CE is scaling – our 3-year plan and current hiring round

By KarolinaSarek🔸 @ 2022-02-01T17:12 (+105)

TLDR: Charity Entrepreneurship is expanding our team to facilitate our plan to scale. Based on the track record of our incubated organizations, we believe that we could increase our impact by doubling the quality of our incubated charities followed by the quantity. To do so, we’re looking for 5 new team members who will be involved in research, outreach, or writing. Open roles include senior and entry-level staff. 

What we do 

At Charity Entrepreneurship, we’re focused on launching new high-impact nonprofits annually by connecting entrepreneurs with effective ideas, training, and funding. This means that each year, we dedicate hundreds of research hours to identifying neglected problems worldwide and pinpointing the charity ideas with the highest potential impact per dollar. Then we recruit aspiring entrepreneurs and provide them with free, two-month-long intensive training, helping them find the co-founder and idea that best fit their talents. Next, our board and network of experts evaluate teams and their project proposals to award seed funding (with grants ranging from $50,000 to $175,000). We continue to provide ongoing operational support, more training opportunities, regular mentorship calls, and a worldwide network of advisors, peers, and partner organizations. You can learn about our Incubation Program on our website. 

Our track record

Charity Entrepreurship’s impact is largely dependent on the success of the charities we launch. Although our work has some other beneficial flow-through effects (e.g., research that informs other organizations and governmental institutions, or advice and guidance that improves broader EA project decision-making and outcomes), when we think about our track record, we mostly focus on the progress of the existing charities we helped to start and continue to mentor. Our current views on this impact are summarized below.

To date, we have launched 18 new charities and secured them over $1.15 million in seed funding grants.
 

So far, these charities have: 

• Improved the lives of ~1.6 million animals
• Implemented programs that have reached over 6 million people
   

To break it down into proportions:

• About ⅖ of the charities each year exceed the cost-effectiveness of the strongest charities in their fields and have been supported by multiple independent funding bodies (Open Philanthropy, GiveWell, EA funds, etc.).
• About ⅖ make progress, but remain small-scale or have an unclear cost-effectiveness.
• About ⅕ shut down in their first 24 months without having a significant impact.

On our website, we published an “Our Charities” page with space dedicated to each individual organization so you can follow their progress. Some highlights below.

• Fortify Health has signed 15 partnerships with flour mills across West Bengal, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh. If they work at scale, fortified flour can reach around 1.65 million people. The organization was also awarded 2 GiveWell Incubation Grants, totaling $1.3M (2018, 2019), and is under evaluation for another. They are predicted to have a 25% chance of becoming a GiveWell top recommended charity.
• Fish Welfare Initiative has potentially helped 420,000 fish and 1.2 million shrimp through welfare improvements. They have also enrolled 58 fish farmers in their Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture.
• Thanks to the Lead Exposure Elimination Project, the Malawi Bureau of Standards has committed to enforcing regulation and getting lead paint off shelves. Estimated impact due to LEEP’s Malawi program: decrease poisoning in ~215,000 children (averting 43,000 DALY-equivalents). LEEP estimates that this will be completed at approximately $14 per DALY-equivalent averted.
• Family Empowerment Media has provided education on family planning to 5.6 million listeners in Nigeria through more than 500 radio ads and shows. (In a recent study, mass media education campaigns have been shown to increase contraceptive use by ~30% on average.) By 2026, FEM expects to be able to avert one maternal death for every $2,600 in funding provided while operating in 10 Nigerian states and reaching 10 million women and men.

Our 3-year plan

This year, CE has considered a number of ways to scale. In the next 3 years, we plan to double the quality and then double the quantity of charities we start. We are also piloting a Foundation Program. 

We considered a number of factors when determining how best to move forward with our scale plan. Ultimately, it came down to past results and future bottlenecks: when looking at correlations between the projects with the most success and the least, the strength of the co-founding team stood out as a strongly predictive factor (0.7). This suggested that outreach to new potential founders may be the primary way to improve charity quality. Another factor that stood out as low-hanging fruit was time-efficient longer-term support. To increase our quantity x2, on the other hand, we must consider each possible bottleneck: founders, ideas, and funding.

We plan to… 

1) Double the quality by: 

a) Ensuring that more of our existing charities are equivalent in quality to our top charities. This includes action plans like: 

• Mentoring charities for longer
• Running professional development days
• Facilitating peer sharing
• Building ecosystem connections to other alumni or funding networks
• Supporting monitoring & evaluation efforts
• Offering third-party coaching (e.g., on scaling)
• Finding staff to join their organizations out of our incubation pool

b) Increasing the size of our top applicants pool by: 

• Optimizing program availability – running the program twice a year
• Expanding our outreach team – hiring a Recruitment & Outreach Manager and a Hiring and Vetting Specialist (see below)
• Further improving program content and format (e.g., determining whether to run the program online, in person, or in a mixed-model)
• Exploring outreach networks with new/under-targeted talent pools

c) Optimizing cause areas: 

• Each year, starting charities from our previously researched cause areas pool (e.g., global poverty, health policy, animal welfare) and our new cause areas pool (e.g., metascience, biorisk, governance reform)

2) Double the quantity of our incubated charities:

To increase our quantity x2, we must consider each possible bottleneck: founders, ideas, and funding. For founders, our actions from the section above would likely lead to a larger number of applications and will suggest a path to increase quantity (possibly at the cost of more resources).

a) Action plans for increasing funding will include: 

• Building up the numbers and reliability of funding partners within the CE seed network (let us know if you want to get involved! Contact joey@charityenentrepreneurship.com)
• Diversifying funding sources and methodologies
• Building multi-year funding commitments

b) Action plans for increasing the number of charity ideas:

• Exploring research partnerships
• Recommending previously researched promising ideas (e.g., tobacco taxation policy work)
• Increasing the capacity of the research department and hiring more senior researchers (see below)

3) Run a Foundation Program

In 2022, we’re launching the Foundation Program. After the successful incubation of 1 grantmaking foundation through our 2021 Incubation Program, we now aim to take 2 to 6 similar organizations from beginning-stage to field leaders. Our dedicated, free, 1-month-long bootcamp will focus on building solid frameworks for making key decisions when the stakes are high. To help us with delivering high-quality content for the program, we’re now looking for a Content Development Specialist (see below).

Overall, at CE, we believe that helping more effective charities to exist in the world is the highest-impact thing we can do with our careers. If you want to maximize your impact and help us scale, we invite you to join our team in London.

Current Hiring Round (5 positions available)

So, CE is growing rapidly, and we want to improve our outreach and strengthen our research. We’re now looking for 5 new team members that could join us at our office in London (working remotely is also possible).

We offer:

• A job that has a huge impact on the world
• A supportive and welcoming work environment
• The chance to shape the direction, goals, and achievements of the organization
• Flexible working schedule and 30 paid days off per year on top of, e.g., sick leave
• Experience working at a nonprofit start-up
• A community of talented, dedicated, and like-minded EAs
• A heavy focus on training in important skills
• High levels of intellectual challenges
• For the right employee, more perks and benefits could be included
• Salary and moving costs are flexible depending on employee needs

We’re now hiring for 5 different positions: 

1) Research Analyst – contribute to the number and type of charities we recommend and launch through identifying, analyzing, and comparing charity opportunities! 

2) Hiring & Vetting Specialist – take this senior role to help us design and execute scalable, methodologically sound vetting processes! 

3) Recruitment & Outreach Manager – help us find the next co-founders of new effective charities!

4) Content Development Specialist – take this senior role and help us build high-quality learning materials for our Foundation Incubation Program! 

5) Copyeditor & Writer – take this cross-cutting role to support our outreach and publishing efforts with your editing and writing skills!

The application deadline is February 15, 2022 
Expected hours: Full-time
Location: London or remote

Apply by filling one of the forms on the linked pages. If you are interested in multiple roles within CE, please use the application form for your first choice. You will later have the option to indicate interest in other roles. 

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to Karolina at karolina@charityentrepreneurship.com