I’d strongly caution against overlearning that ‘this sort of thing cannot work’. The big thing that stands out to me is the issue of founder-fit:
Neither founder had experience from the development field, and spent the first many months learning the field and its many acronyms.
I have the impression that there are a lot of aligned people with this background and expertise looking to fill roles like this. Another attempt should be able to improve on this.
Yep, I think credibility and credentials in policy advocacy are very important, especially when you need to build networks sort of from scratch. Perhaps AIM can pay attention to this aspect going forward when founding more policy oriented charities?
There’s truth here, but I’m not sure how much it would make a difference in terms of moving the needle and changing minds. I’m very uncertain, but I feel like more credentials might get you more conversations and into more rooms but I’m not sure it would make those conversations more likely to lead to change.
Perhaps, but I wouldn’t want to overgeneralise against non-experts in policy either. As the post said, a broad effort to improve aid policy requires a much broader expertise across many areas than specific efforts to target specific policies. AIM has incubated several more targeted policy orgs and I think they’re much easier for non-experts to build knowledge and credibility in.
Sorry to hear about the lack of success.
I’d strongly caution against overlearning that ‘this sort of thing cannot work’. The big thing that stands out to me is the issue of founder-fit:
I have the impression that there are a lot of aligned people with this background and expertise looking to fill roles like this. Another attempt should be able to improve on this.
Yep, I think credibility and credentials in policy advocacy are very important, especially when you need to build networks sort of from scratch. Perhaps AIM can pay attention to this aspect going forward when founding more policy oriented charities?
There’s truth here, but I’m not sure how much it would make a difference in terms of moving the needle and changing minds. I’m very uncertain, but I feel like more credentials might get you more conversations and into more rooms but I’m not sure it would make those conversations more likely to lead to change.
Perhaps, but I wouldn’t want to overgeneralise against non-experts in policy either. As the post said, a broad effort to improve aid policy requires a much broader expertise across many areas than specific efforts to target specific policies. AIM has incubated several more targeted policy orgs and I think they’re much easier for non-experts to build knowledge and credibility in.