FHI is part of a prestigious university. This has signaling value in many areas: Adding credibility to the message, recruitment, and fundraising.
FHI also has raised a lot more money.
You might also compare what they have accomplished given their level of resources—where you get more bang for the buck.
FHI and SIAI have similar but different goals/subgoals. Depending on how one prioritizes these, direct comparisons are not always relevant.
It is also possible, though I am not quite sure of this, that FHI and SIAI are complementary. It may be that FHI uses “establishment” resources like the university affiliation, but is forced to follow a more conservative path; while SIAI is more financially constrained and lacks the prestige, but in exchange is permitted to take radical new directions.
“At the present time, approximately half of our budget comes from the Universityʹs James Martin 21st Century School, and approximately half comes from a few visionary philanthropists. The following donations were received during the last academic year: Philanthropist #1: £161,308 Philanthropist #2: £9,392 Philanthropist #3: £13,435 Bright Horizons Foundation: £46,072 Other donations: £780”
So they got around £231,000 from donations. With the budget from the James Martin School this should sum up to approximately £462,000 which equals around $711,000 for 10/2008 − 10/2009.
Comparing two organizations with the same budget isn’t necessarily fair. If two organizations both had a budget of $500,000, and achieved the same amount of visible progress, but one of them had to spend $250,000 on fundraising, then (assuming linear returns to money) we should expect marginal donations to the latter organization to be twice as effective, right?
FHI is part of a prestigious university. This has signaling value in many areas: Adding credibility to the message, recruitment, and fundraising.
FHI also has raised a lot more money.
You might also compare what they have accomplished given their level of resources—where you get more bang for the buck.
FHI and SIAI have similar but different goals/subgoals. Depending on how one prioritizes these, direct comparisons are not always relevant.
It is also possible, though I am not quite sure of this, that FHI and SIAI are complementary. It may be that FHI uses “establishment” resources like the university affiliation, but is forced to follow a more conservative path; while SIAI is more financially constrained and lacks the prestige, but in exchange is permitted to take radical new directions.
Do you know where to find the figures for how much money FHI has?
In the annual report for 01 October 2008 − 30 September 2009 they write: ( at page 23)
“At the present time, approximately half of our budget comes from the Universityʹs James Martin 21st Century School, and approximately half comes from a few visionary philanthropists. The following donations were received during the last academic year: Philanthropist #1: £161,308 Philanthropist #2: £9,392 Philanthropist #3: £13,435 Bright Horizons Foundation: £46,072 Other donations: £780”
So they got around £231,000 from donations. With the budget from the James Martin School this should sum up to approximately £462,000 which equals around $711,000 for 10/2008 − 10/2009.
I don’t know the budget for the year 2010. (As a sidenote, the budget of FHI for 11/2005- 11/2006 was £203,665. And for 11/2006 − 11/2007 it was £263,113. (page 77). Maybe we can extrapolate from that data? )
Comparing two organizations with the same budget isn’t necessarily fair. If two organizations both had a budget of $500,000, and achieved the same amount of visible progress, but one of them had to spend $250,000 on fundraising, then (assuming linear returns to money) we should expect marginal donations to the latter organization to be twice as effective, right?
Great, thanks!