Thanks for spelling this out, I tend to agree from my gut feeling. Certainly surprising given the general data-driven “obsession” in the community.
Trying to see the glass being half full: if hiring for less quantifiable comms is OK, maybe this can be applied to other “overhead” roles as well. Coming from a project management and tech entrepreneurial background myself, I see the EA space also lagging in other cross-functional ops roles. Given the small size of many orgs, obviously not everything can be done in-house full time, but professional service orgs could provide this on a fractional level. As for the reasons I can only speculate, maybe young average age of founders and orgs, small org sizes, limited budgets (with thinking investing hours themselves don’t have costs), grant makers trying to keep things lean and pure, … wdyt? Also the service providers themselves need to rise to this challenge with education, visibility and maybe also less fragmentation, as some scale would help with the aforementioned as well as sustainability and quality of service.
This is why I am helping e.g. Amplify and WorkStreamNonProfit, and happy to connect folks working in these fields with each other and with orgs in need. (And this is also why my thoughts above might not be completely neutral.)
I think this is a really good extension of the argument, and it matches my intuition too.
My sense is that what’s happening with growth is part of a broader pattern where EA orgs tend to underinvest in cross functional or ops type roles, especially when teams are small and budgets are tight. The points you raise about org size, founder experience, and constraints all feel very plausible, and I agree that fractional or shared service models could make a lot of sense here.
Thanks for being transparent about your involvement. I’d be very happy to connect and continue the conversation.
Thanks for spelling this out, I tend to agree from my gut feeling. Certainly surprising given the general data-driven “obsession” in the community.
Trying to see the glass being half full: if hiring for less quantifiable comms is OK, maybe this can be applied to other “overhead” roles as well. Coming from a project management and tech entrepreneurial background myself, I see the EA space also lagging in other cross-functional ops roles. Given the small size of many orgs, obviously not everything can be done in-house full time, but professional service orgs could provide this on a fractional level.
As for the reasons I can only speculate, maybe young average age of founders and orgs, small org sizes, limited budgets (with thinking investing hours themselves don’t have costs), grant makers trying to keep things lean and pure, … wdyt?
Also the service providers themselves need to rise to this challenge with education, visibility and maybe also less fragmentation, as some scale would help with the aforementioned as well as sustainability and quality of service.
This is why I am helping e.g. Amplify and WorkStreamNonProfit, and happy to connect folks working in these fields with each other and with orgs in need.
(And this is also why my thoughts above might not be completely neutral.)
I think this is a really good extension of the argument, and it matches my intuition too.
My sense is that what’s happening with growth is part of a broader pattern where EA orgs tend to underinvest in cross functional or ops type roles, especially when teams are small and budgets are tight. The points you raise about org size, founder experience, and constraints all feel very plausible, and I agree that fractional or shared service models could make a lot of sense here.
Thanks for being transparent about your involvement. I’d be very happy to connect and continue the conversation.