I recently noticed that my expectations of what various organisations are spending are way off, so I tried to gather some data.
This excludes money moved through the organisation but re-granted outside of it. For organisations that did not have a more recent budget, I graphed their historical trends between publicly available budgets, and assumed that fundraising targets would be hit at the organisation's mid-level.
Happy to correct any of these if anyone can link to more updated data!
| Organisation | Estimated 2024 budget |
| Centre for Effective Altruism | $30 million |
| GiveWell | $28 million |
| 80,000 Hours | $15.5 million (excludes marketing) |
| Rethink Priorities | $11 million |
| Founders Pledge | $7 million |
| Lightcone | $3.7 million |
| Giving What We Can | $2.35 million |
| Charity Entrepreneurship | $2 million |
| Animal charity evaluators | $1.5 million |
| Manifold markets | $1 million |
| Happier lives institute | $0.55 million |
| One for the world | $0.6 million |
| Probably good | $0.5 million |
Data/sources - all numbers normed for 2024
- Centre for effective altruism $30 million - $28m in 2022, events ~$10m, EA forum ~$2m
- GiveWell $28 million - extrapolated from historical planned budgets e.g. $25.4 million in 2023
- 80,000 hours $15.5 million (the number they published is excluding marketing, and I could not find numbers for the marketing budget)
- Rethink priorities $11 million - see comments (initial estimate was extrapolated from $7.5 million in 2022 + the medium growth estimate)
- Founders pledge $7 million - extrapolated from the trends of $4m in 2020 to 2021 $5.6m
- Metaculus $2.75 million - extrapolated that this $5m grant is over 2 years
- Lightcone/Lesswrong $3.7 million
- Giving what we can $2 million
- Charity Entrepreneurship $2 million - extrapolated from $1.62 million in 2023
- Animal charity evaluators $1.5 million (not including regranting)
- Manifold markets $1 million
- Happier lives institute $0.55 million - currently operating on the lean budget, see their most recent fundraising post
- One For The World $0.6 million - extrapolated from $0.5m in 2022
- Probably good - $0.5 million - extrapolated from $0.3m in 2022
I think some of these numbers are way off, or at the very least misleading. For example, in your sources you use the budget for Effective Ventures to estimate the budget of CEA, but Effective Ventures includes ~10 public projects https://ev.org/organisations/ (and some less public ones like Wytham Abbey https://www.wythamabbey.org/ that they don't mention on the website)
I think it's pretty bad to publish unreliable numbers about organizations without checking with them first
Edit: the post has been edited to remove references to Effective Ventures, but still uses as a source for the $30M claim https://time.com/6204627/effective-altruism-longtermism-william-macaskill-interview/, which is from when CEA was still the name of the umbrella org of all the projects
CEA has now confirmed that Miri was correct to understand their budget - not EVF's budget - as around $30m.
Thank you for pointing that out - I had also linked to an EV report for the UK. I removed that link as it could indeed be misleading, and only left the link referencing only the CEA budget.
I only linked to the information I could find publicly, I am unsure why organisations would share additional budgets for me to include in a forum post that they are not publishing themselves.
I am sure I might have missed stuff though, so if you know of additional public information - or have insider information you can share - please let me know!
Many orgs did this for me; I think the answer is they want to be helpful over email but they are too busy to publish things themselves.
your data on manifold is wrong. importantly: (a) manifold is a for-profit company, and (b) they've actually published all of their finances (here). they've raised ~$4.2 million from investors, and ~$1.4 million from grants.
@Miri would love to see this corrected!
Hi Saul,
Thank you for flagging this! I updated the citation.
From what I can tell, the expenses published are the salaries, which are about $1m/year. I am sure that there must be other costs, but unsure how substantial they are.
This post is only comparing yearly budgets, so I have not included investments/donations raised, cash in the bank or other similar metrics for any of the orgs - not because I don´t find this important and interesting, but because it´s even harder to find this information than just the yearly budgets.
It still depends somewhat on how fundraising goes, but it's pretty likely in 2024 Rethink Priorities budget (excluding a number of groups that we fiscally sponsor) will be around $11M.
I think that the specific extrapolation of our budget completed here was importantly off because we did a number of hires over the course of 2022, so the reported spend for that year didn't fully capture total recurring costs of the new headcount (as those new hires started at various points throughout that year).
Thank you so much for sharing this! I updated the post.
It is good to have this info public, it would be cool if there was a 3rd row with some impact measurement as well then a fourth with cost/impact!
Can I suggest you do that? Because if this is aimed at the post writer it looks like the reward for doing one useful thing is people assigning you homework.
Manifold is a lot lower than I expected given it's a tech platform that presumably requires a bunch of dev hours!