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?
Here’s a video of a presentation: it’s purpose is to help people really consider if this path is for them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpZgc0e1aaQ
If you email me steve@charityentrepreneurship.com I’m happy to talk about how you might run a group session, and share some resources.
(This first bit is copied from below)
We provide a whole range of supports, from on-going weekly coaching/mentoring, advisors, retreats, sharing resources, workshops, giving administrative, logistical, and legal support. We do whatever we can to help. It’s not perfect and we’d like to be able to give even more, but on the whole we are always there if a charity asks for help.
We help find new hires, we help access funding, we’ve even set up a yearly “insurance” system where our charities can opt to place a small % of their donations as a “rainy day fund” for a charity in the pool that has a timing issue securing funding.
—- then to address your question more specifically…
We help with visa applications, endorsements etc, and if you’re moving to London we can provide shared office space at our HQ.
We also provide stipends to cover living costs for a month or so after the program if needed.
For those who start a charity, the specific costs of relocation can be added to their funding proposal and spent down as the founders see fit. We provide access to the network of funders. But it’s up to the founders to pay themselves what they need to do the work. It’s their choice. We don’t stipulate salaries. So if you need to relocate then we’d encourage you to include this in your proposal.
Thanks a lot for your interest in supporting our charities!
How it works is we read the forms and then we match potential advisors/mentors with specific charity or specific founder. It is very important for us to use the mentor’s/advisor’s time in the most valuable way. So there is no barriers for filling the form—any skills/experiance level is welcome. We will just make sure to use it for the right charity at the right time and find a good fit for both mentee and mentor/advisor.
Not sure. The ideas of EA and of bed nets were around long before these people stepped up to the plate. Some argue that without GW, EA might not have taken off to this day. But I do agree that oftentimes leaders are advancing things more quickly than they would otherwise be.
Yes—the best way to figure out if you’re a good fit is to apply.
It’s low cost and we’ve developed a pretty good understanding on who will do well. It’s not reasonable to expect to know yourself, if you’d be a good fit for doing something that you’ve never done. So I’d suggest you submit an application and see how far you get.
I will add though, not getting through doesn’t mean you’re NOT a good fit, it just means we had some concerns or reservations given our particular approach. However if you do get in you can be confident you ARE a good fit. We are very careful about that.
Also, as said elsewhere, almost nobody is a good fit when they first join the program. That’s what the program is for. We’re looking for potential, ambition, capacity to learn and overtime to become a leader.
Yes—that’s been done in the past. Case by case basis. There can be good reasons to defer. But it’s best to apply early and then discuss those considerations with us if you progress to the final rounds of the application process.
We certainly don’t vet on the basis of age. We’ve had 19 yr olds and 60+ yr olds. I was 43 on the program. Yes it’s true that most of the applicants are younger and that youth is a reasonably good proxy for higher energy and career / location flexibility, but we do value life experience and do seek older applicants. One can imagine a particularly good founding team being made up of a younger person with their strengths and an older person with their experience.
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