John Salter
Bio
Founder of Overcome, an EA-aligned mental health charity
Posts 11
Comments130
1. Get a pilot up and running NOW, even if it's extremely small.
You will cringe at this suggestion, and think that it's impossible to test your vision without a budget. Everyone does this at first, before realizing that it's extremely difficult to stand out from the crowd without one. For you, maybe this is a single class delivered in a communal area. 30 students attending regularly, demonstrating a good rate of progress, is a really compelling piece of evidence that you can run a school.
- Do you have the resilience and organisation skills it takes to independently run a project?
- Will people actually use it?
- Can you keep your staff?
- Can you cost-effectively produce results?
It can compelling prove the above, whilst having a ton of other benefits.
2. YOU need to be talking to funders NOW
Don't fall into the trap of trying to read their minds. Get conversations with them. Get their take on your idea. Ask what their biggest concerns would be. Go address them. Repeat. Build relationships with them and get feedback on your grant proposals before submitting them.
As the founder, its YOUR job to raise money. Don't delegate it. It'll take forever to get them to understand your organisation well enough, they won't be as sufficiently motivated to perform, and you won't learn. This is going to be a long-term battle that you face every year. You need to build the network, skills & knowledge to do it well.
3. Be lean AF
The best way to have money is not to spend it. Both you and your charity may go without funding for months or years. Spend what little money you have, as a person and as a charity, very slowly. The longer you've been actively serving users, the easier fundraising gets. It's about surviving until that point.
4. Funders will stalk your website, LinkedIn, and social media if they can
As much as possible, make sure that they all tell the same story as your grant application - especially the facts and figures.
5. When writing your proposals, focus on clarity and concreteness above all else
Bear the curse-of-knowledge in mind when writing. Never submit anything without first verifying other people can understand it clearly. Write as though you're trying to inform, not persuade.
- Avoid abstractions
- State exact values ("few" -> "four", "lots" -> "nine", "soon" -> "by the 15th March 2024")
- Avoid adjectives and qualifiers. Nobody cares about your opinions.
- Use language that paints a clear, unambiguous image to the readers mind
OLD: mean student satisfaction ratings have increased greatly increased since programs began and we believe it's quite reasonable to extrapolate due to our other student-engagement enhancements underway and thus forecast an even greater increase by the end of the year"
NEW: When students were asked to rate their lessons out of 10, the average response was 5. Now, just three months later, the average is 7/10. Our goal is to hit 9/10 by 2025 by [X,Y,Z].
Good luck!
I think schlep blindness is everywhere in EA. I think the work activities of the average EA suspiciously align with activities nerds enjoy and very few roles strike me as antithetical. This makes me suspicious that a lot of EA activity is justified by motivated reasoning, as EAs are massive nerds.
It'd be very kind of an otherwise callous universe to make the most impactful activities things that we'd naturally enjoy to do.
I don't know much about being hired by organisations, but I know a lot about starting them.
This answer assumes that you're very ambitious, and want to do something big and world-changing. Your odds are much better if your aims are more modest. It's also just my opinion as a guy whose started a few organisations. I've been wrong before, and I will be wrong again.
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I'm going to tell you some negative stuff, and then suggest a path to getting what you want anyway.
On paper, you aren't suitable to start a charity. Most charities fail (+80%). On the balance of the evidence presented, it's more likely you'd be among the 80%:
- Being a charity founder usually takes a heroic amount of work over a decade, maybe 60Hpw on average for ~48 weeks per year for ~5-10 years. This will be hard to do with ME.
- Social anxiety is debilitating to a startup founder because it involves being rejected 19 times for every one time someone says yes. You'll have to manage teams, fire under-perfomers, explain to funders why your plan fails and why they should fund you again anyway. A great founder will nonetheless make mistakes that will cost people their jobs, waste months of their time, hurt their collaborators and beneficiaries
- Given the lack of relevant experience, it's going to take you longer to get started. You lack the resumé you'd need to get hired or get funding to do the work you're interested in in EA right now.
The good news is that most successful founders seemed to have some crippling flaws that'd make them a bad fit. They find a way around it. It's possible that you could to:
- You could find people to supplement your lack of energy if you can successfully outsource or delegate the more draining parts of the work
- Social anxiety is treatable, even curable, given sufficient effort (2Hs weekly for ~12 weeks).
- Free treatments exist for EAs. Rethink Wellbeing offers free counselling for Effective Altruists, in a group setting. I would be surprised if they didn't offer bespoke support for social anxiety. Overcome, my charity, also offers it but one-to-one (caveat: it's not as bespoke to EAs).
If you can get a project off the ground and make good progress people will stop giving a shit about your lack of qualifications. I'd suggest working on the project linked on your medium article, create a Minimum Viable Product, and writing up the results on the forum or wherever your most likely collaborators / funders hang out.
The above is likely quite helpful for getting a relevant job too. Field-relevant accomplishments will help you get an interview. Being less socially anxious will help you come across better. Having strong systems of outsourcing / delegation would make it more credible to employers that your ME isn't going to undermine your performance.
I hope this is helpful.
More information needed:
- What is your knowledge level?
- Are there specific areas within the non-profit sector you are particularly interested in?
- How many hours per week are you able to commit to volunteering or part-time work?
- Do you have any previous work or volunteer experience, even if not directly related to non-profits?
- What are your strengths?
- What are your salary expectations?
I think we have the exact opposite problem. When I see the budget of many big EA orgs I throw up in my mouth, thinking about how many smaller charities the money could have funded.
Maybe I'm wrong. Got any evidence that larger EA orgs are most cost effective then smaller ones?
I view our hiring process as a constant work in progress, and we look back at the application process of everyone after their time with us, the best and worst performers alike, and try figure out how we could have told ahead of time. Part of that is writing up notes. We use chatgpt to make the notes more sensitive and send them to the applicant.
Caveat: We only do this for people who show some promise of future admission.
Have also tried this, although most our applicants aren't EAs. People who reapply given detailed feedback usually don't hit the bar.
We still do it, in part because we think it's good for the applicants, and in part because people who make a huge improvement attempt 2 usually make strong long-term hires
I think there's a ton of obvious things that people neglect because they're not glamorous enough:
1. Unofficially beta-test new EA stuff e.g. if someone announces something new, use it and give helpful feedback regularly
2. Volunteer to do boring stuff for impactful organisations e.g. admin
3. Deeply fact-check popular EA forum posts
4. Be a good friend to people doing things you think are awesome
5. Investigate EA aligned charities on the ground, check that they are being honest in their reporting
6. Openly criticise grifters who people fear to speak out against for fear of reprisal
7. Stay up-to-date on the needs of different people and orgs, and connect people who need connecting
In generally, looking for the most anxiety provoking, boring, and lowest social status work is a good way of finding impactful opportunities.