I strive to make the biggest positive difference I can in our world, pushing the limits to help as many people as possible. I believe the low-hanging fruit to transforming the world rapidly is to redirect the existing large sums of donations from ineffective (sometimes even harmful) charities to implement high-impact and evidence-based interventions backed by rigorous research and science. My mission is to deploy my career capital to help co-found or scale up numerous effective charities to do the most good with limited resources.
Harry Luk
Karma: 268
Just published this new writeup in our post sequence: How to Get More Important Things Done with the Eisenhower [Effort] Matrix—Inside the Mind of an Aspiring Charity Entrepreneur [Follow Along] #2 — EA Forum (effectivealtruism.org)
In short, after reading through Charity Entrepreneurship’s handbook, I tried to implement CE’s adapted Eisenhower Matrix on a few of the popular task/project management software.
You can see the Eisenhower Effort Matrix in action in both ClickUp and Notion, as well as my personal usage tips.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to implement the EEM on Asana.
Hope this helps.
Thank you so much Cristina! Thank you for your insights, especially the point about the three options not being mutually exclusive.
I definitely didn’t think that you could combine incubation with fiscal sponsorship.
Having read this, does this mean it’s worthwhile to apply to as many incubators and/or fiscal sponsorships as we can?
(It does sound like we can do “external” ops support no matter what path we take.)
Thank you again for your help!
How to Get More Important Things Done with the Eisenhower [Effort] Matrix
Thank you for your comment.
Yes, just want to confirm the costs involved:
Not all sponsors charge a fee, but it’s typical to be charged between 5-10% of your annual budget
CE’s handbook page 350 estimates costs as well:
Fiscal sponsors charge fees, ranging anywhere from 2-15% either of expenditures or reveneues.
Couple reasons why the cost could be worth it is:
You avoid the hassle of setting up an entity and building an operations function
Your project can become associated with a very reputable entity, which signals its potential to the community
Thank you for your comment! No, we have not thought of this, will do a digging on what this is right now.
[Question] Fiscal sponsorship, ops support, or incubation?
From Layoff to Co-founding in a Breathtaking Two Months
“What would the world look like if the risk of death for mothers was globally as low as in the world’s richest countries? The huge majority of mothers who die this year would survive. [...] We know that this is possible. This is what the historical perspective makes clear; all places that have good living conditions today were extremely poor until just a few generations ago.”
This is an amazing perspective.
I had thought before ending poverty was possible, but starting with something smaller (yet still large) like this would be amazing.
The fact that just a few generations ago were extremely poor, and now have good living conditions really is a mindset shift for me.
Thank you
But the main lesson is that all three of these things—warm fuzzies, status, and expected utilons—can be bought far more efficiently when you buy separately, optimizing for only one thing at a time.
Trying to optimize for all three criteria in one go only ensures that none of them end up optimized very well—just vague pushes along all three dimensions.
Perhaps this is another way to think about it.
In one of the EA job or volunteering applications I was asked:
If you made $50,000 USD per year, how much would you donate to charity, to which organization(s), and why?
This is the answer I gave and I believe it satisfies both warm fuzzies (80000hours.org), and expected good done (Against Malaria Foundation) at the same time:
I would donate 10% ($5,000) to https://givingmultiplier.org/ and split the donations so that 80% goes to Against Malaria Foundation (one of the charities recommended by https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities) and 20% to 80000hours.org. By committing 80% to a super-effective charity, it boosts the matching rate to 72% in Giving Multiplier, which amounts to $3,600 USD.
Effectively, even though I’m only donating $5,000, the actual amount donated becomes a total of $8,600 USD ($6,880 goes to Against Malaria Foundation (a charity that’s doing high-impact work proven by evidence and analysis), and $1,720 goes to 80000hours.org (a charity I believe is vital to furthering the EA movement and bringing in future EAs))
Of course, the warm fuzzies can be substituted for any other charity that your heart wants to give to. I think this is a great way to encouraging giving from the heart and the head
We make it easy to give from the “heart” and the “head” with our donation splitting system, made possible by our partners at Every.org. You pick the charity that speaks most to your heart. No researchers can do that for you. You also pick a charity that researchers have identified as extremely effective. And with just a few clicks, you can support both charities, dividing your donation however you choose.[1]
Our care-o-meters are broken. They don’t work on large numbers. Nobody has one capable of faithfully representing the scope of the world’s problems. But the fact that you can’t feel the caring doesn’t mean that you can’t do the caring.
You don’t get to feel the appropriate amount of “care” in your body. Sorry — the world’s problems are just too large, and your body is not built to respond appropriately to problems of this magnitude. But if you choose to do so, you can still act like the world’s problems are as big as they are. You can stop trusting internal feelings to guide your actions and switch over to manual control.
You can’t actually feel the weight of the world. The human mind is not capable of that feat.
But sometimes, you can catch a glimpse.
This points hit home.
As a Christian myself, I believe this is by design and we are not suppose to bare this weight by ourselves. We are not designed to (and hence not supposed to) be able to comprehend nor FEEL the tremendous amount of suffering in the world.
That’s God’s weight and God’s burden to carry.
This is a message I recently heard and resonate with. This is taught to the staff serving with IJM. I don’t have a recording of the message, but letting God handle the weight is described eloquently at https://www.eauk.org/news-and-views/activism-and-burnout
God’s weight, our work, Jesus’ way
The work of justice – of activism, of making wrong things right – is heavy. It takes its toll. But it is not our weight to carry – it is God’s. As Christians, we are called to do the work, but not to carry the weight. And so, we throw the weight off onto God – those children waiting to be rescued from human trafficking, the trials being continually delayed, those big meetings, the partnerships we long to see but seem impossible. He is big enough, strong enough and mighty enough to carry the weight. Plus, let’s be honest, it was His in the first place. Justice is part of God’s big story, redeeming the whole of creation, and – believe it or not – He cares about it even more than we do. The weight is not ours to bear.
But we are called to do the work – whatever that looks like. So we do what we can – investigating, prosecuting abusers, caring for survivors, writing talks, making connections, crunching numbers – to participate in God’s big mission of justice through His people here on earth. We do it Jesus’ way – with love, patience, faithfulness. And we leave the rest to God.
Here’s an example of this in action. The typical person in the UK donates around £6,700 ($9,600USD)[3] over the course of their working lifetimes. For this money we could fund the distribution of around 1,900 mosquito nets[4] (likely preventing around 200children from becoming really, really sick from malaria[5], and probably saving at least two or three lives). However, most voluntary donations go to domestic medical charities.[6] The UK’s National Health Service considers it good value to save one year of healthy life for around £25,000. [7]It’s highly unlikely that a domestic charity will beat this figure, so the typical donor’s impact is going to be many, many times less than it could otherwise be. Remember, just because we don’t think about these choices, doesn’t mean that they’re not there.
Great example here
Was literally talking to a friend about this. Many people I’ve met when I talked about EA has the first impression that it’s about looking at the admin costs and overhead being too high that makes charities ineffective.
When in fact, as I’m trying to explain to them, it’s where the money can be directed (aka effective interventions) that’s going to make the most difference.
We shouldn’t lose sight of our privilege in being able to read and discuss these ideas, or that we are talking about real lives. We’re lucky to be in a position where we can have such a large impact, and this opportunity for impact is the consequence of a profoundly unequal world.
Indeed very grateful to embark on this journey and extremely excited to go through EA in a structured manner :)
If you start off disagreeing with someone then change your mind, that can be hard to admit, but we think that should be celebrated. Helping conversations become clearer by changing your mind in response to arguments you find compelling will help the community act to save lives more effectively
To add to this (for those who think Charity Entrepreneurship could be a career option), this is from How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit book page 35:
Feedback loops and openness to criticism allow you to change your mind and grow your organization. This requires a rare willingness to admit mistakes. Cultivate a “scout mindset,” trying to understand situations and concepts as honestly and accurately as possible, even when inconvenient. Remember, changing your mind is the ultimate victory, because in those moments you are improving your model of the world and making your charity better.
Got private message feedback
Natural follow-up question becomes: “is setting up an entity is the rate determining step (bottleneck) after all?”
The answer to this is provided in the articles referenced by Cristina Schmidt Ibáñez (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zzcWFPHCuNEYCw4kJ/fiscal-sponsorship-ops-support-or-incubation?commentId=uZaukmD4DeXBXPD5z)
In short:
Under model A
Under model C