What I'd Want a Fiscal Sponsor to Do Well

Someone asked me what I think an AI Safety fiscal sponsor should do, but I reckon most of it is generic enough, and pretty good ops advice, that I am posting it here. Let me know/comment if you have any additional ideas or disagreements and I can pass them on.

I voice-memo’d to Claude, who wrote it up, and then I edited it. Would recommend!

Service and communication

• Be a very open-ended help desk. Someone should be able to send a question like “How do I pay stipends to the fellows of my program?” without filling out annoying forms, and just get an answer back. Also make reimbursements as easy as possible for the submitters, e.g., use Ramp where they can just submit a receipt and it mostly auto-fills.
• Be incredibly service-minded. The people you work with won’t have any clue about anything about operations. That’s the point; that’s why they’re fiscally sponsored. They’ll not know things and be annoying sometimes, but they’re busy getting their project off the ground and just won’t want to/shouldn’t have to deal with it.
• Write clearly without being formal. Put the bottom line up front, use plain words, and say who’s doing what. Monzo’s writing principles are a good model.
• Be proactive about updates and transparent about why things take time, and what you need to do. It’s better to know “the fiscal sponsor is not going to figure this out in time, I need another solution” than to be left waiting.
• Give each project a named point of contact, not just a shared inbox.
• Speed matters most. Keep some slack ops capacity.
• Do user interviews. Find out what your prospective sponsees want, find out what previous people who were fiscally sponsored in your space want, and find out what funders who will be giving you money want from you to pass their due diligence.

Preempt the common questions

• Stipends in the common places. Probably the UK and the US, maybe South Africa. Work out how it works for Americans abroad, Americans at home, and foreigners in the US: what needs a visa, what doesn’t, and how to word things so it’s clear that fellowships are training opportunities and not work.
• Get a great employer of record. This is hard. Definitely look at the recommendations in the EA Ops Slack.
• Have a clear, short spending policy, with the list of things that aren’t allowed as limited and clear as possible. Maybe a version people can give/link their LLMs so it’s always in context.
• Help with compliance and legal basics, like getting a privacy policy. Lots of AI safety orgs miss this.
• Help get contractor vs employee classification right, e.g. IR35 in the UK, 1099 vs W-2 in the US. Easy to get wrong and expensive.
• Be clear about lobbying and political activity limits. 501(c)(3) rules cap lobbying, and AI safety work can come close to this. Give your sponsees a plain-English guide to what’s fine.
• Be clear about insurance. What do sponsees need to sort out themselves/is essential insurance for them to get? Do you already cover some things for them?

Tools and infrastructure

• Build a big knowledge base. A wiki your sponsees can easily search and easily give their LLMs access to. Just make it easy.
• Have a nice ticket-tracking dashboard where people can see progress.
• Give a real-time view of all of a sponsee’s transactions. Exportable, and ideally accessible by API. Shared spreadsheet is a good alternative.
• Keep a template library: contractor agreements, offer letters, stipend agreements, NDAs, data-sharing agreements, policies (harassment, privacy).
• Make nonprofit software discounts easy. Everything sits on your legal entity, and sometimes you only get one, so make the process clear. Everyone will want Slack; lots will want Airtable. Argue with these companies on their behalf if you can, and for the common ones give instructions how to get it. E.g., “If you want this, fill out the form and we’ll request it for you.”

Money and the project lifecycle

• Make onboarding easy. What do you actually need to know, and how can people get you that data? Make a clear list of what people should know up front.
• Pay reimbursements fast, with a stated maximum turnaround. Your sponsees give you a lot of power by having you handle all their finances. And with great power…
• Be transparent about your costs and where the money goes, so people can see what they’re paying for and that it’s worth it.
• Make spinning out as easy as possible. No strong takes on this.

Nice to have

• An extremely nice to have is help with cash flow when grant money is late, e.g. advances or bridging. This is hard, especially if your sponsees are new, but if you can help with this, that can be a huge lifesaver.
• Grant writing support: can you recommend people who can help people write good grants for common AI Safety funders?