An early stage incubator that can provide guidance and funding for very small projects, like Charity Entrepreneurship but on a much more experimental scale.
To add a bit here; I think there are a bunch of small projects coming up (like all those funded by the Long-Term Fund. They could probably use several kinds of infrastructure. An incubator could be nice, but there could also be other kinds of services provided without quite that specific setup.
First off all, I thought those 4 items are a useful list of what you referred to as infrastructure for small projects.
On offering Asana Business:
We are now offering Asana Business teams at 90% discounts (€120/team/month) vs. usual minimum cost. This is our cost price since we’re using the a 50% Nonprofit discount, and assign one organisation member slot per team facilitator. The lower cost is a clear benefit to the organisations and groups that determine to move to Asana Business
I’m working with ops staff from RethinkCharity and Charity Entrepreneurship (and possibly Charity Science Health) to move to a shared Asana space called ‘Teams for Effective Altruism’ (along with EA Netherlands and EA Cambridge). Not set in stone but all preparations are now in place.
This doesn’t yet answer your question of why I particularly thought of Asana. Here are some reasons for why to work on building up an shared Asana Business space together:
Online task management is useful: I think at least half of the EA teams >5 people running small projects would benefit from tracking their tasks online for remote check-ins. For instance, when it’s hard to travel to say a meeting room once a week, or you need to reliably carry out nitty-gritty ops tasks where it feels burdensome for a manager to ask ‘Have you done this and this and this?‘. At EA Netherlands, a lot of the project delays and time wasted seemed to emerge along the lines of someone feeling unclear of what was expected/endorsed of their role, being aware of update X, waiting for person Y to confirm, or forgetting/having to remind about task Z. It seems to make common-sense to avoid that by creating a ‘single place of truth’ where team members can place requests and update each other on progress asynchronously.
Facilitate onboarding of teams: Leaders of small projects seem to experience difficulty in getting volunteers to building the habit of updating online tasks in the first months, even if most would agree on reflection that it’s worth the switching cost. In surveying EA regional groups in northern Europe, the one reason organisers kept mentioning to me why they weren’t using task software came along the lines of them previously excitedly trying to track tasks online but volunteers forgetting to update their tasks a few weeks later. Both EA Netherlands and EA Oxford flopped twice at using Trello. My sense is they would have succeeded more likely than not if someone took up the role of facilitating team members to use the platform in ways that was useful to them, and reminding them to update their tasks weeks down the line. Part of the Asana team application process is assigning a facilitator, who I can guide from within our shared space.
Asana Business is top-notch: I personally find Asana Business’ interface intuitive and well-ordered, striking a balance between powerful features and simplicity. External reviews rate Asana around 4-4.5 out of 5. Having said that, some EA teams seem to have different work styles or preferences that fit other platforms better – I’ve heard of people using Trello, Nozbe, Notion, GSheets, or even just NextCloud’s basic task board.
Asana is an unexploited Schelling point for collaboration: A surprising number of established EA organisations use Asana: the Centre for Effective Altruism, RethinkCharity, Founder’s Pledge, Centre for Human-compatible AI, Charity Entrepreneurship, Charity Science Health, 80,000 Hours(?), and probably a few I haven’t discovered yet. That’s an implicit endorsement of Asana’s usefulness for ‘EA work’ (bias: Dustin Moskovitz co-founded it). Asana staff are now making their way into the Enterprise market, and intend to developing features that enable users to smoothly start collaborations across increasingly large organisational units (Teams...Divisions...Organisations).
Passing on institutional knowledge to start-ups: In a call I had with a key Asana manager, he randomly mentioned how it would be great to enable organisations to coordinate across spaces. I don’t think we have to wait for that though. When EA Hub staff could offer Asana teams to local EA groups in our shared space, coach them by commenting on projects/scheduling check-in calls, and stay up to date of what’s going on. Likewise, Charity Entrepreneurship could offer Asana teams to the charities they incubate and continue checking in with and supporting the start-up leaders coming out of the incubation program. People could also share project templates (e.g. conference/retreat organiser checklists), share standardised data from custom fields, etc.
So of your infrastructure suggestions, that seems to cover operations support and coaching/advice.
To make sharing the space work, we’d have to close off short-term human error/malice failure modes as well as tend to the long-term culture we create. Downsides of connecting software up to discuss work smoothly is that it’s also easier for damaging ideas and intentions to cross boundaries, for people to jostle for admin positions, and for a resulting homogenous culture is build upon fragile assumptions of how the world works, and what the systematic approaches are to improving it.
That does convince me both that it could be useful and more importantly, that you specifically have expertise and interest for work that you do on it to be useful to others.
That said, I would point out that it seems like a “nice small win”, but I would be more excited about it being part of a portfolio of similar wins or similar.
It does cover cover “operations support” and “coaching/advice”, but a very specific parts of them.
Kudos for working on this though and helping out those other orgs. I’m excited to see where things go as they continue.
“coaching to entrepreneurs starting on projects” is another one; it could be that there is a lot of coaching you could do, and if so, I would expect that there is still more value there in total than with Asana. By “portfolio of similar wins” I meant other similar things. The items in my original list would count. Also, maybe helping them with other software or services as well. There are lots besides Asana.
(My previous list):
nonprofit sponsorship (as described above)
operations support
coaching / advice (there are lots of things to provide help here with)
contractor support
Thank for clarifying ‘the similar wins’ point. You seem to imply that these coaching/software/ops support/etc. wins compound on each other.
On the shared Asana space, I’ll keep checking in with the EA Netherlands/Rethink/CE coaches working with EA groups/charity start-ups on how time-(in)efficient/(in)convenient it is to keep track of team tasks with the leaders they are mentoring.
From my limited experience, a shared coaching GDoc already works reasonably well for that:
Upside: Everyone uses GDoc. Easy to co-edit texts + comment-assign questions and tasks that pop up in email inbox. On the other hand, the attentional burden of one party switching over to the other’s task management system to track say biweekly check-ins over half a year doesn’t seem worth it.
Downsides: GDocs easily suck away the first ten minutes of a call when you need to update each other on two weeks of progress in one swoop. It also relies on the leader/coach actively reminding each other to check medium-term outcomes and key results. This ‘update/remind factor’ felt like a demotivating drag for me in my coach or accountability check-ins – all with people who I didn’t see day to day and therefore lacked a shared context with.
The way you arrange the format together seems key here. Also, you’d want to be careful about sharing internal data – for Asana, I recommend leaders to invite coaches comment-only to projects, rather than entire teams.
On other software or services, curious if any ‘done deals’ come to mind for you.
Regarding your forecasting platform, I’m curious if anything comes to mind on fitting forecasts there with EA project planning over the next years.
An early stage incubator that can provide guidance and funding for very small projects, like Charity Entrepreneurship but on a much more experimental scale.
To add a bit here; I think there are a bunch of small projects coming up (like all those funded by the Long-Term Fund. They could probably use several kinds of infrastructure. An incubator could be nice, but there could also be other kinds of services provided without quite that specific setup.
@Ozzie, I’m curious what kinds of infrastructures you think would be worth offering.
(I’m exploring offering Asana Business + coaching to entrepreneurs starting on projects)
I’m honestly not too sure, but could imagine a bunch of different things.
nonprofit sponsorship (as described above)
operations support
coaching / advice (there are lots of things to provide help here with)
contractor support
Why are you thinking of Asana Business? Like, you would provide free Asana Business accounts?
Hey, I never finished my reply to you.
First off all, I thought those 4 items are a useful list of what you referred to as infrastructure for small projects.
On offering Asana Business:
We are now offering Asana Business teams at 90% discounts (€120/team/month) vs. usual minimum cost. This is our cost price since we’re using the a 50% Nonprofit discount, and assign one organisation member slot per team facilitator. The lower cost is a clear benefit to the organisations and groups that determine to move to Asana Business
I’m working with ops staff from RethinkCharity and Charity Entrepreneurship (and possibly Charity Science Health) to move to a shared Asana space called ‘Teams for Effective Altruism’ (along with EA Netherlands and EA Cambridge). Not set in stone but all preparations are now in place.
This doesn’t yet answer your question of why I particularly thought of Asana. Here are some reasons for why to work on building up an shared Asana Business space together:
Online task management is useful: I think at least half of the EA teams >5 people running small projects would benefit from tracking their tasks online for remote check-ins. For instance, when it’s hard to travel to say a meeting room once a week, or you need to reliably carry out nitty-gritty ops tasks where it feels burdensome for a manager to ask ‘Have you done this and this and this?‘. At EA Netherlands, a lot of the project delays and time wasted seemed to emerge along the lines of someone feeling unclear of what was expected/endorsed of their role, being aware of update X, waiting for person Y to confirm, or forgetting/having to remind about task Z. It seems to make common-sense to avoid that by creating a ‘single place of truth’ where team members can place requests and update each other on progress asynchronously.
Facilitate onboarding of teams: Leaders of small projects seem to experience difficulty in getting volunteers to building the habit of updating online tasks in the first months, even if most would agree on reflection that it’s worth the switching cost. In surveying EA regional groups in northern Europe, the one reason organisers kept mentioning to me why they weren’t using task software came along the lines of them previously excitedly trying to track tasks online but volunteers forgetting to update their tasks a few weeks later. Both EA Netherlands and EA Oxford flopped twice at using Trello. My sense is they would have succeeded more likely than not if someone took up the role of facilitating team members to use the platform in ways that was useful to them, and reminding them to update their tasks weeks down the line. Part of the Asana team application process is assigning a facilitator, who I can guide from within our shared space.
Asana Business is top-notch: I personally find Asana Business’ interface intuitive and well-ordered, striking a balance between powerful features and simplicity. External reviews rate Asana around 4-4.5 out of 5. Having said that, some EA teams seem to have different work styles or preferences that fit other platforms better – I’ve heard of people using Trello, Nozbe, Notion, GSheets, or even just NextCloud’s basic task board.
Asana is an unexploited Schelling point for collaboration: A surprising number of established EA organisations use Asana: the Centre for Effective Altruism, RethinkCharity, Founder’s Pledge, Centre for Human-compatible AI, Charity Entrepreneurship, Charity Science Health, 80,000 Hours(?), and probably a few I haven’t discovered yet. That’s an implicit endorsement of Asana’s usefulness for ‘EA work’ (bias: Dustin Moskovitz co-founded it). Asana staff are now making their way into the Enterprise market, and intend to developing features that enable users to smoothly start collaborations across increasingly large organisational units (Teams...Divisions...Organisations).
Passing on institutional knowledge to start-ups: In a call I had with a key Asana manager, he randomly mentioned how it would be great to enable organisations to coordinate across spaces. I don’t think we have to wait for that though. When EA Hub staff could offer Asana teams to local EA groups in our shared space, coach them by commenting on projects/scheduling check-in calls, and stay up to date of what’s going on. Likewise, Charity Entrepreneurship could offer Asana teams to the charities they incubate and continue checking in with and supporting the start-up leaders coming out of the incubation program. People could also share project templates (e.g. conference/retreat organiser checklists), share standardised data from custom fields, etc.
So of your infrastructure suggestions, that seems to cover operations support and coaching/advice.
To make sharing the space work, we’d have to close off short-term human error/malice failure modes as well as tend to the long-term culture we create. Downsides of connecting software up to discuss work smoothly is that it’s also easier for damaging ideas and intentions to cross boundaries, for people to jostle for admin positions, and for a resulting homogenous culture is build upon fragile assumptions of how the world works, and what the systematic approaches are to improving it.
That’s quite a reply, thanks!
That does convince me both that it could be useful and more importantly, that you specifically have expertise and interest for work that you do on it to be useful to others.
That said, I would point out that it seems like a “nice small win”, but I would be more excited about it being part of a portfolio of similar wins or similar.
It does cover cover “operations support” and “coaching/advice”, but a very specific parts of them.
Kudos for working on this though and helping out those other orgs. I’m excited to see where things go as they continue.
Good to hear your thoughts on this!
What do you mean here with a ‘portfolio of similar wins’? Any specific example of such a portfolio that comes to mind?
“coaching to entrepreneurs starting on projects” is another one; it could be that there is a lot of coaching you could do, and if so, I would expect that there is still more value there in total than with Asana. By “portfolio of similar wins” I meant other similar things. The items in my original list would count. Also, maybe helping them with other software or services as well. There are lots besides Asana.
(My previous list): nonprofit sponsorship (as described above) operations support coaching / advice (there are lots of things to provide help here with) contractor support
Thank for clarifying ‘the similar wins’ point. You seem to imply that these coaching/software/ops support/etc. wins compound on each other.
On the shared Asana space, I’ll keep checking in with the EA Netherlands/Rethink/CE coaches working with EA groups/charity start-ups on how time-(in)efficient/(in)convenient it is to keep track of team tasks with the leaders they are mentoring.
From my limited experience, a shared coaching GDoc already works reasonably well for that:
Upside: Everyone uses GDoc. Easy to co-edit texts + comment-assign questions and tasks that pop up in email inbox. On the other hand, the attentional burden of one party switching over to the other’s task management system to track say biweekly check-ins over half a year doesn’t seem worth it.
Downsides: GDocs easily suck away the first ten minutes of a call when you need to update each other on two weeks of progress in one swoop. It also relies on the leader/coach actively reminding each other to check medium-term outcomes and key results. This ‘update/remind factor’ felt like a demotivating drag for me in my coach or accountability check-ins – all with people who I didn’t see day to day and therefore lacked a shared context with.
The way you arrange the format together seems key here. Also, you’d want to be careful about sharing internal data – for Asana, I recommend leaders to invite coaches comment-only to projects, rather than entire teams.
On other software or services, curious if any ‘done deals’ come to mind for you.
Regarding your forecasting platform, I’m curious if anything comes to mind on fitting forecasts there with EA project planning over the next years.