EA - How much funding does GiveWell expect to raise through 2025? by GiveWell

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: How much funding does GiveWell expect to raise through 2025?, published by GiveWell on April 11, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.SummaryWe're optimistic that GiveWell's funds raised will continue to increase in the long run. Over the next few years, we believe our annual funds raised are more likely to stay relatively constant, due to a decrease in expected funding from our largest donor, Open Philanthropy, offset by an expected increase in funding from our other donors.This chart shows our latest forecasts for funds raised in millions of dollars:[1]In November 2021, we wrote that we were anticipating rapid growth and aiming to influence $1 billion in 2025. Now, our best guess is that we'll raise between $400 million and $800 million in 2025 (for comparison, we raised around $600 million in 2022). As in the chart above, we now think it's possible but unlikely that we'll raise close to $1 billion in 2025, and we also think it's possible but unlikely that our funds raised in 2025 will be substantially lower (e.g. around $300 million) than they were in 2022.We're excited about the impact we can have at any of those levels of funding, and we'll be continuing to direct as much funding as we can raise to the most cost-effective opportunities we can find.Our forecasts are uncertain. We might be wrong about what the future will look like, just as our projections now are very different than they were in late 2021. We'll have better information as time goes on.This change in projected funds raised means that:We're funding-constrained: we believe that our research will yield more outstanding opportunities than we'll be able to fund over the next few years. Your donations can help fill those gaps.Because it's valuable to maintain a stable cost-effectiveness bar, we may not spend down all the funds available to us in each year. Depending on how much funding we are able to direct and when it becomes available, we may smooth our spending over the next few years. Currently, we recommend funding to opportunities we believe to be at least 10 times as cost-effective as unconditional cash transfers ("10x cash").We are increasing our emphasis on fundraising relative to past years and relative to our previous plans for 2023 to 2025 in order to increase the chances of us being able to fill additional cost-effective funding gaps.In the rest of this post, we discuss:Our updated forecastsHow we'll respond to shifting expectationsThe uncertainty inherent in these projectionsOur updated forecastsWhen we wrote that we aimed to direct $1 billion annually by 2025, we were imagining a scenario in which we'd receive $500 million from Open Philanthropy and roughly $450 million from other donors.[2]We now believe that:Given our strong community of supporters and our increased fundraising efforts, funding from donors beyond Open Philanthropy will likely continue to increase. We're uncertain of the rate at which it'll increase, and it's always possible that funds raised will stall or decrease. Despite the economic downturn, our projections for funds raised among these donors haven't changed much. Our goal is to reach $500 million in funds raised from donors other than Open Philanthropy by 2025. We think this goal is ambitious but plausibly achievable with effort.The level of funding we'll receive from Open Philanthropy in the future is very uncertain. There is a wide range of possibilities, but our median expectation is that funds from Open Philanthropy will taper down from a high of $350 million in 2022.Previously, Open Philanthropy had tentatively planned to give $500 million in each of 2022 and 2023. We projected that level of funding out to 2025 as a best guess. In early 2022, Open Philanthropy revised its plans to give $350 million in 2022; it tentatively plans to give $250...