Hi there
I’m now (finally) doing a round of user interviews to understand what influences people to apply or not apply. If you know of anyone who you would consider a very talented potential founder that has decided not to apply, I’d love to connect with them to understand their thinking. (I won’t try to change their mind, just understand their reasons.)
See also, Joey’s response to a very similar question towards the top of the thread
Thanks Thijs
Good point. TBH, I haven’t given much thought in a while. Be good to re-calculate given that we have way more datapoints now and, as you say, the funding situation has changed.
We believe that it’s very challenging to change existing organizations.
Oh—and apologies for how long it took me to respond to this.
Yep—it’s true we get very large numbers of applicants. Perhaps 80% are speculative though, and don’t even really understand what we do. So the big number is somewhat misleading. Of the two or three hundred relevant candidates we receive, maybe 20 or so will make it onto the program. So for the purposes of those reading the EA Forum (who one would imagine are somewhat or very involved in EA) the likelihood of getting into the later rounds of the application process are actually pretty good.
I will add, however, that it’s a little difficult to communicate around this topic. On the one hand we want to ensure people know that it’s highly competitive; on the other, we don’t want to discourage people. Furthermore, each recent round of applications has been really quite different, so it’s not easy to generalize or lay out probabilities.
What we are confident about is that if we could find more excellent candidates we would be able to start more excellent charities. Our experience is that it makes a huge difference to find particularly well suited candidates. They tend to go on to start exceptionally effective organizations.
Our mission is for more highly- impactful charities to exist in the world. In four years we’ve helped launch 23. We’ve proved our model works and we’re now getting ready to scale up.
Our research team has traditionally targeted ideas for charities that, in expectation, will be at least 5 X AMF.
We’ve grown in confidence, scope and capability. We’re now targeting even more ambitious ideas and, we hope, we’re demonstrating what’s possible.
We’ve grown a very tight- knit community of charity entrepreneurs, funders, researchers, and advisors.
Three SAMPLE wins are…
1) Fortify Health who are on the pathway to become one of the GiveWell top recommended charities. They recently received an $8.2 million incubation grant to scale their efforts in India.
2) Lead Exposure Elimination Project is a charity that drives effective policies to eliminate lead poisoning across the globe. In their first year they managed to convince the government of Malawi to take lead paint off the shelves. This may mean ~215,000 fewer children in Malawi getting lead poisoning . LEEP is now working on similar projects in nine other countries.
3) Fish Welfare Initiative has improved the lives of well over 1.6 million aquatic farmed animals and are making progress in one of the most important, neglected and hard to work places—India, which is the second largest producer of fish globally.
We’re also very interested in tracking their impact (for many reasons including our own cost effectiveness analyses).
We encourage and will pay for external impact evaluations too.
We encourage orgs to have shut down criteria and scale up criteria and we coach and advise based on these.
We would love to do user interviews with people who don’t apply.
How might we find these people and encourage them to tell us what’s holding them back or what’s off putting?
Hi there
I’m now (finally) doing a round of user interviews to understand what influences people to apply or not apply. If you know of anyone who you would consider a very talented potential founder that has decided not to apply, I’d love to connect with them to understand their thinking. (I won’t try to change their mind, just understand their reasons.)
Steve@charityentrepreneurship.com