New EA book: “How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit” by Charity Entrepreneurship is now available worldwide in paper and eBook format.

[Joey]

TLDR: Our handbook How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit is available now on Amazon!

How did this book come to be?

This book was created out of content used for the annual CE Incubation Program, originally a list of blog post readings. That list evolved into a single document and was simplified into a far-too-long CE handbook, which was used by our 2020 cohort. It was always primarily aimed at a small, highly involved audience who was keen to found impactful projects. Over time, we have reworked and tweaked new editions based on the experiences of our charities and the content of our program. As we iterated, the handbook improved, and we now feel that, although far from perfect, it is at the stage where it could be useful for a broader audience than CE program participants alone.

The Charity Entrepreneurship (CE) handbook is an EA-aligned source of practical advice on early-stage project management and includes useful decision-making tools, templates, success stories, and the philosophical underpinnings of why charity entrepreneurship could be an impactful career path and how to run a project well.

We’re proud that Peter Singer wrote a short foreword message and recommended our book, stating: “Clear, thoughtful, engaging. Excellent advice for nonprofit entrepreneurs.”

You can buy the handbook on Amazon as an ebook or as a paperback (you can keep shipping costs down by ordering from your country’s specific Amazon account, like Amazon.co.uk, .de, or the one closest to you). All the proceeds of the book will directly support our work and help launch new charities through our Incubation Programs.

EA chapters and groups can get it for free through EA Books Direct. (If the book is not yet on your group’s order link, you can reach out to [e-mail] to add it.)

Not just for charity entrepreneurs?

We believe that charity entrepreneurship is an incredibly impactful career path, and this belief has been the driving force behind this book’s creation. But we also believe that the contents can be useful to a larger pool of EAs.

Many EAs take on complex projects, typically in small teams, trying to drive ambitious results. If you’re collaborating with other EAs and constantly making decisions when the available information is incomplete and the stakes are high, or if you try to streamline your standard operating procedures and narrow down on optimal theories of change and endline goals, the Charity Entrepreneurship handbook might be helpful.

How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit covers:

• Assessment of your personal fit for founding an organization

• The decision-making tools you can apply to your most important decisions

• Best practices in fundraising and building support

• How to measure impact and optimize as you test and improve

• Tips on choosing the right mentors, advisors, and board members

• The fundamentals of daily operations, running legally, and registering as a charity

• The range and value of the resources–from ready-made templates to critical applications–available to you.

The book also features interviews and contributions from past charity founders who share their experiences, inspiration, know-how, and advice. We certainly don’t have all the answers, and there is always more to learn. But we do move quickly and show real results, and we are confident that this material could help many people in EA accelerate their work and maximize their impact.

But wait, we’re never finished! We are always open to updating. If you’d like to get involved in making this book even better, please submit suggestions for improvements to future versions.

Please review the book on Amazon or Goodreads and share the link with friends.

This book had many contributors, editors, and volunteers, and we would love to thank them all (but it would take a whole other blog post – you can take a look at the book’s preface to see all those who helped make this book a reality).

[SofiaBalderson]

Amazing news and great that it’s so available! I was recommending this at the AAC careers fair, and not only to people wanting to start an org, but also to people who want to understand what makes an impactful charity! Also copying my Goodreads review here:

I got recommended this book as I’m starting a charity soon and it exceed my expectations. This book covers pretty much everything you’ll need in the first couple of years and suggests further resources for the future (if you’d like to delve even deeper into each topic). Each chapter is very comprehensive but short enough to keep you interested. It seems like all the best advice from the years of charity entrepreneurship experience was collected, combined with the industry best practice, and organised into neat chapters. I was delighted to find answers to some questions I had for a long time: “how do you speak to potential donors?” or “how to you make the right decisions and trade-offs”? It felt really validating to read about the common fears and worries of new founders and made me feel like we’re in it together and all problems have solutions. My thinking became more rational and evidence-based—the book is not just about building charities, but also making the right decisions and balancing responsibilities. I’ve actually recommended this book to my friends who are involved in effective altruism organisations (not necessarily in a founder capacity) and they borrowed some tips from it too. The best thing is having this book to refer to in the future too as my organisation grows. Really recommended!

[BrianTan]

Really happy to see this book being available widely now and publicized more! I’ll copy over my Goodreads review here below. I highly recommend the book:

“This was the most useful book I read in 2021. It’s an amazing book for people interested in making a large impact with their career, especially those interested in starting a charity or working for one. They tell you why and how to start a high-impact charity, while giving you the tools and tips to make great decisions as a charity entrepreneur, which are useful even if you don’t start a charity. Give it a read!”

I was part of Charity Entrepreneurship’s incubation program last year, where we also had a 4-week reading group to discuss this book with other incubatees, and we also had supplementary video content during the program. But reading this book alone also has a lot of value in itself without those!

[justaperson]

Thank you to Charity Entrepreneurship and all contributors for putting this book together. Can’t wait to read!

[AndreFerretti]

All charity founders should read How to Launch A High-Impact Nonprofit.

I added it to my recommended books webpage.

What I learned from the book:

• Use CE’s templates for scoring interviews and hiring employees

• Write with proper fonts, use Canva for your logo and visualizations

• For online meetings, opt for discussions instead of updates

• Interactions add $1 or subtract $5 in our social piggy banks

• Build better Weighted Factor Models

• The six endgames for nonprofits framework

• Write a founder’s agreement and explore these questions with your cofounder

Potential Improvements

The post’s title, “New EA book: “How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit” by Charity Entrepreneurship is now available worldwide in paper and eBook format”, is too long.
I would cut it to “New Book: How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit” or “Announcing How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit .”

Also, some paragraphs of the book were too long. You could improve readability with ∼10% fewer pages (from 420 to 380) and convey the same—if not stronger—message.