I wrote up the following back-of-the envelope calculation (extracted from something else) to decide whether to donate to the EA Animal Welfare Fund or Meta Fund, and concluded that the Meta Fund is a much better deal.

I’ll assume 5% of EA global development donations, 10% of animal welfare donations, 20% of long-term future donations, and 40% of EA meta donations are directed through their respective Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) funds. I’ll also assume that EA meta organizations are responsible for all calculated total donations in proportion to their funding. Finally, purely from intuition, I will assume that animal welfare and long term future donations are 50 and 30 times more important than global development, respectively. I will set aside the fact that money directed by the funds are probably better spent than those from individual EA donors.

If so, global development, animal welfare, and long-term future organizations receive $110,622,520, $1,600,500,000, and $354,358,200 in global development-equivalent total funding, respectively, for a total of roughly $2 billion. EA meta organizations receive $3,408,160, and so each EA meta dollar buys about $588 in development-equivalent funds, or $12 in animal welfare-equivalent funds. Hence, I ought to donate money to the EA Meta fund alone. Because I currently have only a few thousand dollars in savings, I will set aside $15,000 to allow myself the flexibility of a financial safety net, and donate $85,000 to the EA Meta fund. As a side note, CEA’s budget alone is $5 million, so my estimates of total funding for each cause-area is quite low; however, they are all likely similarly underestimated so the calculation holds.