I help organizations run effectively through operations coaching, workflow optimization, and talent development. I gain a lot of personal satisfaction from making other people’s work lives more productive, satisfying, and under control. On a personal note, I’m a mom with 3 kids juggling life, work, family, and community involvement.
Deena Englander
I completely agree with this. I’ve seen many worse scenarios play out in other organizations due to unprofessionalism, mostly due to lack of experience and the tendency to bootstrap and work in startup mode. While that approach is helpful in some cases, it causes a lot of dysfunction across many organizations and I’d like to see more efforts put into instituting professional norms within EA organizations. This is only a well publicized event—there are many worse ones that I’ve witnessed that aren’t highlighted here. But that brings up another point that a few other commenters mentioned—are we creating an environment that: A) encourages the “move fast and break things” lack of professionalism approach But then: B) condemns them for making mistakes It seems to me that we cannot believe both. Either we supposed the first approach and accept that mistakes will be made, or we do not tolerate mistakes, but then discourage unprofessionalism. That, it seems to me, is the systemic issue surrounding this particular one.
Looking at this from a systemic perspective, I wonder how we can prevent this situation from happening again. To clarify, the situation I refer to is intense criticism presented without consideration of the facts that requires significant resources to be directed towards defense in order to maintain credibility.
Writing and responding to discrediting posts consumes a lot of resources that counterfactually could have been used for more impactful purposes.
Additionally, it creates a lot of fear—I can only imagine the distress this situation caused Kat and NL. It takes a lot of personal strength and conviction to stand up to such negativity, and I fear that this kind of whistleblowing is more likely to push people away from doing the hard job of being a nonprofit entrepreneur.
I’d love to hear any suggestions about how to prevent this from happening again.
Hi all! I’m new to the EA forum. My husband’s been involved in EA for years, and I am finally in a place to want to join in as well. Specifically, I’m an efficiency consultant, specializing in operations and productivity improvement. I would love to take my talents to the EA world to make charities and the people involved more impactful.
Anti Entropy focuses on providing short-term operational resources to supplement an organization and get them past specific obstacles. They provide “things” to support orgs, which is extremely valuable. WorkStream provides talent and personnel development and ongoing coaching. We focus on upskilling people and guiding them through growing their organizations.
I couldn’t have said this better myself! Coaching provides huge value towards career and impact growth, and I would love to see more EAs investing in themselves.
I have an organization, WorkStream, focused on helping orgs be more effective. See my post about it here. We are currently running both management and operations fellowship programs (see more details here), designed to build community and provide access to relevant education to our org leaders. We start the programs on a quarterly basis, so it’s an open application for anyone who wants to apply. It’s not a free resource, but we do try to give scholarships when possible.
Thanks for posting this—in my sessions with varying EA orgs, I’m finding myself trying to prove the point of why they should be investing in branding and marketing as an effective way to increase funding potential and impact. In order to function like a non-profit not exclusive to EA funding, this is vital for the organization’s survival. I’ll definitely refer people back here as it comes up!
It’s not a necessity to have these within EA. It is a necessity to have good resources. There are also some cases, such as with finances and legal matters, that having a specialized service provider will allow more people to be helped effectively since they’ll have a greater degree of familiarity and expertise with common EA org problems. And if we do have an EA that does a good job providing those services, I’d rather prioritize using those folks and if we don’t know of them I’d like to.
In general, I’m finding that there are many similar patterns to what most EA orgs need, and the objective needs to be finding them quality resource providers and making them easily accessible.
I totally agree with you.
The other problem with outside experts is the same that anyone faces—who do I use? Which company is good? Pre-covid, I had been working on a problem in the small business community that created something very similar because of the hesitancy of humans to trust, especially when a lot of providers aren’t as good as they claim to be. So I do think there’s a trust factor that’s important regardless, and if we don’t have the talent in EA, I would consider bringing people out of EA into the community to fill those gaps.
Fiscal sponsorship and/or operations support go a really long way in bridging the gap between ideation and implementation, especially when the majority of executive directors don’t have management experience. I highly support these types of services!
I like that phone metaphor better.… I think I’ll switch to that! Thanks for the idea.
You’re correct about all of this. I developed a fellowship program to help orgs specifically with upskilling and having the support they need to do well. I believe that the 3 critical ingredients to running an org successfully are: a) having the right knowledge b) having peer support and c) having a mentor and accountability. My personal mission is to help orgs succeed. You can find out more information on my website, or shoot me a PM / email.
I’m also working on developing an organization to consolidate all the org support resources—I’ve done this in the small business sector, and am applying the principles to EA. Would love to connect with anyone who wants to be a part of it.
To me, a fellowship implies a higher degree of training and involvement than just a course. It’s a combination of education and experience, and it seems to me to be the best word for it. And yes, the fact that it’s something EAs tend to understand easily makes it a better word to use for that purpose. But I’m open for suggestions if you have better ones!
Please submit an application to be added here.
It’s based on our collective experiences working with EA orgs. We all interact with a large volume of EA orgs, and we keep getting similar questions for providers in certain areas.
And to your point, I personally refer in non-EA specialists as needed, but I would prefer to use EA folks (if they exist) to strengthen the business support services in the community. And some services are better provided when the provider is at least familiar with EA. All the people I bring in get a short introduction of what to expect before they start with EAs. Believe it or not, EA orgs have a VERY different mentality than most other organizations out there and it can be challenging for providers to understand and navigate if they don’t have prior exposure.
Another reason why we are focusing on EAs now is that we’re building a directory of EA service providers, so we’re just noting the gaps that exist within EA. Part of the goal is that anyone who needs help with something has an easily accessible resource to find access to trusted advisors and partners. So it’s not that someone outside of EA provides “worse” software implementation than someone within EA—it’s just noticing that our community doesn’t have that resource available now. And potentially, it might be that none of us are aware of a provider that does that, in which case, we’d like to know about it.
I would like it to involve active matchmaking, but we’re not there yet. Right now it’s just a directory.
Do you have any insight into what type of efforts these funds are allocated towards?
I think you’re quite right—and if we’re going to port it over to the analogy, I would venture to say that if you know you’re I’m going to need to run a high resource task at some point, you need to conserce capacity to be able to extend the limits as needed. I don’t normally need to process and analyze gigabytes of data, but I need the ability to be able to on my device.
Not yet, no. That comes next, once we have the articles of incorporation.
I think another bottleneck is the unwillingness to hire outside of EA. It’s not so hard to find good ops people who have experience outside of EA, and as long as it’s a good personality fit, I’ve seen that working out well. Also, your typical EA is not a great ops person because they’re happier working on the big picture. To find people who are good at implementing, you have to look outside the group since they’re not naturally drawn to EA.