AMA with Ambitious Impact’s Co-founder & CEO Joey Savoie

Looking back at your journey from Charity Science to Ambitious Impact, what's one major strategic assumption you made early on that turned out to be completely wrong? How did that realization change your approach to launching new charities?

In ecosystems without strong accelerators, it’s hard to find mentors who understand both ambition and local constraints. At the same time, many of the brightest minds in Nigeria leave academia or the nonprofit space due to survival pressures. From your experience, what mentorship structures and co-founder matching practices are most critical to replicate in regions like Nigeria to help leaders retain talent and build resilient organizations?

Should small donors (~$10k per year) support small scale charities such as charity entrepreneurship incubated ones? Or would these charities be better supported by other larger founders?

What have been the commonalities between the most successful charities created through the programme so far?

In places like Nigeria, systemic barriers (weak infrastructure, scarce funding, policy gaps) often mean impact takes much longer to show. From your own leadership journey, what practices or mindsets have helped you sustain vision and motivation over the long term—and how might these lessons translate for founders working in Global South contexts where “quick wins” are rare?

Thanks for doing this AMA, Joey! I’m curious about Ambitious Impact’s experience with outreach and participant recruitment for your accelerator.
– What have been the biggest challenges in finding and engaging the right applicants?
– Which approaches or channels have you tried so far, and what’s worked best (or least well)?
– Looking ahead, how do you see participant recruitment and scaling evolving — what do you expect to double down on in the future?
– More broadly, what do you think are the common challenges accelerators or fellowship programs face when it comes to effective participant recruitment?

Since targeting Ultra High Net Worth Individuals seems to be a more effective strategy than broad donations (reference), to what extent do you think it is feasible to attract more such individuals to effective giving? What strategies are you particularly excited about researching and testing more extensively to do so?

To what extent the EA community should put more effort towards increasing the donation basis vs finding ever more impactful opportunities? What worries me the most in the second case is that while there might be some pretty good untapped opportunities to create new, more impactful charities, there is always too much uncertainty. For example, this is often argued as a reason to not prioritise funding Vitamin A supplementation (€3.5k/per live saved) vs malaria nets (€5.5k/per live saved), see this Ayuda Efectiva spreadsheet based on GiveWell data; which are already pretty heavily researched areas.

What are, in your opinion, the most promising strategies to increase the amount of funding dedicated to effective charities?

In Carbon Credit markets, project implementers create carbon emission mitigation projects, and buyers, either environmental philanthropists, or organizations wanting or regulated to mitigate their climate impact buy verified impact credits, called carbon credits.  A balance between supply and demand sets the "price" of buying impact, and buyers try to maximize impact per dollar by minimizing the price they pay per credit. 

Acknowledging that carbon credit markets have a whole host of problems, they still seem to be an interesting mechanism for "buying impact" and by being market based, they create incentives to minimize barriers to entry for both buyers and sellers.  And competition should encourage cost-minimization or impact maximization. 

So do you have an opinion on why EA has not yet succeeded in creating a version of an "Impact Credit" market for expanding and incentivizing impact-based philanthropy? I can imagine a few possibilities. Here are some that come to mind:

(1) It is just too hard to accurately characterize impact accurately at the project level so the focus is on charity-wide impact evaluation and quantification. 

(2) Attribution of impact cannot be realistically done at the project level, it has to be done at the charity level.

(3) An open market will encourage cheating and the EA community does not have the resources to police the potential cheating and corruption. 

(4) There are too many types of impact that EAs are interested in, and because EAs focus on neglected cause areas, you can't really create Impact Credits for a neglected area because that puts the "cart before the horse."

(5) Maybe it is a good idea and the EA community just hasn't gotten around to seriously or successfully trying it yet. 

(6) Maybe if there is too much money going into "Impact Markets," by the laws of supply and demand the cost of impact will go up for the donors, and the impact cost effectiveness will go down. Therefore EA donors get much more "bang for the buck" by being exclusive, raising requirements on donors, charities and projects so that their more limited, exclusive projects can have higher cost effectiveness, than what might be possible at larger scale.  Do we really want Malaria bednets to get $20,000 per life saved instead of $5,000 per life saved so that Malaria bednet charities have an incentive to lower the average bed net distribution cost-effectiveness? If the market price for impact is $20,000 when a focused program can deliver $5,000 per life saved, then the bednet charities have an incentive to expand and lower their cost-effectiveness by 4X by distributing bednets to people who really don't need them.

I am sure that there are many more possible answers. 

What clear advantages come through creating a charity through AIM, compared to starting a charity independently?

Which makes for a better applicant: A researcher with no entrepreneurial skills, or an entrepreneur with no research skills?