Appealing to the Public

By Jeff Kaufman 🔸 @ 2024-10-23T19:27 (+43)

This is a crosspost, probably from LessWrong. Try viewing it there.

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Austin @ 2024-10-24T01:27 (+9)

The act of raising funding from "EA general public" is quite rare at the moment - most orgs I'm familiar with get the vast majority of their funding from a handful of institutions (OP, EA Funds, SFF, some donor circles).

I do think fundraising from the public can be a good forcing function and I wish more EA nonprofits tried to do so. Especially meta/EA internal orgs like 80k or EA Forum or EAG (or Lightcone), since there, "how much is a user willing to donate" could be a very good metric for the how much value they are receiving from their work.

One of the best things that happened to Manifold early on was when our FTX Future Fund regrantor offered to cover up to half of our $2m seed round - contingent on us raising the other half from other sources. We then had to build the muscle of fundraising from regular Silicon Valley angels/VCs, which especially served us well when Future Fund went kaput.

Manifund tries to make public fundraising for EA projects much easier, and there have been a few success cases such as MATS and Act I - though in the end most of our dollars moved come from our regrantors.

Jason @ 2024-10-23T23:27 (+8)

So I like the for-profit approach as a model. Early in the life of your project you have a small number of high-context funders where you can put time into each funding relationship. As you scale, you "go public" and start also raising money from people you're not going to have conversations with. 

I think that model works well in some circumstances, and certain appreciate the logic behind extending it to the non-profit world when that is the case. However, it's not the case that every potential founder or org has access to a "small number of high-context funders" who are in a position to support the early stages of the project without a public appeal. That means some of them are going to need to go public in a less developed state than would perhaps be ideal. Ability to self-fund, get support from one's family, or access to a good pre-existing network for fundraising do not strike me as strongly correlated with merit of either the founder, the org's theory, or the org itself. So I do have some concerns that expecting too much out of early-stage founders or ideas will give those (at most) weakly merit-based factors too much weigh in determining which founders, ideas, and orgs survive the infant-mortality period.

In general, I'd err on the side of encouraging public appeals rather than erring on the side of setting too high a bar. I think the average community member is pretty savvy, and the community's demonstrated deliberative skill in evaluating funding issues seems pretty strong. To the extent the community effort were too burdensome, I'd prefer something like people deferring somewhat to a ~randomly selected community screening jury (which could hopefully be at least medium-context) if the alternative were to discourage public appeals.

Jeff Kaufman @ 2024-10-23T23:56 (+4)

I think the average community member is pretty savvy, and the community's demonstrated deliberative skill in evaluating funding issues seems pretty strong.

I don't know, this seems overly optimistic to me. The average community member doesn't come in with much skill in evaluating nascent orgs, and is unlikely to get the kind of practice-with-feedback that would allow them to develop this skill.

people deferring somewhat to a ~randomly selected community screening jury (which could hopefully be at least medium-context)

Donor lottery winners?

Or, less flippantly, this seems to me what EA Funds and the other granting groups that give seed funding do.

I do think there are cases where someone has a good idea that isn't a good match for any of these funders (ex: the Global Health and Development Fund isn't accepting applications) or where the grantmakers are overworked, not omniscient, and not able to consider everything that they would ideally fund. In these cases I do think making a public case is good, but then it should either look like:

  • An appeal for "angels" who are interested in engaging somewhat deeply with the org to advise and fund it.
  • An appeal for seed funders that gives enough detail that they can make an informed decision without personal engagement. I think @Habiba Banu and Roxanne Heston's Spiro - New TB charity raising seed funds post is an example of doing this well.
Jason @ 2024-10-24T11:35 (+4)

It's reasonable to conclude that if there are enough viable major sources of seed funding in an area, those sources make decisions independently enough of each other, and an organization has struck out with ~all of them, that is probably a signal that the org should not move forward with making a public appeal. I don't think we significantly disagree on what a public appeal would ideally look like, either.

I think points that may or may not be cruxes include:

  • I suspect that I have a somewhat higher threshold for what I'd consider enough (and independent-enough-of-each-other) viable funding sources to justify the kind of inference described above.
  • Where an organization moves forward with a public appeal earlier in its life cycle than ideal due to the lack of / limited number of "existing" seed funders in that area, I would expect less of their public appeal in certain aspects. Specifically, their answers to some of your questions are likely going to be less developed than they could be if the org had better seed funding prior to a public appeal.

Or, less flippantly, this seems to me what EA Funds and the other granting groups that give seed funding do.

Conditional on "Alice is reading Org's public appeal for funding and deciding whether to give," it seems that Alice has previously (and at least implicitly) decided not to defer to EA Funds or a similar organization for some reason or another.[1] 

Of course, Alice could decide to ignore a randomly-selected community jury too! But:

  • Some reasons Alice may have for not deferring to something like EA Funds may not apply to a ~random jury (e.g., believing that the expert grantmaker already has too much centralized influence over the ecosystem, or makes decisions that are too correlated with the decisions of someone who does); and
  • Moreover, in my comment the random jury had only an advisory function, and deferring to a third party to winnow down the options (or even make affirmative recommendations) requires less trust than empowering someone to make a final decision without the donor's oversight and approval.

A funding circle with a shared initial screening process is probably the closest extant analogue to what I was gesturing at.

 

 

 

  1. ^

    Or a funding circle may not have a mechanism for someone to donate three, four, or maybe even low five figures.

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2024-10-31T13:37 (+4)

Thanks for the post, Jeff. Sharing lots of relevant information would take time, and I think applying to EA Funds and Open Philanthropy would raise funds more cost-effectively. However, orgs can simply share their applications to larger funders on EA Forum, and then add info about what they would do with marginal funding on top of funds received from the larger funders.

Jeff Kaufman @ 2024-10-31T23:45 (+8)

As someone who has raised funds from larger funders and is currently considering participating in marginal funding week, I don't think that would work very well:

  • Our main funders have a lot of context on our work, and so our grant applications are missing a lot of information that a typical Forum reader would need. This includes basic stuff like " what problem are you trying to solve?"

  • Because we have engaged with these funders previously, portions of a funding requests can be discussion of specific issues they have previously raised, which might be pretty in the weeds for a Forum reader and require extra context.

  • There is a lot of information you can share in a private grant request that you can't make public. For example, specific quotes you've received from potential partners on pricing, some kinds of strategic planning, potential partnership opportunities, or frank assessments of the capabilities of other organizations.

  • Writing for public consumption requires more attention to how a wide range of potential readers, including both low context Forum readers and potential partners, would interpret things.

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2024-11-01T10:24 (+2)

Thanks for the good context, Jeff.

I don't think that would work very well

I think a good part of the appeal is that it is low cost strategy (relative to one where lots of context is provided).

Our main funders have a lot of context on our work, and so our grant applications are missing a lot of information that a typical Forum reader would need. This includes basic stuff like " what problem are you trying to solve?"

Note the target audience will be more familiar with the work than a random EA Forum reader. For example, if you were raising funds for the Nucleic Acid Observatory (NAO), your target audience would be more familiar with bio and more likely to have read other posts about NAO.

There is a lot of information you can share in a private grant request that you can't make public.

Fair! Some information would have to be removed.