Thanks Ozzie, these are good suggestions. To add some thoughts: I think we may benefit from someone building a directory of aspiring freelance consultants .This can help solve coincidence of wants issues (i.e., knowing who wants to hire/be hired) and help provide the scale and critical mass needed for many person consultancies to form and grow.
It would need to be low effort as now many potential consultants are doing very well in their work lives and don’t really have time to engage with EA groups and organisations. Even something like this which we have for the behaviour science community would be a big help to start. https://www.eac-network.com/ might be worth contacting as they could be good people to lead something.
Some advanced market commitments (i.e., organisations publicly committing to pay for consulting services if they are offered) might also be helpful. Related to that, some sort of EA wide survey of what consultants orgs need and will pay for might help to catalyse the development of a market. I wonder if RP could do something like that in the next survey round?
RP and others offering incubation support and grants might also help. The EA infrastructure fund drive probably helps but most people still don’t know much about how to set up and run an organisation. I think that charity entrepreneurship has a good model to learn from in that regard. You get in, you learn, then if it goes well you will usually get funded.
To give some context: I am one of the people who set up READI in 2019 to potentially provide behavioural/social science research support and consulting services related to pressing social issues. Our most notable so far is probably the SCRUB project which has been funded (through BehaviourWorks Australia, where three of us work) by the government for over a year. We have also finished two literature reviews on promoting philanthropy and reducing animal product consumption, both of which are in review for journals.
My experience with that has been that it isn’t easy to know what EA orgs want and would pay for without reaching out directly, which is a lot of effort for full time professionals and also quite low efficiency. It’s also hard to know how to effectively structure and run such an org. Hence many of the ideas above.
My guess is that this is going to be a bit difficult. My impression is that the needs EA organizations know they have are fairly specific; they look like “really great research into key questions”, or sometimes very tactical things like, “bookkeeping” or simple website development. “Consultant” is a really broad class of thing and really needs to be narrowed down in conversation.
Generally, organizations don’t have that much time to experiment with non-obvious contractor arrangements. This includes time brainstorming ways they might be useful. If one is having a lot of trouble getting integrated (as a possible contractor), the best method I know of is to just work in one of these organizations for a while and develop a close understanding, or perhaps try to write blog posts on topics that are really useful to these groups and see if these pick up.
Around having things like a directory, I expect the ones to work will be more narrow. There are a few smaller “contractor hubs” around; or “talent agencies”, that assist with hiring contractors and charge some fee on top. I think this is a pretty good model for low-level work, and I’d like to see more of it. It does require people with either really good understandings of EA needs (or the relationships), or really good ability to do some super-obviously useful problems (like accounting).
If anyone is interested in doing consulting, one easy way to indicate so would be by just posting in a comment in this thread, or there could be a new thread for such work.
Some advanced market commitments (i.e., organisations publicly committing to pay for consulting services if they are offered) might also be helpful.
My guess is that this would be a tough sell, but I appreciate the idea.
The EA infrastructure probably helps but most people don’t know much about how to set up and run an organisation
One (small) positive is that I think contractor setups can be some of the easiest to get started with. If you’re just doing contracting with yourself, and maybe one other person, you don’t even need to set up a formal business, you could just do it directly. The big challenges are in finding clients and providing value. You don’t need much scale at first. But those things are challenges.
I imagine it could be considered nice for organizations to hire more new contractors than would otherwise make sense, as that would be effectively subsidizing the industry.
Thanks Ozzy, that’s useful. I don’t have time to respond in full or say much more, but I will mention:
After reflection I still think that the catalyst needs to be something that solves the coincidence of wants issue (i.e., consultants don’t know who would hire them if they took the time to advertise and work in this space and orgs don’t know who they can hire or if it would go well).
I think that next steps that could help could be as simple as i) someone creating something like this for consultants in EA and posting about it on the forum when filled and ii) the next time someone does a survey of EA leaders they could ask them to benchmark how much more they to spend annually on consultants if they had the talent available, and for what exactly, then share that on the forum also.
I think that you go narrower after the first two steps are done as right now we don’t have much to work with. Though maybe Luke’s suggestions are evidence enough to form narrow directories in those areas, or to have them as ‘specialisations’ in the initial database?
I think that a talent agency is a great idea. I can imagine a ‘head-hunter/recruiter’ with contacts across both the organisations and the consulting networks would help to accelerate things.
Agree that working in existing orgs is a good idea for potential org founders. I am warming more to the RP incubator idea!
I agree that doing things as a sole contractor is probably easier but that’s also a lot more stressful for many people as you assume full responsibility for the work and need to be across all of the accounting and other aspects. It’s probably got some of the issues of being a sole founder in that it asks a lot of one person. It probably works well in a lot of cases though.
RP and others offering incubation support and grants might also help. The EA infrastructure fund drive probably helps but most people still don’t know much about how to set up and run an organisation. I think that charity entrepreneurship has a good model to learn from in that regard. You get in, you learn, then if it goes well you will usually get funded. [emphasis added]
Actually, this makes me think, maybe it would be great if Charity Entrepreneurship’s next “round” was focused on EA consultancies, rather than on a particular cause area? Their usual process seems potentially well-suited to this; they can survey relevant stakeholders regarding what needs exist and what might be best for filling them, do some additional shallow investigation of various ideas like those listed in Luke’s post, then attract people and help them set these things up.
At first glance, it seems at least plausible that:
an EA funder would be happy to fund this whole process
this process would result in, say, ~3 orgs that will provide a fair amount of value at good cost-effectiveness for at least 2 years, & 1 org that might eventually grow up to be something kinda like RP.
Maybe I’ll contact CE to see what they think. I’d also be interested to hear if anyone thinks this would be a bad idea for some reason.
(I also think people applying to EA Funds, trying to learn from or get advice from RP, and/or trying to get funding and support in other ways would be good. But I agree that this won’t always be “enough”.)
Edit: Someone downvoted this, which seems reasonable if they mean to say “I do think that this would be a bad idea”, but then I’d be quite interested to hear why they think so.
I really like this idea, as you might have guessed. The best solution of all probably involves RP working in collaboration with CE where you merge RP’s experience of consulting for EA orgs with CE’s ability for training up new people to set up organisations. I think that RP could also think about how to i) get more people in to learn about their processes and ii) how to support those people to take that knowledge and found new research organisation that focus on different regions, topics or methods but can keep much of the prior learning
Thanks Ozzie, these are good suggestions. To add some thoughts: I think we may benefit from someone building a directory of aspiring freelance consultants .This can help solve coincidence of wants issues (i.e., knowing who wants to hire/be hired) and help provide the scale and critical mass needed for many person consultancies to form and grow.
It would need to be low effort as now many potential consultants are doing very well in their work lives and don’t really have time to engage with EA groups and organisations. Even something like this which we have for the behaviour science community would be a big help to start. https://www.eac-network.com/ might be worth contacting as they could be good people to lead something.
Some advanced market commitments (i.e., organisations publicly committing to pay for consulting services if they are offered) might also be helpful. Related to that, some sort of EA wide survey of what consultants orgs need and will pay for might help to catalyse the development of a market. I wonder if RP could do something like that in the next survey round?
RP and others offering incubation support and grants might also help. The EA infrastructure fund drive probably helps but most people still don’t know much about how to set up and run an organisation. I think that charity entrepreneurship has a good model to learn from in that regard. You get in, you learn, then if it goes well you will usually get funded.
To give some context: I am one of the people who set up READI in 2019 to potentially provide behavioural/social science research support and consulting services related to pressing social issues. Our most notable so far is probably the SCRUB project which has been funded (through BehaviourWorks Australia, where three of us work) by the government for over a year. We have also finished two literature reviews on promoting philanthropy and reducing animal product consumption, both of which are in review for journals.
My experience with that has been that it isn’t easy to know what EA orgs want and would pay for without reaching out directly, which is a lot of effort for full time professionals and also quite low efficiency. It’s also hard to know how to effectively structure and run such an org. Hence many of the ideas above.
Hi Peter,
Thanks for the ideas here.
My guess is that this is going to be a bit difficult. My impression is that the needs EA organizations know they have are fairly specific; they look like “really great research into key questions”, or sometimes very tactical things like, “bookkeeping” or simple website development. “Consultant” is a really broad class of thing and really needs to be narrowed down in conversation.
Generally, organizations don’t have that much time to experiment with non-obvious contractor arrangements. This includes time brainstorming ways they might be useful. If one is having a lot of trouble getting integrated (as a possible contractor), the best method I know of is to just work in one of these organizations for a while and develop a close understanding, or perhaps try to write blog posts on topics that are really useful to these groups and see if these pick up.
Around having things like a directory, I expect the ones to work will be more narrow. There are a few smaller “contractor hubs” around; or “talent agencies”, that assist with hiring contractors and charge some fee on top. I think this is a pretty good model for low-level work, and I’d like to see more of it. It does require people with either really good understandings of EA needs (or the relationships), or really good ability to do some super-obviously useful problems (like accounting).
If anyone is interested in doing consulting, one easy way to indicate so would be by just posting in a comment in this thread, or there could be a new thread for such work.
My guess is that this would be a tough sell, but I appreciate the idea.
One (small) positive is that I think contractor setups can be some of the easiest to get started with. If you’re just doing contracting with yourself, and maybe one other person, you don’t even need to set up a formal business, you could just do it directly. The big challenges are in finding clients and providing value. You don’t need much scale at first. But those things are challenges.
I imagine it could be considered nice for organizations to hire more new contractors than would otherwise make sense, as that would be effectively subsidizing the industry.
Thanks Ozzy, that’s useful. I don’t have time to respond in full or say much more, but I will mention:
After reflection I still think that the catalyst needs to be something that solves the coincidence of wants issue (i.e., consultants don’t know who would hire them if they took the time to advertise and work in this space and orgs don’t know who they can hire or if it would go well).
I think that next steps that could help could be as simple as i) someone creating something like this for consultants in EA and posting about it on the forum when filled and ii) the next time someone does a survey of EA leaders they could ask them to benchmark how much more they to spend annually on consultants if they had the talent available, and for what exactly, then share that on the forum also.
I think that you go narrower after the first two steps are done as right now we don’t have much to work with. Though maybe Luke’s suggestions are evidence enough to form narrow directories in those areas, or to have them as ‘specialisations’ in the initial database?
I think that a talent agency is a great idea. I can imagine a ‘head-hunter/recruiter’ with contacts across both the organisations and the consulting networks would help to accelerate things.
Agree that working in existing orgs is a good idea for potential org founders. I am warming more to the RP incubator idea!
I agree that doing things as a sole contractor is probably easier but that’s also a lot more stressful for many people as you assume full responsibility for the work and need to be across all of the accounting and other aspects. It’s probably got some of the issues of being a sole founder in that it asks a lot of one person. It probably works well in a lot of cases though.
Hi Peter,
I already created a directory for EA aligned consultants.
Best,
Jona
Excellent! Sorry, I didn’t know about this. I will promote it to a few relevant people.
Actually, this makes me think, maybe it would be great if Charity Entrepreneurship’s next “round” was focused on EA consultancies, rather than on a particular cause area? Their usual process seems potentially well-suited to this; they can survey relevant stakeholders regarding what needs exist and what might be best for filling them, do some additional shallow investigation of various ideas like those listed in Luke’s post, then attract people and help them set these things up.
At first glance, it seems at least plausible that:
an EA funder would be happy to fund this whole process
this process would result in, say, ~3 orgs that will provide a fair amount of value at good cost-effectiveness for at least 2 years, & 1 org that might eventually grow up to be something kinda like RP.
Maybe I’ll contact CE to see what they think. I’d also be interested to hear if anyone thinks this would be a bad idea for some reason.
(I also think people applying to EA Funds, trying to learn from or get advice from RP, and/or trying to get funding and support in other ways would be good. But I agree that this won’t always be “enough”.)
Edit: Someone downvoted this, which seems reasonable if they mean to say “I do think that this would be a bad idea”, but then I’d be quite interested to hear why they think so.
I really like this idea, as you might have guessed. The best solution of all probably involves RP working in collaboration with CE where you merge RP’s experience of consulting for EA orgs with CE’s ability for training up new people to set up organisations. I think that RP could also think about how to i) get more people in to learn about their processes and ii) how to support those people to take that knowledge and found new research organisation that focus on different regions, topics or methods but can keep much of the prior learning
.