Chief of staff at the Forethought Foundation (project of EV UK and EV US). Former ED of EA Norway.
eirine
Karma: 489
Doing brainstorming better
So you want to do operations [Part one] - which skills do you need?
Thanks for this addition! This is very interesting. Do you find that taking responsibility and being willing to do whatever you have to do is something innate to people, or something that is mostly acquirable? Do you have ideas for how to test whether you have this trait?
If you were to interview someone for a position, what type of work trial, case work, or other activities would you have the interviewee do for you to assess whether they have the trait of taking responsibility? Do you think just answering questions would provide enough for you to assess it, or could they do certain tasks or trials to test it?
Do you think there are certain situations one could force or reenact in order for a person to develop the trait of taking responsibility, or discover if they have it? Do you feel like the perceived importance of the project is the only factor, or are their other factors that can induce this?
I actually attended the launch of this report in Oslo. I have three main points about this report: 1) The results aren’t really generalisable, yet they present the findings as if they were; 2) the actual findings of the report don’t directly say that fundraising campaigns need to change; 3) although it might be a ‘whataboutist’ argument, I’d really like for SAIH to focus on something else.
As the report itself states: “this is a study based on a very limited selection of informants, and we cannot generalise from the findings of this research. However, the findings provide an intersting, if restricted, insight into how aid comunications are perceived at the receiving end.” The data consists of 12 focus groups in 6 countries: Ghana, Zambia, Malawi, Ethiopia, Uganda, and South Africa. The total amount of people interviewed was 74 people, 36 female and 38 male. The respondents are either beneficiaries or potential beneficiaries of SAIH’s research partners’ aid activities. Yet, in the concluding chapters (chapter 5 and 7), SAIH are calling for change based on the findings of the report. It feels a bit as if they have fallen into the same trap that the organisations they criticize fall into: generalising about Africa based on a few case studies in 6 countries.
Further, the findings themselves aren’t really telling us much other than common sense. First of all, a lot of the responses to the different questions were very varied. When the responses were similar, they seemed to report that using negative images of children were the most effective—and they would use the same type of pictures. Most of the respondents felt like the pictures used in the ten examples of aid campaigns were accurate, and that they would use similar pictures as well. If the respondents were to make a fundraising campaign of their own, a majority stated that they would also use negative pictures, and 38% said they would show the problem. They also thought that negative images and showcasing the problem was more likely to increase funds.
Lastly, as SAIH are called a ‘watch-dog’, it would be so great to see them focus on other aspects of the aid sector than fundraising campaigns. Yes, treating people with dignity and representing an accurate and diverse portrayal of developing countries is important … but is it really that important? The work SAIH has done through RadiAid has been great, and has resulted in many organisations changing how they portray developing countries. It would be so awesome to see this organisation who are great at making awareness campaigns look into other areas in the aid sector as well. I realise that this might be a poor argument, however, and think it’s likely that I’m affected by having dealt with this group on numerous occations. I think it comes from a place of being impressed with their work, and just wanting them to focus that on something I find more important.
Hi! Hope your meeting today goes well. I agree with Michal at the Local Effective Altruism Network (LEAN) and Alex at the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), and think those two groups are the best to reach out to.
I’m from EA Norway, and I think it would be exciting to set up a call to introduce ourselves and see if we can help at all. I think just saying hi and explaining what we’re doing in Norway and hearing what you’re doing in the Philippines could be useful. Email me at eirin@effektivaltruisme.no if you’d like to set up a call.
I think this hypothesis is similar to the points made by 80k in their post on why although EA orgs really value their previous hires, especially in operations, there is still a large talent gap. It seems like part of the constraint has to do with the organisations’ ability hire new people. We’re also really interested in finding ways to reduce the constraint on EA orgs by seeing how we can reduce organisational costs through, for example, contributing to the filtering process or providing strong signals about a person. This is something we want to explore in the next posts in the series.
Do you have ideas to address and perhaps reduce the organisational constraints?
Interesting, do you think there are ways to practice or increase value-alignment/good judgment? For example by doing an internship at the organisation in question? Or having a practice period either at the organisation, or through a training programme organised by someone else?
So you want to do operations [Part two] - how to acquire and test for relevant skills
Just to check, does this link work for you? http://hexaco.org/hexaco-online
(Edit) Ah, sorry. So you don’t get the results from the website?
This is very cool! Exciting results. We’ll definitely look into doing something similar in Norway. Thanks for writing this up and sharing.
Thank you so much for your comment! I really appreciate that you’ve taken the time to be so thorough. I also appreciate how structured your comment is, and it makes it easy to follow. You bring up a lot of new points that we haven’t thought about before, and have made us think more about how we can better cooperate with MBA/ business graduates and HR managers. I also found your list of certificates particularly useful. I was wondering, could you explain more about what you call ‘partnership streams’?
A few days ago we published another post on this topic where we outline our plans for an operations camp this summer as a project to help reduce the operations talent gap in EA. It would be great if you get the chance to read over it and see if you have any input.
Thank you for your comments! You’ve particularly made us think about the length of camp for the first group. We’re now leaning towards something between 5-10 days. Your comment about potential risks is also greatly appreciated, and we will think carefully about how much we will make public moving forward.
Thanks again for taking the time to comment! We’ve noted down all your points, and found especially the one about signalling fit and thoughts on the role of national/local groups very interesting and valuable.
Thanks for explaining! I wasn’t familiar with the term, but I feel like I know understand better what it entails and the different ways it could look like.
Thanks for your feedback! We have ended up going for a 4-7 day camp for people with 1-2 years of experience. I’ve noted down your ideas for a future iteration of the camp.
And thanks for your offer! You’ve been very helpful so far, and it would be great to discuss more at a later time.
Overview of projects at EA NTNU
Thanks for sharing, this is great! I found it particularly useful to read how many hours you spend on each activity and the objectives and key results you’ve planned for 2020.
I was a bit surprised that you’ve used a quarter (250/932 hours) of your time on personally learning directly related to EA. How much do you think the hours you spent on learning have contributed to the positive outcomes of EA Toronto? You wrote “Finally, without independent learning, another wild guess seems to say that the other two thirds of EATO’s strategy updates and insights would not exist”. Does this mean that you partly focused on learning about strategy and evaluation?
Also super cool that you directed around 42,000 CAD to MF!!
Thank you for this suggestion! I think there are three main benefits of brainwriting: to generate ideas in a very short amount of time, to build on others’ ideas, and to have someplace to start when working on a project.
We’ve used it for getting ideas on articles we’d like to write and topics we’d like to discuss. We also use it before a meeting with someone if we’re a bit unsure about what we’d like the meeting to be about. Recently, we have decided on which indicators we are going to use to measure to what extent we are reaching our goals. We then used brainwriting to come up with ideas of different indicators, and built on those. Further, through brainwriting we tried to find alternatives to hosting a large conference that would give us the same outcomes.
We more or less use it whenever we are stuck on a project, when we need ideas, or when we’re unsure exactly what our thoughts are on something. I unfortunately don’t have a specific example of a project that was generated through this way, but hope this clarification and additional information has been useful :)