Grantmaking is more like a skill than a path

Arden here from 80,000 Hours - just an update: Ollie showed me this draft before posting and I thought he was right about a bunch of it, so we adjusted the write-up to put more emphasis on becoming skilled in an area before becoming a grantmaker in it being the ideal, plus added his 4 bullet point list to our section on assessing your fit.

We didn't want to move away from calling it a "path" because we use that term to describe jobs/sets of jobs that one can do for many years, which we think could be among highest impact phases of one's career, which this seems to fit.

Thank you for this Ollie, I strongly agree with your perspective.

FYI, Probably Good has a writeup on grantmaking that makes some of these points very well and points out additional useful nuances about grantmaking as a path.

Thanks for this, Ollie, it has been very helpful for me. If it's ok, I have a tenuously related question about helping with grant making in a way that is perhaps a little different from the norm. 

I have been thinking about exploring grant making as a potential skill area of comparative advantage. A friend suggested I consider it because of my tendency to be well networked and to generate ideas for collaborations, projects and operational improvements etc. 

I don't think I would be a good conventional grant maker who reviews submitted grants and then makes a decision on how much funding they should get. For instance, I don't trust my judgement or attention to detail in assessing complex grant applications or doing due diligence. 

However, I think that I could potentially be a good "grant opportunity scout/lead generator". For instance, I think I could help to solve coordination problems by finding and connecting good people, ideas and grant assessors to create a critical mass that can be funded. 

I see some value in doing such a role. I know a lot of people who would make EA aligned career changes (e.g., founding something) if given commitments, then access, to appropriate connections and advance commitments of funding.  I also believe (very weakly) that most EA funders would like more applications for high value large-scale funding opportunities where coordination/coincidence of wants issues are a particularly major blocker. 

I'd like to know what you think about all this. Specifically, does or should anything like this sort of grant related work exist in EA or elsewhere? If so, how could someone trial doing it? Anyone I should talk to? 

Feel free to direct me to ask 80k or someone/somewhere if you don't feel that you have enough time or motivation to answer - I understand that the question is a bit tangential!  

Source: My own experience of interning in one of the philanthropy foundations

TL;DR: I would emphasize more regarding culture fit, and group other points of yours in newly classified buckets.

My opening remarks

Indeed, your example of Open Philanthropy was excellent, as the model of operations is based on cost-effective analysis. Therefore, generalist and research skills complement each other as you could find more 'factors' in costs and benefits based on what you've already known. However, this draws one key weakness of your grantmaking skills model. What if cost-effectiveness isn't what the foundation seeks? For example, if they seek global collaboration, will they tend to fund organizations that are closely aligned with a willingness to collaborate globally, even though it may not be the most cost-effective? (My personal experience is that local organizations are less costly than regional organizations, and suppose we can expect the same benefit, cost-effectiveness analysis should lean towards funding the local organizations)

This is based on an already well-known organization, but if you are a newly established foundation then it might be different from my experience.

My proposal would rearrange some of your ideas into the following buckets

1) Culture fit (Do you fit with the organization's view of value)

I still believe this is an important issue to consider if you want to work in grantmaking.  Grantmakers usually have long tenures and those who aren't fit quickly moved out of the organization quickly.

2) Reasoning skills

I would rather combine the "theory of change" and "bird's eye view" into this bucket, as what would you be doing is to argue, based on what you have, if this grant would be beneficial to mankind or the organization.  Consulting, researching, or managerial skills would enhance this bucket as they are trained to argue with reasoning. You may not need to know the details, as the information is available enough for you to dissect. However, which information will you be using to argue your case would far more be necessary than how you obtained it in the first place.

Other kinds of equivalent careers that may create transferable skills may include corporate social responsibility jobs (where you get to fund using corporate money) and successful grant writers (where you know which word would hit up more funding). Beyond that, I would rather ask for more clarification of what is your idea of 'generalist' skills in your own critique.

3)Networking skills

I would put this skillset below the above, as it depends if you already have strong reasoning skills, networking may not play a major role here. This is different than if you were the grant seeker or if you are applying into grantmaking, networking will give you the 'launchpad' to be considered from the grantmaker side. Schools, classes, events, and your degree would also fit in here.

My reasoning for downgrading the networking skill is that if your organization has a track record of funding, your previous pipeline of recipients would gladly provide you the opportunity (sometimes, overwhelming) to talk about their interesting projects.

One of the reasons that networking skills might be useful is if you are funding new ventures. In that case, you might need to scout additional people for your work and thus, networking would play a major role in that.

My Closing Remarks

As I argue, I would rather reclassify your skills model as I illustrated above. Beyond that, I agree that grantmaking is a rather great opportunity in a later stage of your work. The only issue is that grantmaking is a specific skill set and unless you are really passionate about not owning but judging other works and being ready to reject hundreds of proposals, I suggest that a lot of consideration should be taken into account before pursuing this career.

P.S.: This is my first post and I will be extremely grateful if folks could discuss my thoughts in the future.

Thanks for writing this up Ollie!

I'm designing a grantmaking training programme for Training for Good at the moment and have spoken with ~20 grantmakers across different cause areas over the past few weeks. Just wanted to add that your perspective seemed to be broadly shared by others working in the space - ie that to be excellent at grantmaking you need to be an excellent generalist with a strong object-level understanding of a specific field first.

If anyone reading this fits Ollie's description and is interested in exploring grantmaking, let me know. (We're looking for 5-10 people with experience in a relevant EA problem area to participate in an 8 week scaled down beta test of our programme starting at the end of march. Time commitment would be ~5 hours per week).

Thanks for this, Ollie!  Having read the 80k article but still felt a bit fuzzy about 'how to become a good grantmaker,' this post makes a lot of sense to me. It updates me away from grantmaking being a general skill and more towards it being domain-specific, which seems right considering my prior was that it was just a very general skillset (equivalent to having really good judgment).

During the calls I've offered to people considering applying to work as a grantmaker, I've sent this post to about 10 people already. Thanks for writing it!

I agree that this is the most common misconception about grantmaking. To be clear, (as we've discussed) I think there are some ways to make a difference in grantmaking which are exceptions to the general rule explained here, but think this approach is the right one for most people.

May I ask about my specific case?

I think I have strong generalist skills as a software developer, including a good understanding of software projects and startups (for example, I used to consult founders professionally, especially on how it's reasonably to build their tech based on their business needs). linkedin.

Do you think this could be useful for grant making?

It's not really a "field" in the way you use that word, I think


Regarding grant making stuff: Just like John Snow, I know nothing