EA - Five Years of Rethink Priorities: Impact, Future Plans, Funding Needs (July 2023) by Rethink Priorities

Welcome 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: Five Years of Rethink Priorities: Impact, Future Plans, Funding Needs (July 2023), published by Rethink Priorities on July 18, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.OverviewThis piece highlights Rethink Priorities' accomplishments, mistakes, and changes since its establishment in 2018. We discuss RP's future plans as well as potential constraints to our impact. Finally, we call for donations and invite people to engage in an Ask Me Anything (AMA) discussion with Co-CEO Peter Wildeford that will be announced by July 19 in our newsletter and social media.You can also read this post as a PDF with visualizations.Executive summaryKey accomplishments (2018-2023)In five years, RP has published over 125 pieces of research, completed more than another 100 research projects, provided various grantmakers with consultation, influenced tens of millions of dollars in funding, fiscally sponsored nine projects, and drove forward the promising field of invertebrate welfare. Specific accomplishments include:Collaborating with dozens of European Union (EU) animal advocacy organizations to work on setting medium-term policy strategies for farmed animal welfare.Providing expert consultation to the Chilean government as they considered a bill (which has advanced to the next legislative stage) to recognize animals as sentient.Contributing significantly to burgeoning fields, such as invertebrate welfare - including work related to shrimps and insects (see more here).Completing the Moral Weight Project to try to help funders decide how to best allocate resources across species.Producing 23 reports commissioned by Open Philanthropy answering their questions about global health and development issues and interventions.Conducting 205 tailored surveys and data analysis to help several organizations that build communities of people working on global priorities.Launching projects such as Condor Camp and fiscally sponsoring organizations like Epoch and Apollo Research via our Special Projects team, which provides operational support.Setting up an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Governance and Strategy team.Growing from a two-person operation in 2018 to a team that will soon include 75 RP employees, 30 contractors, and 25 staff of fiscally sponsored projects.Mistakes and challengesWe believe that some of RP's past projects failed because we did not adequately consider the project's probability of success, its potential value, and the resources required. For example, our 2018 PriorityWiki project would have involved a large volunteer coordination effort we weren't well-placed to execute, and it is unclear how valuable it would have been even if successful.Our biggest early mistake was not building a plan for each project's path to influence and not putting enough resources into measuring our impact. We initially relied too much on producing research and hoping that it would be impactful just by existing.Thus far, we have not publicly shared as much of our existing internal impact tracking as we had initially intended due to time constraints.While we did some preparation prior to scaling in 2022, we would have liked to have established more robust project management systems beforehand.Our project timelines are not always predictable, as it is difficult to determine when you should stop researching due to diminishing returns. We think there are several cases where we spent too long working on a piece of research and would've had more impact by releasing the work earlier.ChangesWe now have better project management systems and spend much more time thinking through how to communicate our research and ensure each piece has a higher chance for impact.We are focusing more on measuring our impact, and hired a Chief Strategy Analyst last year.In addition to researching neglected areas (e....