$7.91M


You can make your contribution here. We accept major credit cards, PayPal, Venmo, bank transfers, cryptocurrency donations, and stock transfers.

If you have questions about donation opportunities, please email or book a meeting with our Director of Development. 

Acknowledgements

This post was written by Rachel Norman and Janique Behman from Rethink Priorities. Thanks to Marcus A. Davis, Abraham Rowe, Tom Hird, Bob Fischer, Daniela Waldhorn, Michael Aird, and David Moss for helpful feedback. If you like our work, please consider subscribing to our newsletter. You can see more of our research here.


Jamie_Harris @ 2022-07-28T19:17 (+12)

I'm a bit confused by this bit:

"We presently have to turn down some large commissions due to lack of staff capacity, and lack of funds in place to expand our team (or to maintain the team at its current size)."

Do you charge for your commissions? I'm struggling to get my head around why the ability to take commissions could be constrained by both lack of funding and staff capacity.

Thoughts I have about what might explain it / what you might mean:

Clarification on which of these, if any, seems closest to RP's situation would be welcome. Thanks!

David_Moss @ 2022-08-02T09:46 (+16)

The short answer is simply that the vast majority of projects requested of us are highly time sensitive (i.e. orgs want them completed within very fast timeline), so we need to have the staff already in place if we’re to take them on, as it’s not possible to hire staff in time to complete them even if they are offering more than enough funding (e.g. 6 or 7 figures) to make it happen.

This is particularly unfortunate, since we want to grow our team to take on more of these projects, and have repeatedly turned down many highly skilled applicants who could do valuable work, exclusively due to lack of funding.

Still, I would definitely encourage people to reach out to us to see whether we have capacity for projects.

Austin @ 2022-07-26T17:55 (+9)

Thanks for writing this up! Really appreciate the clear and transparent writeup across hiring, output, and financial numbers, and think that more orgs (including Manifold!) should strive for this level of clarity. One thing I would have been curious to see is how much money came in from each funding source, haha.

I set up a prediction market to see how RP will do against its funding goals:

Janique @ 2022-07-27T08:47 (+3)

Very cool, thanks, Austin!
We will publish another post on the Forum with updated funding goals by mid-November at the latest. I'm curious to see how our plans and ambitions might have changed by then. 
[Note: I'm working as Rethink Priorities' Director of Development.]

drwahl @ 2022-07-26T17:10 (+2)

One such project, already underway, is our work on interspecies comparisons of moral weight.

FYI this link gives me an "Access Denied" error.

Janique @ 2022-07-26T17:51 (+2)

It should link to the section above, we'll fix it. Thanks!