One of the most important concepts that I got from GiveWell is the idea of room for more funding. The idea is even if you found an effective organization working on a cost-effective issue, you still need to make sure that a donation to them will actually cause something new to happen. It's the marginal impact of your donation that you need to compare across giving opportunities, not the impact of the organization as a whole.

For Effective Animal Activism, however, which I have given to before, I'm now doubtful they have actual room for more funding. It's unclear what additional actions from EAA will be caused by more funding and how much of EAA's current expenses and activities are being met by current donors. Right now, actually, it's unclear what EAA is doing at all, regardless of funding.

Can anyone shed some light on this concern?

Thanks for the question, Peter. It's great that you're following up on things like this.

Since summer 2012, EAA hasn't had any employees, so most of what we've done since then has been with volunteer labor for free. In other words, we haven't really begun to use our funding. What we have accomplished in that time, besides lots of fruitful discussions on the forum, has been to recruit a new Executive Director, who will begin working next week. (Watch for a formal announcement soon.) We've also recruited several volunteers and potential interns for the summer. Eitan and I have also been doing a lot of behind-the-scenes logistical work and ramping up of our new people. So stay tuned, and in a few months, the situation will be pretty different from how it is now. This is in part thanks to your donation for enabling us to hire someone full-time as well as interns.

I don't think there's any realistic limit on how much funding EAA could use effectively in the forseeable future. We're considering hiring a second full-time employee later this year, but it's not clear if we will yet. Whether we can take on a second person or not depends on how much more funding we get in the coming months. Maybe the second employee would be slightly less valuable than the first (since at least the lowest-hanging fruit would be handled by the first employee), but I doubt the value would be more than 2 times lower. There's basically no end to the amount of research, outreach, fundraising, and movement-building to be done. Even if EAA had 10 employees, I don't think it would be enough, and the value of additional funding would still be higher than for other things, if not quite as high as it is now.

The next few months will be a planning phase for EAA, so if you want more specifics on what we intend to do, we hope to be able to share that by the summer. In fact, if you'd like to be part of planning yourself, let me know, and I could loop you in. As always, feel free to make suggestions or ask questions of this type on the EAA forum. We'd love to have your insights.