EA - SoGive Grants: a promising pilot. Our reflections and payout report. by SoGive

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: SoGive Grants: a promising pilot. Our reflections and payout report., published by SoGive on December 5, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Executive SummarySoGive ran a pilot grants program, and we ended up granting a total of £223k to 6 projects (see the section “Our grantee payouts” for details). We were pleased to be able to give high quality feedback to all rejected applicants (which appears to be a gap in the grants market), and were also able to help some projects make tweaks such that we could make a positive decision to fund them. We also noted that despite explicitly encouraging biosecurity projects we only received one application in this field. We tracked our initial impressions of grants and found that the initial video call with applicants was discriminatory and helped unearth lots of decision-relevant information, but that a second video call didn’t change our evaluations very much.Given we added value to the grants market by providing feedback to all applicants, helped some candidates tweak their project proposal and identified 6 promising applications to direct funding towards, we would run SoGive Grants again next year, but perform a more light touch approach, assuming that the donors we work with agree to this, or new ones opt to contribute to the pool of funding. This report also includes thoughts on how we might improve the questions asked in the application form (which currently mirrors the application form used by EA Funds).IntroductionBack in April SoGive launched our first ever applied-for granting program, this program has now wrapped up and this post sets out our experiences and lessons learned. For those of you not familiar with SoGive we’re an EA-aligned research organisation and think tank.This post will cover:Summary of the SoGive Grants programAdvice to grant applicantsReflections on our evaluation process and criteriaAdvice for people considering running their own grants programOur grantee payoutsWe’d like to say a huge thank you to all of the SoGive team who helped with this project, and also to the external advisors who offered their time and expertise. Also, as discussed in the report we referred back to a lot of publicly posted EA material (typically from the EA forum) so for those individuals and organisations who take the time to write up their views and considerations online it is incredibly helpful and it affects real world decisions - thank you.If any potential donors reading this want their funding to contribute to the funding pool for the next round of SoGive grants, then please get in touch ([email protected]).1. Summary of the SoGive Grants programWhy run a grants program?Even at the start of 2022 when funding conditions were more favourable, we believed that another funding body would be valuable. This reflected our view of the value of there being more vetting capacity. We also thought Joey made a valuable contribution in this post.Part of our work at SoGive involves advising high net worth individuals, and as such we generally scope out opportunities for high impact giving, so in order to find the highest impact donation opportunities we decided to formalise and open up this process. Prior to SoGive grants, we have tended to guide funds towards organisations that Founders Pledge, Open Phil, and GiveWell might also recommend along with interventions that SoGive has specifically researched or investigated for our donors. Especially in the case of following Open Phil’s grants, we had doubts that this was the highest impact donation advice we could offer, since Open Phil makes no guarantee that a grantee still has room for more funding (after receiving a grant from Open Phil).We also noticed a gap in the market for a granting program that provided high quality feedback (or, for some applicants, any feed...