Advisors for Smaller Major Donors?

People may not be aware that GiveWell provides this service, in the global health and development space. They are happy to work with donors to find grant opportunities that are a good fit.

In some ways this level of advising was what @Spencer R. Ericson 🔸 was trying to do with SoGive. Although, they've now pivoted as I think there was not sufficient interest or willingness to pay from this size of donor. See this post on SoGive's expanded advising and custom research service (I think now outdated). 

Nice post! If someone wants AI governance/safety recommendations, feel free to message me. There's a set of orgs I'm confident are things that (a) non-OP donors are better suited than OP to funding and (b) people like me and OP grantmakers think are good. These are what I give to myself. Up to a given person whether they want my suggestions, of course!

(I was previously a grantmaker for EA Funds, and have been in the AI governance space for a few years.)

I'm not aware of any projects that aim to advise what we might call "Small Major Donors": people giving away perhaps $20k-$100k annually.

We don't advertise very much, but my org (Manifund) does try to fill this gap:

• Our main site, https://manifund.org/, allows individuals and orgs to publish charitable projects and raise funding in public, usually for projects in the range of $10k-$200k
• We generally focus on: good website UX, transparency (our grants, reasoning, website code and meeting notes are all public), moving money fast (~1 week rather than months)
• We are more self-serve than advisory; we mostly expect our donors to find projects they like themselves, which they can do because the grant proposals include large amounts of detail, plus they can directly chat with the project creators over our comments section
  • Though, we have experimented with promoting good projects via things like impact certs & quadratic funding rounds, or just posting recommendations on our blog
• In the EA space, we're particularly open to weird arrangements; beyond providing lightweight fiscal sponsorship to hundreds of individuals and experimenting with funding mechanisms, we have eg loaned money to aligned orgs and invested in for-profit enterprises
  • If you're interested in donating medium-sized amounts in unusual ways, reach out to me at austin@manifund.org!

I work as a grantmaker for a larger donor but as part of my role, I offer pro-bono advising to people giving $50k+ to animal welfare. If anyone is interested in this, feel free to message me via the Forum and happy to help!

(I’ve also advised donors giving $2-10M so feel free to reach out if you want to give at higher amounts too.)

At Giving Green, we happily provide free consultations for donors in this range who are interested in climate change mitigation. 

not speaking for my employer but as someone who engages a lot with this donor segment both in my paid work and in my volunteer time: (a) I do not think such a thing exists for cause-agnostic lightweight advising (but if it does I would love to hear about it); (b) this is part of the gap Giving Green tries to fill on climate, and maybe there are parallel cause-specific advisories that have the flexibility to advise smaller donors?; (c) I think the most doable thing here for an individual small major donor is to join a community of donors giving at around the same level with the same interests—I'm excited about e.g. GWWC pledge communities, funding circles, etc for this reason. unfortunately for this segment I don't think there's a way around doing some legwork yourself, but at least you can share the load + sometimes pool money/time/connections to get advice or access to funding opportunities that are normally only available to larger donors (I've done this!).

I've done some work for someone at the $200K/year level. Maybe one option would be to put in together three to ten people at your $20k-$100k range and pitch in to hire a researcher for a month to answer your pressing common questions.

I'm also kinda frustrated by the low number of funders for speculative not AI-specific gcr work (perhaps like your own Nucleic Acid Observatory, or my own Sentinel). I've thought about starting a donor circle for this, but then I'd just have an obvious conflict of interest. Still, I'd like such a thing to exist.

It looks like you don't fund in the animal welfare space, but I wanted to let you know that your post sparked some thinking from my colleague and I here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/srZEX2r9upbwfnRKw/giving-season-2024-announcement

Perhaps things like this exist within your funding priorities?

Thanks for writing this Jeff. You inspired Caroline and I to write this post. 

Some thoughts on what would help. Some of them are already happening.

• funding circles. Note that most official funding circles I know require a large budget and are therefore inaccessible for mid-sized donors.
• Related: a small group of like-minded donors evaluating a specific organization. Donors could reach out to each other and organize themselves.
• Give each other recommendations. If you have expertise of specific cause area and you can recommend organizations (especially when you don't have a conflict of interest with them), do talk about it to potential donors during networking events. Or, if you are a donor, do ask.
• EA funds can publish a more detailed public write-up of their grants, so that interested donors can follow up. Especially interesting when they can't give as much as they want due to funding constraints.
• Donor lotteries
• Impact markets, if implemented well.
• The two local effective giving organizations I know best (Effektiv Spenden and Doneer Effectief) offer donor advising. However, they might be limited to the cause areas they are working in themselves.

I used to work as a part-time advisor and ops person for a family foundation (no actual staff) that gave away ~$500k annually; they've worked with several other people since then.

Much of my advisory time was spent researching and evaluating fairly small grants (workable for someone in the $20k-100k range), since the foundation's "experimental/non-GiveWell" budget was a small fraction of the total. I think I could have done this work for a group of 10-20 clients of that size at a time if I'd been a full-time advisor.

Hi Jeff.

But I'm not aware of any projects that aim to advise what we might call "Small Major Donors": people giving away perhaps $20k-$100k annually.

How about Ambitious Impact's funding circles, which have a minimum contribution "typically ranging from $10,000 to $100,000" (per year?)?

Perhaps the most compelling reason for independent donors to contribute is that organizations like OP may have methodologies and assumptions that result in important opportunities being missed. Independent donors likely have a different set of methodologies and assumptions – as well as ideas that they are exposed to- that enable them to spot and support high-impact opportunities that OP overlooks or undervalues due to its particular perspectives, biases, or just lack of awareness.

 Given the vast landscape of potential research areas, decisions, even by large institutions, about which causes to investigate are often made using rough back-of-the-envelope calculations. And given the importance of finality and focus, promising ideas and/or cause areas can be rather cavalierly dismissed. Even if these calculations are approximately correct, categorically including or excluding entire areas means that promising interventions not typical of a category may be missed. Independent funders would not necessarily be burdened by having removed areas from consideration (although this certainly trades off with OP's ability to zoom in and explore the areas that they positively categorized more fully).

By bringing diverse viewpoints to the table, independent donors can fund innovative projects that might otherwise be overlooked, enriching the philanthropic landscape beyond what a single major funder can achieve.