How Does Effective Altruism Funds Decide Which Projects to Fund?

Updated

Effective Altruism Funds (EA Funds) decides which projects to fund by having expert fund managers evaluate each opportunity against a set of explicit criteria, then compare projects using expected value rather than raw upside or raw probability alone. The approach is designed to direct donations toward work that is important, solvable, and overlooked. This explainer covers the criteria EA Funds names, how they trade off risky versus safe bets, and who actually makes the calls.

The seven criteria EA Funds uses

EA Funds lists seven considerations in its grantmaking approach. They are not a rigid checklist; they are lenses for comparing very different projects.

Criterion What it asks
Expected value What is the potential benefit multiplied by the chance of success?
Marginal impact How much does this grant change the outcome versus funding that would have happened anyway?
Counterfactual impact What would have happened without this funding?
Track record Has this person or organization delivered results before?
Information value Will this grant also teach us something useful for future decisions?
Direct and indirect effects What are the spillover effects beyond the immediate goal?
Scope and limitations How broad is the effect, and where does the reasoning break down?

The first three do most of the work in separating strong grants from weak ones. A project with a huge potential benefit but a tiny chance of success can rank alongside a modest project that is nearly certain to work — if their expected values are similar.

How expected value changes the decision

EA Funds explains expected value with a concrete comparison:

  • A 1% chance of $100,000 has an expected value of $1,000.
  • A 50% chance of $2,000 also has an expected value of $1,000.

Both yield the same average return over time, so neither is automatically better. This is why EA Funds does not simply fund the safest projects or the most ambitious ones. Some projects are high-risk with big potential payoffs; others are safer bets. Expected value lets the fund managers compare them on one scale.

Marginal and counterfactual impact then ask a second question: would this work happen anyway? A grant to an organization that already has full funding may look impressive but change little. A grant that unlocks work no one else would pay for has higher counterfactual impact.

Who makes the funding decisions

EA Funds is not a crowd vote. Each of its four funds has a fund manager who works in that area and makes grant decisions:

  • Animal Welfare Fund — organizations and projects that alleviate the suffering of millions or billions of animals.
  • Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund — organizations or people that grow or improve the effective altruism community.
  • Global Health and Development Fund — evidence-based opportunities to improve access to healthcare and economic development.
  • Transformative AI Fund — early-stage grants to individuals, new organizations, and existing organizations with new projects, focused on reducing global catastrophic risks from advanced AI systems.

Donors pool their money into a fund rather than picking individual grants, and the fund manager allocates it. That is the core trade: you give up direct control over which project receives your money in exchange for expert evaluation.

What the grant history suggests

The public grant examples show the range of what gets funded:

  • The Center for Responsible Seafood — $117,000 (2024 Q4), research and a pilot program on humane chill-killing at Indian shrimp farms to inform global certification standards (Animal Welfare).
  • Hear This Idea — $6,196.87 (2024 Q3), ongoing support for a podcast about ideas for solving important problems (EA Infrastructure).
  • Malaria Consortium — $1,690,095.48 (2022 Q4), support of a seasonal malaria chemoprevention program (Global Health and Development).

The spread — from roughly $6,000 for a podcast to $1.7M for a malaria program — reflects the criteria in practice. Small grants can score well on information value or marginal impact; large grants usually need a strong track record and a large scope of benefit.

If you want to apply or donate

  • Applying for funding: grants range between $1,000 and $500,000, and EA Funds states the application takes less than 1 hour. It funds people, projects, non-profits, and institutions.
  • Donating: you can donate to a fund directly, or via Every.org (recommended for donors outside the UK or Netherlands) or Giving What We Can (recommended for donors in the UK or Netherlands).

EA Funds reports 52,000 donors, over $100M in grants, and 1,544 grants awarded. If your goal is to understand whether a given project would qualify, test it against the seven criteria above — especially expected value, marginal impact, and counterfactual impact — before assuming a strong-sounding cause is enough.