Effective Altruism Funds: Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund donations made to RC Forward

This is an online portal with information on donations that were announced publicly (or have been shared with permission) that were of interest to Vipul Naik. The git repository with the code for this portal, as well as all the underlying data, is available on GitHub. All payment amounts are in current United States dollars (USD). The repository of donations is being seeded with an initial collation by Issa Rice as well as continued contributions from him (see his commits and the contract work page listing all financially compensated contributions to the site) but all responsibility for errors and inaccuracies belongs to Vipul Naik. Current data is preliminary and has not been completely vetted and normalized; if sharing a link to this site or any page on this site, please include the caveat that the data is preliminary (if you want to share without including caveats, please check with Vipul Naik). We expect to have completed the first round of development by the end of July 2024. See the about page for more details. Also of interest: pageview data on analytics.vipulnaik.com, tutorial in README, request for feedback to EA Forum.

Table of contents

Basic donor information

ItemValue
Country United Kingdom
Affiliated organizations (current or former; restricted to potential donees or others relevant to donation decisions)Centre for Effective Altruism
Websitehttps://app.effectivealtruism.org/funds/ea-community
Donations URLhttps://app.effectivealtruism.org/
Regularity with which donor updates donations datairregular
Regularity with which Donations List Website updates donations data (after donor update)irregular
Lag with which donor updates donations datamonths
Lag with which Donations List Website updates donations data (after donor update)days
Data entry method on Donations List WebsiteManual (no scripts used)

Brief history: This is one of four Effective Altruism Funds that are a program of the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA). The creation of the funds was inspired by the success of the EA Giving Group donor-advised fund run by Nick Beckstead, and also by the donor lottery run in December 2016 by Paul Christiano and Carl Shulman (see https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WvPEitTCM8ueYPeeH/donor-lotteries-demonstration-and-faq (GW, IR) for more). EA Funds were introduced on 2017-02-09 in the post https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/a8eng4PbME85vdoep/introducing-the-ea-funds (GW, IR) and launched on 2017-02-28 in the post http://effective-ahttps://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iYoSAXhodpxJFwdQz/ea-funds-beta-launch The first round of allocations was announced on 2017-04-20 at https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MsaS8JKrR8nnxyPkK/update-on-effective-altruism-funds (GW, IR) The funds allocation information appears to have next been updated in November 2017; see https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/permalink/1606722932717391/ for more. This particular fund was previously called the Community Fund; in October 2018, the blog post https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yYHKRgLk9ufjJZn23/announcing-new-ea-funds-management-teams (GW, IR) announced that it was renamed to the Meta Fund to more accurately reflect its use for funding activities (such as cause prioritization) that are "meta" but not necessarily tied to community-building

Brief notes on broad donor philosophy and major focus areas: As the name suggests, the Fund's focus area is "meta" activities related to effective altruism. This includes some activities that directly and explicitly relate to effective altruism, as well as other activities that are related more broadly to promoting a culture of more and smarter philanthropy. It also covers cause prioritization and foundational research work. At inception, the Fund had Nick Beckstead of Open Philanthropy its sole manager. Beckstead stepped down in August 2018, and October 2018, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yYHKRgLk9ufjJZn23/announcing-new-ea-funds-management-teams (GW, IR) announces a new management team for the Fund, comprising Luke Ding (chair), Denise Melchin, Matt Wage, Alex Foster, and Tara MacAulay as members, and Nick Beckstead as advisor

Notes on grant decision logistics: Money from the fund is supposed to be granted about thrice a year, with the target months being November, February, and June. Actual grant months may differ from the target months. The amount of money granted with each decision cycle depends on the amount of money available in the Fund as well as on the available donation opportunities. Grant applications can be submitted any time; any submitted applications will be considered prior to the next grant round (each grant round has a deadline by which applications must be submitted to be considered)

Notes on grant publication logistics: Grant details are published on the EA Funds website, and linked to from the Fund page. Each grant is accompanied by a brief description of the grantee's work (and hence, the intended use of funds) as well as reasons the grantee was considered impressive

Notes on grant financing: Money in the Meta Fund only includes funds explicitly donated for that Fund. In each grant round, the amount of money that can be allocated is limited by the balance available in the fund at that time

This entity is also a donee.

Full donor page for donor Effective Altruism Funds: Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund

Basic donee information

We do not have any donee information for the donee RC Forward in our system.

Full donee page for donee RC Forward

Donor–donee relationship

Item Value

Donor–donee donation statistics

Cause areaCountMedianMeanMinimum10th percentile 20th percentile 30th percentile 40th percentile 50th percentile 60th percentile 70th percentile 80th percentile 90th percentile Maximum
Overall 1 11,000 11,000 11,000 11,000 11,000 11,000 11,000 11,000 11,000 11,000 11,000 11,000 11,000
Effective altruism 1 11,000 11,000 11,000 11,000 11,000 11,000 11,000 11,000 11,000 11,000 11,000 11,000 11,000

Donation amounts by cause area and year

If you hover over a cell for a given cause area and year, you will get a tooltip with the number of donees and the number of donations.

Note: Cause area classification used here may not match that used by donor for all cases.

Cause area Number of donations Total 2019
Effective altruism (filter this donor) 1 11,000.00 11,000.00
Total 1 11,000.00 11,000.00

Skipping spending graph as there is at most one year’s worth of donations.

Full list of documents in reverse chronological order (0 documents)

There are no documents associated with this combination of donor and donee.

Full list of donations in reverse chronological order (1 donations)

Graph of all donations (with known year of donation), showing the timeframe of donations

Graph of donations and their timeframes
Amount (current USD)Amount rank (out of 1)Donation dateCause areaURLInfluencerNotes
11,000.0012019-08-23Effective altruism/fundraisinghttps://app.effectivealtruism.org/funds/ea-community/payouts/3pxoLG7aRWtETC1lECC6LKLuke Ding Alex Foster Denise Melchin Matt Wage Donation process: Part of the July 2019 EA Meta Fund grants round. The grant page says: "7 of the 9 grantees in this round applied through this process." It is not clear whether RC Forward is one of the 7 that applied

Intended use of funds (category): Organizational general support

Intended use of funds: Grantee, RC Forward, is a subsidiary of Rethink Charity that specializes in helping donors in Canada make tax-deductible donations. In 2018, it moved $3.3 million to 25 effective charities with just $50,000 in operational expenses

Donor reason for selecting the donee: The grant page says: "RC Forward still looks to be a relatively strong donation opportunity even when applying the most pessimistic estimates. In 2018, RC Forward is expected to have moved at least $3 for every $1 spent." Also: "Even if only 2% of the total money moved through the platform last year was directly caused by RC Forward, they would beat the break-even point." Further: "Although any potential scale-up is limited to the Canadian market, the platform could process many more donations within that market without a proportional rise in costs." It also links to RC Forward's own analysis at https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/n2Y7z5wvjTuNn5TYg/cost-effectiveness-of-rc-forward (GW, IR)

Donor reason for donating that amount (rather than a bigger or smaller amount): The grant page says: "This grant will fill RC Forward's immediate remaining funding gap for 2019."
Percentage of total donor spend in the corresponding batch of donations: 2.36%

Donor reason for donating at this time (rather than earlier or later): Timing determined by timing of grant round, and by RC Forward getting close to Giving Season 2019