How High Impact Professionals (HIP) can support you (MCF 2025 memo)

By Nina Friedrich🔸, High Impact Professionals @ 2025-09-22T11:48 (+22)

This memo was originally written for the Meta Coordination Forum 2025. I’m sharing this here (with some edits) in the hope it will be useful for others as well. (my other MCF memos are here: More Sharing of Top Candidates - Easy, High-Impact, Underused; Learnings from running programs for busy people)

Disclaimer: I wrote this fairly quickly - no further research done compared to the data we have already available.

Quick overview of HIP

High Impact Professionals enables mid- and senior-level professionals to maximize their positive impact. We connect people to the tools, structure, and networks to move into high-impact roles. HIP takes a holistic approach, encouraging professionals to use their skills, money, or network to do good.

Quick program overview

Impact Accelerator Program (IAP) - 6-week cohort program for mid-career and senior professionals looking to pivot their career to higher impact. In 2024, of the 130 total participants, 43 have already transitioned into high-impact careers through the IAP. We expect a total of over 200 participants across 3 rounds in 2025.

Talent Directory (TD) - 4,000+ profiles of professionals looking to join high-impact orgs, including 200+ Top Candidates shared by ~40 orgs (e.g. finalists in their hiring rounds), 22 confirmed hires so far.

HIP Pledge Club - 66 new pledges in slightly over a year (including 21 🔸10% Pledges) - 46 via IAP (15 🔸10% Pledges) and 11 via CIT (2 🔸10% Pledges).

Career Impact Track (CIT) - self-guided version of the IAP with workbook, accountability matching and weekly nudges. CIT 1 (pilot) ran alongside the most recent IAP. 11 giving pledges (including 2 🔸10% Pledges) came through the CIT, no confirmed career transitions yet.

Four ways we can support you

1. Find your next hire via the Talent Directory

Here’s the simple process on how to use the Talent Directory.

• Request recruiter access
• Filter by experience type/level, cause interests, EA familiarity, location, and more.
• Look specifically for Top Candidates that match your filters (e.g., finalists in other orgs’ rounds).
• Reach out and invite promising candidates into your hiring process.
• If you hire via the TD, please tell us so we can track impact.

2. Get referrals for your open roles

Send us your job descriptions and we’ll share relevant IAP profiles and other strong candidates from our network.

3. Find a skilled volunteer

We help orgs find skilled volunteers from our Impact Accelerator Program. If you would like to have access t the Volunteer Match Doc (to find volunteers), please contact us directly. 

4.Experience & learning sharing

• Pledge drives: We've recently shared with a joint forum post with Giving What We Can and other pledge partners how we’re running this in our program to get over 20% of people to take a new giving pledge.
• Program design: We have experimented with creating programs that people want to attend and drive action from. I have shared my learnings in this Forum post (adapted from my MCF 2025 memo).
• M&E for career transitions: This is a hard problem! I’ve shared a brief overview on our methodology below and am happy to share more details (and learn from your processes!).
• Working with skilled volunteers: Something you might not know about HIP? We’ve operated in 2024 and 2025 with only 1.6 FTE! To allow us to scale our impact and programs, we have worked heavily with volunteers - almost all IAP cohorts are run by volunteer facilitators. I’m happy to share my learnings on this.

How you can help HIP (and the ecosystem more broadly)

• Share your Top Candidates link with finalists and other top candidates; add it to your finalist rejection template; resend to finalists from the last 6–12 months. Need your link? We’ll resend it. Here is my Forum post on the topic (adapted from my MCF 2025 memo).
• Offer our programs as a next step for people in your network; for outstanding candidates - refer them directly to the IAP.
• Share your thinking and processes around measuring career changes.
• Ideas for collaboration or feedback on this/other Forum posts, or for HIP more generally, are very welcome.

How we measure our impact

We’re mainly running a bottom-up impact tracking system - participant-level tracking with concrete steps and impact estimates. For every IAP participant and all TD hires, we track:

• Career changes/contracts: estimate annual role impact, adjust for individual counterfactual and program counterfactual, and sum over 2.5 years (or contract length if shorter). To be conservative, we set impact beyond 2.5 years to 0.
• TD extras: record time saved in hiring and earlier start dates (usually small relative to role impact).
• Volunteer roles: apply a token value per scoped project to reflect delivered output.
• Giving pledges: use Giving What We Can's pledge-partner counterfactual numbers.

Verification and persistence

• IAP: input during the program, 1- and 2-month cohort follow-ups, 6-month survey, then rolling 6-month reminders.
• TD: collect data from orgs and talent (we often hear only much later - and presumably often not at all - so please report hires via the TD).
• Pledges: verify via the GWWC partner dashboard and assignment logic.