 For each salmon produced, it takes ~5 other fish to be caught in order to feed it. Great numbers of fish killed every year are not used directly for human consumption, but for the purpose of being fed to other farmed fish. The amount of fish fed to other fish exceeds the number of fish sold to consumers by an order of magnitude: around 0.45 to 1.0 trillion annually compared to 48 to 160 billion slaughtered for food globally in 2015. This agricultural practice likely causes extreme suffering. It is also highly neglected by the animal welfare movement. This strengthens the case for interventions targeting these fish. In this report we discuss interventions from in-vitro fish feed and switching to plant-based feeds, to consumer outreach to reduce the consumption of carnivorous fish. However, despite the scale of the problem, it might be that natural industry movement is making this intervention not worth pursuing. The industry has incentives to put resources into research and development of alternative fish feeds independent of advocacy, as plant-based feed is far cheaper than fish-based ones. Our preliminary research suggests that this is not a very promising intervention, as the declining industry means that a medium-sized charity wouldn’t have much effect on welfare. We expect this to fall into the bottom 5 of our ask reports. This report considers more deeply the positives and negatives of this intervention, as well as crucial considerations like whether the industry is naturally moving away from fish feed.  Ask reports Our priority ask reports are focused on what are the particular improvements or changes that can be “asked” for from corporations, governments, or individuals. Going cage free, making dietary changes, regulating slaughter practices, and many other asks all serve as examples here. They are compared based on the strength of the idea (including the evidence base and estimated cost-effectiveness), limiting factors, execution difficulty, and externalities. All of these factors together could begin to suggest which asks might be the most effective when combined with a priority animal, country, and approach. However, these ask reports are short summaries of longer unpublished reports and, therefore, even if an ask looks promising this does not necessarily suggest that it will end up being a promising charity once paired with other elements and cross-compared to the other strongest possible charities. It just suggests that it is worth further and deeper investigation from our team. You can see our full planned research process here. Did you know that CharityEntrepreneurship can help you start
an effective charity for animals? If you want to be the first to know when we will start accepting applications (April 2019) to our incubation program, subscribe to our mailing list.
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 The Charity Entrepreneurship incubation program is built to to help new charity entrepreneurs start as high impact a charity as possible in as little time as possible. It will run for 2 months from June 17th to August 16th 2019. New organizations will be founded using seed grants at the end of the program. Month 1 The first month is structured similarly to a full-time university course and includes presentations, guest speakers, activities, and partner projects. The content covered over the first month includes:
At the end of the first month, each attendee will submit a document stating which charity ideas they are interested in working on and who they would be interested in co-founding these with. They will also provide some logistical information, e.g. where they plan to live. Using this information the Charity Entrepreneurship team will come out with a recommendation list of compatible co-founders and ideas. These recommendations will be the best estimate of a high impact team given all the submitted information. Most co-founding groups will comprise of 2 people, but there may be occasions where we recommend a single founder or a group of 3 people. Month 2The second month will be focused on working on the charity idea with your possible co-founding team. There will be four different parts in each given day. Morning hour Every morning an hour will be given for every charity team to focus on a specific project that can be worked on throughout the day. For example, on day one the focus could be on something like “becoming an expert in the area - reading summary content”. The morning hour would be used for setting up research goals, discussing what information is most important, and receiving some tips about how to find summary content for your area. Work day The bulk of the day will be spent on working directly on your project with your co-founding team. This could include operational details, such as determining the best country to register in, strategy details, such as who might be the team’s first hire and what the team’s first actions would be. On the first days, this would involve reading summaries about the area written by CE and other experts, finding the best few experts to contact for a Skype meeting, and talking to your co-founder about what information should be prioritized next in order to get a good sense of the charity area. One-on-one Your charity will get daily one-on-one time with Charity Entrepreneurship staff or previous co-founders. This time can be used to address the hardest questions or the questions that would benefit you the most as pertains to external experience. For example, “We plan on contacting this expert to ask question A and B, do you think we should contact them now or after we have a stronger sense of related areas?”. Q and A At the end of each day there will be a open Q and A where each charity team can ask questions while other teams, Charity Entrepreneurship staff and mentors can work together on answering. This will help the teams get into the mindset of learning from each other and contributing to other teams’ projects. It will also identify problems that are common across teams and give the teams a sense of what others groups are doing to address them. The above is an overview, but there may be other events and opportunities not mentioned, such as a CE conference where teams will give a presentation about their charity idea to donors, mentors, and future staff. We may have guest speakers from charities who have progressed to later stages, for example charities who have scaled up nationally. There is also a lot of support and other benefits available after the program for those who start a charity. You can read about those benefits here. To be the first to know when applications open, you can sign up to our mailing list. There is no hard limit on how many people can be accepted to the program, but we expect that each year there will be between 6 and 20 attendees depending on the number of applicants. Applicants will be accepted into the program if the CE team feels they have a high chance of creating an extremely impactful charity - such that could be recommended by Animal Charity Evaluators or Givewell. If you want to be the first to know when we will start accepting applications to our incubation program, subscribe to our mailing list.
 Over the past few months, Charity Entrepreneurship has dedicated hours of work to researching ideas for potential animal charities that we believe could have uniquely high positive-impact. Our ask reports cover the impact of many different components of charitable interventions (for example, which animals to focus on). However, all of these reports are done only in the context of founding a new charity. Sometimes an area looks very promising, but there are so many strong organizations working in the area already that it would not be optimal to start a new one. Other areas are very easy to do incorrectly, and thus taking a gamble with a new charity is not worth it. However, if an organization were to do it right, it would definitely be worth funding it. Yet other areas might just not be at a stage where founding a charity is the right move. Below, we go into a few of the reasons we expect our recommended charities’ list to be different from the areas we would recommend for funding, research, or other non-entrepreneurship activities. Strong existing organizations If an area is full of very strong existing organizations, particularly ones that can accept more funding or talent, it weakens the area from the perspective of recommending a new charity. For example, in our historical research, bednets scored very low as an area to start a new charity in, but the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) is generally considered one of the strongest charities to donate to. In fact, AMF being so strong and able to absorb large amounts of funding is one of the reasons we did not recommend a bednet charity in the past. Interventions that are easy to do wrong Some interventions might be high impact, but due to very high levels of difficulty would not be optimal for founding a charity. For example, certain interventions might require 10-20 organizations to be founded in order to start one that makes a real difference. Therefore, due to its difficulty of execution, it would make better sense to fund a project that was already succeeding in the area instead of relying on a new one that has a very high chance of failure. Interventions that are at the wrong stage of their life cycle Some interventions are promising, but not at a stage where founding a specific charity would be the best next step. This could be because an intervention is too young and requires more research before conducting broader, charitable activities. It could also be due to the field being too old, with large players already established and conducting the needed effort in the area. A field that is too old might be a perfect field to fund, and a field that is too young would, generally, be a good field to research without necessarily founding a charity in it. Interventions, of course, can move at different rates, and it's difficult to clearly classify them. However, we do feel some classification of what stage they are at can help to explain why we found some asks to be more or less promising.
As such, it's not surprising that many of the areas we find most promising are in the field establishment section, with none of the ideas at the very ends of the spectrum matching the most promising ideas. However, if we were looking at the same set of interventions from a funding perspective, we would be mostly looking at “growing, refinement, and stabilization stages”. If we were looking at this list from a research perspective, requiring both long-term and short-term research would be ideal. Conclusion Through our research of animal welfare, we have learnt some lessons unrelated to what charities should be founded (and we plan on writing these up in the future). These lessons are about which charities to support and fund, as well as where further research would be most valuable to conduct. However, we expect these to be significantly different from what we recommend in our reports. This is because our reports are focused specifically on generating strong ideas for new charities.
 The following is a fictional story to illustrate a point. The two interventions were both urgent. Animal Issues - Canada had been considering which of the two to pick for months. Jeremy thought that they should work on geese, as they had a significantly lower welfare standard than other in Canada. It looked clear to him that they should move the majority of their resources onto campaigns aimed at increasing the welfare of geese. However, his co-director disagreed. Jenny had been researching ducks and thought they were even more important than geese, since the ducks were slightly more numerous, although slightly better treated than the geese. It was a hard call, and so they chose to flip a coin. Both interventions were good, and flipping a coin seemed like a fair way of deciding, but both Executive Directors agreed that whatever the outcome, they would dedicate themselves to the issue. But the coin betrayed them. It told them to work on geese, and so they did for years - the two of them were ambitious and talented activists, and thus they made considerable progress. They would have made progress with ducks as well, but they had to choose one. Unfortunately, they had chosen wrong. As they won victories for geese, the goose population was decreasing. Each year, less and less geese were farmed, not because of the activists’ victories, but independent of them. Goose was going out of style - less geese were being farmed everywhere and not just in Canada. And although their improvements had been huge, during the 5 years they had worked on the issue, the goose population had shrunk by almost 50%, meaning that their improvements only affected half as many individuals as they predicted they would. Duck populations, on the other hand, had exploded, and there were now twice as many ducks as there had been when they had first made the calculation. 5 years later, to their dismay, they compared what would have happened if they had been working on ducks instead of geese, and, sadly, their calculations showed that they could have saved four times as many animals if they had made the same amounts of progress. In some cases, they could not have known which group would grow and which would shrink, but in this case, the data was there and they just had not looked. If they had looked at the trends from the last 5 years before, it would have been clear that ducks were a growing problem and geese were a shrinking one. They had not taken into account the ‘unique timing’. They had not targeted the duck industry when it was young, and now it would be an uphill battle to switch over to a much more established duck farming industry. The solution to this problem was not to invest time and attention by half and half in each. The solution would have been to take a deeper look at the future trends in the farming industry to try to determine what area would have been more important both then and after 5 years. When we are evaluating which is the best charity to start, we want to take into account both the long and near-term effects. Within animal issues, one major factor to take into account is the tractability, or ease of implementation. But another factor to take into account is the question of if now is the right or wrong time to pursue a specific intervention? Some interventions might be particularly tractable or easy to implement right now, while on the flip side, others might be uniquely difficult. A clear example of this is how established the factory farming industry is: if it is well-established in a country (has a lobbying team, possesses already built infrastructure, makes a large profit, and so on) it will be harder to run a corporate campaign or pass a government law in order to change the standards. Another example: it’s easier to change the size of battery cages (or ban them altogether) before the industry has bought them. Sadly, there are few areas were factory farming has not been established at all. However, there are areas that are growing and others that are shrinking.  The graphic shows the change over time of aquaculture production vs the wild capture of fish. It’s clear that aquaculture is gaining market share with wild capture stagnating, and there is good reason to think that this trend will continue with wild capture getting harder as the wild fish supplies are reduced.
This graph suggests that if we want welfare reforms to pass on aquaculture, the sooner the better, because the industry will likely get larger and more established over time. On the flip side, now might be a uniquely bad time to use up resources passing reforms for wild fish, as it’s more likely that the industry will shrink instead of grow going forwards. For example, if you thought the two different welfare interventions “Humane slaughter of fish” and “Increasing dissolved oxygen levels to improve water quality” are about equally important, then the ‘unique timing’ consideration could change your view. An intervention like “Dissolved oxygen” (which generally will be impossible to execute with wild fish, and thus targets aquafarm fish) might look more promising to go forward with right now (it aims to hit before the aquaculture industry gets any larger) than something like slaughter (which targets both wild and aquaculture fish). This would be even more significant a factor for an intervention that just affects wild fish (e.g. bycatch reduction strategies). Overall, the timing of an intervention should be carefully considered, and interventions that have uniquely good timing should be prioritized over those that do not or those that could be more effectively done at a different time. This is a factor our team is going to consider when recommending new charities. Right now, this would mean targeting countries with low but growing animal production rates, such as Bangladesh, and targeting industry trends like aquaculture. In this talk from EA Global 2018: London, Joey Savoie, Charity Entrepreneurship's director, discusses why charity entrepreneurship is one of the highest-impact things you can do. He also explains what we can do to help you start an effective organization. Below you can find the full video and a transcript crossposted from effectivealtruism.org prepared and lightly edited by The Centre for Effective Altruism (huge thanks for their hard work). You can share your thoughts about this talk on the EA Forum. TranscriptSo, we are going to talk about charity entrepreneurship. But first, I'm going to take you to a slum of Lucknow.  Lucknow is a city in India, and this picture is fairly representative of the state of affairs. You can tell from the picture that there are giant health and poverty concerns. It really is a place where charitable intervention can make a huge difference. One thing you can't tell from this picture, though, is the sheer size of this slum. A team of SMS Vaccine reminding staff went from building to building trying to find pregnant mothers, and it took hours to cover even a small section of this slum.  But of course that is just one slum in a much larger city. Lucknow city has several hundred slums, 200 to 300 slums by the record right now. Each of them has a unique set of problems, although there are some commonalities in terms of global health and economic difficulties. There's a huge volume of good that can be done in a city like Lucknow.  But of course we can zoom out further, and look at Uttar Pradesh. This is a state in India, but it is such a big state that if it were a country it'd be the sixth largest country in the world. It truly is massive. You could have a giant organization spend their entire budget and all their staff time all working in Uttar Pradesh, and not even make a dent in the massive scale problems that they have, both from poverty and other sorts of issues.  But of course, we can zoom out even further and look at India. A country with over a billion people, and problems to match. Although there are incredible charities working there, there's still a huge need for more organizations working intelligently, systematically, and with evidence.  Of course, India is not the only country with problems, and of course, global poverty isn't the only problem. There's tons of different issues that one can work on, like animal welfare, mental health challenges, economic development, or migration. There are a lot of gaps in the world where new and effective organizations could be founded. Why I'm talking about these gaps is because I think that a lot of people are under the impression that there's already a ton of charities out there. Maybe all the best opportunities have been filled by organizations, and that's really not the case. There really is room for fantastic new charities to be founded and be fantastically high impact.  I'm going to talk about why charity entrepreneurship is important. I'll talk about its importance to the world, and to the EA movement specifically. I'll also talk about who charity entrepreneurship might be a good fit for; it really is not a good fit for everybody. Some people are fantastically well aligned and do a really good job, while other people aren't a good career fit and shouldn't enter the space. Finally, I'll address how Charity Science is aiming to help new charities get founded and started off on the right foot.  I'm going to make this argument from more of a cluster thinking perspective than a sequence thinking perspective, which means coming at it from a bunch of different angles and showing that charity entrepreneurship looks very good and very high impact from several different perspectives. The first thing that comes to almost everyone's mind when they think about the potential impact of charity entrepreneurship, is the sheer size of good that you can do when you found a successful charity.  Here's some of the money moved from some top GiveWell recommended charities. You can see it's often in the 10s of millions of dollars. And these are just the numbers from GiveWell itself, as opposed to the total money that's going towards each charity. Suffice to say that starting a high-impact charity can redirect millions of dollars in a positive direction. So, even if your charity is only 1% more effective than the charity that a donor would have given to otherwise, it can have a really massive impact just because of the sheer volume of money. There's also a force multiplication argument about this. You're not just directing money, when you're founding a new charity. You're directing talent, you're directing interest, you're directing passion towards your chosen issue. There are a lot of people who will work for a high-impact charity, but wouldn't ever found one themselves. By creating a new high-impact charity, you're creating an opportunity for talented individuals to get invested in the field and to make a difference. Finally, there are hits. So, everyone wants their charity to be successful, and charity entrepreneurship is inherently, like normal entrepreneurship, a risky business. A lot of charities will be started and the impact analysis will come back bad, or the charity won't have a valid way of scaling. There's a lot of ways to fail, but there's also a lot of ways to have massive success. Success that is incomparable to many other jobs. For example, a minor hit, although it feels funny to call it a minor hit, would be becoming a GiveWell recommended charity. Just a small percentage difference between you and the other GiveWell recommended charities in terms of being better, or even simply giving more options that GiveWell can recommend to attract donors from different spaces and different interests. So a minor hit can make a huge difference. But that's not even taking into account the major hits. Most giant charitable organizations that are around today started off as a small group. The benefits of an EA group being the group to start the next Oxfam, and shaping an entire cause area, is truly massive.  The next thing I want to talk about is neglectedness. Charity Entrepreneurship isn't a salient career path for a lot of people. Many people will have considered entrepreneurship as a career path, and many, many people will consider working for a charity. But founding a charity is off the radar, even in EA. So, this chart shows is the percent of people working in different jobs from the EA survey that was most recently conducted. Several thousand people responded, and an incredibly small number of them have seriously considered founding high impact charities. Of those who have, almost all of them have been in global poverty. For example, organizations like New Incentives, Charity Science Health, or Fortify Health. So there's a truly large opportunity for more people to get involved in the space, more people to work in the space, and eventually for people to start high impact organizations.  The next thing we'll talk about is tractability and track record. Founding a charity is a difficult job, especially one good enough to be a GiveWell or Animal Charity Evaluators recommended charity, but it's not impossible. Some of our collective track record shows this. A lot of the charities we view as strongest and most impactful in the EA movement, weren't started by someone with 55 years of experience in the relevant area. They were instead started by someone who came into it with more of an analytical mindset, more of an EA mindset, someone looking for cost effectiveness or evidence base. A lot of the recent charities that have been started and that have become GiveWell incubated, were coming with the same mindset. That's a huge competitive advantage over other charities that happened to be cost-effective by luck, as opposed to explicitly seeking cost-effectiveness out or trying to maximize it.  No good EA presentation would be complete without an expected value calculation. So what's the numerical worth of Charity Entrepreneurship? Well, there are a couple different calculations. Peter Hurford's calculation assumes an 85% chance that the charity has zero impact, so fails completely, and assumes a 15% chance of becoming GiveWell recommended. These numbers were based off Charity Science Health, the charity that we founded, after doing a similar round of analytical research to the ones that we now do for all sorts of charities. His model determined that the average staff member would be worth $400,000 of equivalent donations to high impact charity. That's just the average staff member, that wasn't for co-founders or the founding team in particular. This is an incredibly high impact thing. This is $400,000 donated. So, even if you earned $400,000 you'd have to donate 100% of it to match this level of impact. We did an internal model that was a bit more pessimistic, assuming that there's only a certain chance that someone would get to the point where Charity Science Health has got, and get GiveWell incubated, and ended up at a similar figure of $200,000 of expected value of donations. This sort of impact is really, really high, and these calculations are quite conservative relative to a lot of the other impact estimates going around the EA movement. There's a whole bunch of other benefits that I'd love to spend more time on. But I'm going to go through really quickly because we only have so much time. The first one is skill building. So, entrepreneurship gives you an opportunity to try on a lot of different hats. That's part of why it's hard and intimidating, but it also gives you a chance to build a lot of different skills. If you try to found a charity, even if you fail, going into the next job having basic budgeting skills, fundraising skills, management skills, hiring skills, it gives you a huge advantage and will stick with you for a long time. Similarly, career capital. If someone sees that you took a good attempt at a project, even if it's a failed project, but especially if it's successful project, that does wonders for your CV and career capital in general. You can use a successful charity as a stepping stone towards getting into a high impact position with the World Health Organization, or any sort of other organization that would look at that sort of thing. The next thing is attributable impact. So, calculating the impact that you're going to have is really, really difficult, and there's one less step you have to calculate with charity entrepreneurship. If you do, in fact, start a charity that no one else would have founded, that wouldn't have gotten started without your time and energy put into it, what you're most looking at is that charity's impact as a whole. Instead of having to calculate both the organization's impact, and then your specific impact within the organization. When calculating your impact in othre cases, maybe the organization is great, but your personal role is very minor. Or maybe your staff impact is big, but the organization sucks. With charity entrepreneurship, you only have to calculate the organization's impact. Job satisfaction is the next one. As I said, it's really not the perfect fit for everybody, and we'll go a little bit more into that soon. But for the right personality type, it's incredibly enjoyable. Being able to look at your charity and know that you built it from scratch, being able to work with flexible hours, with a bunch of different staff. There are a lot of benefits to it. There's an unparalleled amount of job diversity. But there are also cons. Ambiguity is tough, which is a thing you're going to have to deal with as a charity entrepreneur. Not only are there personal benefits for founders, there are also benefits to the EA movement in general. Charity entrepreneurship enhances movement growth, by expanding the EA movement outside of its traditional sphere. By getting involved at the charity level and hiring people in that field, working with people who, say, work in vaccinations, you expand EA in a very concrete way to a sympathetic audience. There's also a much clearer case for impact for some of these charities. It's fine to go and tell someone that you're doing a philosophy think tank that will eventually save humanity, but it sure is nice to also be able to say we started a vaccine charity that people think is highly cost effective. That sort of concrete case for impact can benefit the whole EA movement, in terms of showing that we are in fact doing what we say we're doing and having success doing that. The next thing is stability. Organizations tend to outlive movements. The EA movement is social movement, and it is fragile in many ways. It gets stronger the more organizations there are to anchor it, and tie it to reality in a long lasting way. Finally, opportunities. Lots of EAs want to work for EA organizations. Lots of EAs wants to work for high impact jobs. As I mentioned with the force multiplier before, by creating an opportunity, you create space for people to grow, develop their capacities, and expand the EAmovement. It gives a space for people to go once they get involved. Next up, community learning value. Even a failed project can be massively impactful if you get a lot of learning value from it. One of our early projects didn't work at all, but we were able to publish a giant report explaining why it didn't work and tens of other organizations in the EAmovement were able to learn from that mistake and not repeat the same thing. If your charity does fail, and you are able to be transparent about why it failed, and you learn from it, you can benefit not only the charity entrepreneurship community within EA, but the broader EAmovement as a whole, because a lot of these lessons are generalizable. Finally, there's inspiration. If you can inspire someone else to found a charity through your example, that can be massively high impact. If people can see other people doing successful, ambitious projects, then it can lead to precedence. So for instance, we saw New Incentives do a really great job founding their charity, and that gave us confidence to start Charity Science Health. Charity Science Health gave Fortify Health confidence to do that, and now Fortify Health, New Incentives and Charity Science Health can give other EAs a chance to look at charities that have been successful and it gives them a chance to feel inspired by the possibility. The next thing is passive impact. So, for people who have heard of passive income, passive impact is a very similar concept. Basically, if you set up a charity to run independently without you, and it continues to do good in the world, you continue to hold some sort of counterfactual responsibility for that impact. The last thing that I'll talk about briefly is just the room for more funding. Room for more funding isn't a huge impact if it's filled by someone who's otherwise going to donate to a fantastic charity, but by creating a new charity, you can leave a lot of room for new donors to get involved, and donate to maybe something particular to their interest, while still making a really high impact.  So why now? There's a lot of reasons why founding a charity now in particular is maybe a lot better than historically. Hopefully, it will continue to be this good in the future. There's a lot of funder support and funder interest in this sort of thing. The GiveWell incubation program has been trying to fund programs that might eventually become GiveWell top charities. Animal Charity Evaluators has money for this, Open Philanthropy is very interested in new charities and of course, Charity Science, my organization, provides seed funding to new projects starting up. Just an unparalleled time where funding probably won't be the major bottleneck for a lot of charities being founded, if they are founded in an evidence-based way in an evidence-based cause. There's also mentorship support. You're not the first charity working on this anymore. So you are able to kind of connect with an alumni community. Charities that we've talked to have shared hiring pools and strategies for management and all sorts of different things. The EAcommunity really is starting to build up a network of people you could talk to about issues, whether it's communications or research, and really get an informed perspective of someone who's done something quite similar, quite recently. Finally, there's still gaps. That's why I talked about one specific case at the beginning. It's really, really easy to forget just how big the world is, and just how large-scale our problems are. There's a ton of malaria charities, and yet, there's still malaria, killing hundreds of thousands of people every year. There's still a lot of work to be done, and the EA movement can contribute a lot more to that. Specifically, there are even lists of ideas that people would like to see more of. GiveWell has a list of priority programs that has 25 ideas. ACE has a list of charities that it would like to see, with 17 ideas. Charity Science Entrepreneurship, we want to do a research program that recommends two to five ideas every single year, that'll be particularly promising to found, in the GiveWell priority program ballpark, or even more high impact, like something that could compete with AMF.  So I want to talk a little bit about who Charity Entrepreneurship is a good fit for. As I mentioned, it really is not a great fit for everybody, but people are often surprised at what they need going in, what would make them a good fit or would not. So I'll talk about personality, what it helps to have, what you don't really need or what people tend to overvalue, and how you might further test this (in case a 30-minute presentation can't convince you one way or the other to radically change your career).  Okay, so first up, personality. This is an example of a fantastic charity entrepreneur. I'm not talking about Prince William; I don't really have an opinion on whether he can make a good charity entrepreneur or not. I haven't spoken to him personally. But I have spoken to Rob Mather. He really embodies what a fantastic charity entrepreneur might look like. One of the things I want to highlight about him is his personality. Personality is so key, when it comes to charity entrepreneurship. It's one of the first things we look for in our vetting process, and one of the things that I think determines eventually whether your charity ends up being massively high impact or not. You need a lot of different things. You need to be resilient. There are going to be bad days, bad weeks, and potentially even bad months where you think your charity is low impact, that it wasn't worth founding, and that it's too hard to get yourself motivated. And as the founder, you have to motivate not only yourself, but also your co-founder and your employees. You have to be ready to take those shocks and keep moving on, keep moving through them even when it's tough. The next thing is being ambitiously altruistic. So a lot of entrepreneurs love ambition. It's a very common thing, but it's really easy to be ambitious about the wrong thing. If you're ambitious about how big your charity is, your charity might get really big, but it won't necessarily do any good. What you need to be ambitious about is how many lives you save, or whatever your end line metric is for doing good. That's the thing you have to be laser focused and truly ambitious about. The next thing is results oriented. Quantified measurement is one of the things that makes EAdifferent from many other movements. We really want to see concrete, specific results, and have data to back it up. Staying focused on this will stop your charity from diverging into 100 other projects that might not be as high impact, and it really can make a difference in the long term. The next thing is being open-minded. You won't have all the skills you need. Nobody does, when they first found a charity. You have to be able to update based on the world changing, based on testing out one thing and it not working, based on advice from people in the field, people who have worked in specific areas that you don't have knowledge in. You have to be ready to amalgamate all these different views, and come up with a coherent answer, and update as new data comes in. Similarly, it's important not to be afraid to make mistakes. You will make mistakes. Every charity entrepreneur does, and will. Being able to admit these mistakes transparently, learn from these mistakes, and update them can be the difference between your charity eventually succeeding, and you continuing to make the same mistakes again and again. Next, self-motivated. This might be the most important criterion. You really have no boss, no person whipping you at the end of the day to get the work done. You have to really care about your charity and be able to put in the hours, to be able to work yourself through the project. One of the easiest kind of litmus tests I have for charity entrepreneurship fit is, can you get yourself through a self-directed project? Can you complete an online course without anyone needing you to? Can you start something where only you're responsible if it succeeds or fails? That sort of thing is really challenging for a lot of people, and it's really, really challenging to do a charity like this. You will have your co-founder, you will have your mentors, you will even have funders you have to report to, but not at the same level of regularity that any other job will make you. You have to be self-motivated. Creativity also helps. There will be a blank slate. You won't necessarily know what the next steps are, and you have to come up with ideas. How to test one thing, how to test another thing. If you come up with five ideas, five ways to test a given concept, that's the limit of how good you can get: the best of five. If you come up with 30 ideas, you can test them all, you can evaluate them all, and come to the best of 30. That makes a huge difference for your charity's impact. Next, doing it for the right reasons. This is a bit different than being ambitiously altruistic. You really, really have to be focused on doing good for the world. If your goals are different, if your goals are divergent and you want to create a charity to look good, or to impress a partner, or something like that, your charity won't end up being high impact. You really have to be laser focused on that, doing it for the right reasons, with an altruistic mentality.  There are some other things it helps to have. It's nice to be highly competent, whatever that means. Kind of general ability, conscientiousness, IQ, that sort of thing. The EA community is a huge asset, a bunch of skillsets that you can tap to, a bunch of people who really want to help you start a charity. Social skills or research skills, it's really great to have one of those. Your co-founder can balance you out and have the other one. And experience working in a small organization charity can give you a sense of what it looks like from the inside. You tend to think that every organization is perfect, and when you get on the inside, you tend to see how held together with glue and tape it really is. What's less important than people generally think? Well, one is a degree. A lot of people think that if they want to start a global health charity that's fantastic, they need to get a global health PhD. Unfortunately, those programs end up being too unspecific a lot of the time. For my charity, SMS Vaccine Reminders, you might have only read a page or paragraph in a global health program about this sort of intervention. It's just very, very specific, not to mention the country context. What you need to be able to do is become an expert, it's not necessarily through a degree; it's through reading the studies, reading the research, getting very, very expertised in the very narrow domain that you want to start a charity in. You want to be able to talk to experts and engage with them at the highest possible level, but you won't get there from doing a PhD program. You'll have to do the independent learning on top of that, in either case. Also, targeted experience. At a health nonprofit, you might be able to pick up some good habits, but often your role will be very specific. If you're working for a large, even a well run health organization, often you'll be running one very small component of it, whether that's a comms job or a research role. That will give you some skills in that area, but as a charity entrepreneur, you really will need to learn a little bit of how to do everything. Some people might come into charity entrepreneurship with five out of 100 skills that they need, and other people might come in with nine out of 100 skills that they need. Either way, you still need to be able to develop 91 skills. A lot of it comes down to being able to learn things on the fly, try things out, pivot and update based off evidence, talk to mentors and utilize their skills. That sort of thing is going to be far more important than coming in with a few extra skills.  Next thing is, connections in the field. Connections in the field are super important, and you do need them to have a successful charity. But you'd be amazed how willing these people are to talk to you. If you come in informed and keen, and with some expertise or some funding, a lot of these organizations are extremely excited to talk to a young or experienced person who's getting involved. They want to see other charities. They care about this stuff a lot. And they're not getting a thousand emails a day, if they're running some small program out of India. In general, it's a very, very easy to build the network, and that is how you build the network, by working in the field. It's helpful to reach out these people and have a quick Skype with them, tell them what you're doing, tell them what you're considering, ask them for advice. Everyone's been very happy to help when we've done this on multiple different projects, across multiple different cause areas. The one exception to this is government connections. It's hard to build government connections; they're not willing to talk to you. If you're doing a job where you need government connections, hire someone who has the government connections. That's the advice there.  So, a little bit about further testing. The best way to test if you're a great fit for charity entrepreneurship in the way I'm talking about it, might be applying for our incubation program. I'll talk a little bit more about what that offers and why you might consider it, but we do have a process that we've used before, on entrepreneurs, that has been fairly successful at selecting the kind of people who might start a GiveWell incubated charity. We have a quiz on our website. It's a lot less intensive than doing the full incubation program process. It's pretty quick, about three minutes, and it will give you a sense from a personal perspective if you might be a decent fit or not for charity entrepreneurship. Finally, generally on our website we're trying to put out as much information as possible. So people can self-select, people can consider whether they're going to be a good fit for charity entrepreneurship or not. Our mail list, we send out of all of our relevant research as well as like, helpful things like Facebook group links, to ways that you can ask people questions, and all that sort of thing. So that also can help to give you a sense slowly of whether this might be a good fit as a career path or a bad fit. In general, though, don't be too discouraged. A lot of the strongest charity entrepreneurs I've talked to are scared, they're nervous, they're not the archetype of a gung ho, confident entrepreneur. Some of them are cautious. Some of them are detail-oriented, some of them are not gregarious. Don't let superficial entrepreneurship associated traits fool you. Instead, try to get as good as sense as you can from external people who have looked at it before, or by talking about it, or by reading the content from people who have started successful charities.  I want to talk a little bit about how Charity Entrepreneurship as an organization is aiming to help charity founders. The first thing is, coming up with a really fantastic idea to run a charity on is hard, especially if you're trying to become a top GiveWell charity or top Animal Charity Evaluators charity. That's not an easy bar to beat. Thankfully, we've been able to do a lot of research to narrow down the space a little bit into some ideas that are extremely promising. This is a spreadsheet we did on different global health ideas, narrowing down to what ideas might feasibly be competitive with the top GiveWell charities. They might be evidence based, and they might be cost effective enough to do a really good thing.  Here are a few of them in particular. Tobacco taxation looks fantastically cost effective if you can get the right country. Conditional cash transfers have a case for very strong impact, and are being done almost nowhere by NGOs. This year, we're going to be focusing on animal interventions, and researching that, and looking for the highest possible impact interventions that one could start in the field. We're doing research a bit different than say, GiveWell, or Animal Charity Evaluators. We're looking for gaps, areas that could be really promising, could be really effective, but don't have anyone working in them necessarily. Malaria is a fantastic place to work, but AMF is doing a really good job, I wouldn't want someone to start another bed net charity. But there are areas that are both fantastically high impact and neglected, as in no one's working in the kind of way that we as effective altruists, or we as people who want help the world, would like to see it done.  So the incubation program that we're running is taking place from June 15th to August 15th, and we'll be hoping to run it every year. We really want to make the process of founding a charity as easy as possible. So we're giving structured support that slowly withdraws, until people are fully independent and standing on their own two feet. The first month will be something akin to a university class. There'll be activities, there'll be pairing with different co-founders to test out your abilities in different ways, there'll be explicit teaching about cost effectiveness, or fundraising plans, all the hard skills that you might need to run a really good charity. The second month, you'll be paired with co-founders on an idea and start working on a project, but with a lot of support from teams of people who have already successfully founded charities. Finally, over the next six months, you'll be given a seed grant, to financially support yourself so that you can really become a true domain expert before seeking external funding. Seed grants are about $50,000, depending on how many charities apply. This structure allows someone who maybe doesn't have a ton of experience in working for NGOs, or nonprofits, but is able to build the experience as they go and get really competent and capable, to start a high impact charity. We really don't want it to just end after the seed grant ends, we want to continue to support charities as long as they need it. We're trying to build a community such that people can continue to stay connected, whether that's over Skype or Facebook, or a co-working office that we're going to have. We want to have joint office space so that people can feel like they're working with a team instead of working alone or with their co-founder. The seed grants I already mentioned. We'll also connect people with long-term funders. We don't want to see these charities just run for six months, and then flounder. Most of the connections will be people who are very keen on founding new charities, and ongoing mentorship. So I still continue to Skype with the projects that we've helped, and help them with the most difficult issues, so they can have an external set of eyes for as long as they need it.  This is a quote from Fortify Health, and I think it's a really important one, because it shows that not everyone knows that they're going to be a perfect fit for this. Some people think it might be too hard or impossible, but a lot of people can do it. You can rely on the process to figure out if you're a fantastic fit.  Just to reiterate on the goal, there are fantastic charities in the world, but there aren't not enough of them. We need more really, really good charities, more Humane Leagues, more Against Malaria Foundations. Charities that make a massive difference at cost effectiveness far greater than a standard charity. There's still gaps, and room to do it. The main thing missing is entrepreneurs, people who will be able to step forward and take on this risk, and potentially start incredibly successful charities. QuestionsQuestion: Earlier, one of our speakers, Dr. Glennerster, said that she really advises young people to make sure that they spend some time in an effective organization so they know what an effective organization looks like. What do you think about that?
Joey: Yeah, it helps a lot. When people ask me what they should do if they're still working on their degree or are looking for internships, I always say, prioritize how good the organization is. It doesn't have to necessarily be in a tightly related area, but if you work for a charity like AMF, or pick up some of their management practices, that's going to be one of the best things you can do to set yourself up to run a charity really well. Question: It seems like the charity space has a proliferation problem, where there are lots of small charities, often nipping at different corners of the same bigger problems. What's your take on that, and how do you think about people joining versus starting charities given that reality? Joey: So, we're pretty pro starting versus joining. Joining organizations, whether they're small or big, it's incredibly hard to change them in an effective direction. You can ask a lot of people who have worked with these organizations to get a sense of that. There are lots of charities, but most of them are incredibly small. You'll see a statistic like there's a million charities, but almost all of them have an operating budget of under $50,000 or something like that. So it's not like they're taking out huge chunks of global problems. What you really have to look at is the scale of the remaining problem, and whether you can start a charity that starts to cover some of that problem.  Our charity incubation program is designed to teach you all the basics for starting a highly effective charity. For those who decide to start one of our incubated charities, there are many optional benefits after the program finishes. They aim to ease the transition into becoming a fully independent charity entrepreneur. Here are some of the benefits of starting an incubated charity:  Every incubated charity will receive a roughly $50,000 seed fund grant. The size of the grant may be bigger, depending on how much your charity needs, how many charities are started that year, and so on. This is designed to give each charity 3 to 6 months time in which they do not need to worry about funding. This will give you time to establish yourself, flesh-out your future plans, and hopefully even have some proof of concept before approaching funders.  Finding the right people to help fund your charity is a crucial step. To help with this, your charity will be invited to take part in our Charity Entrepreneurship Conference. This will be an opportunity for you to meet potential funders and give them a first-hand explanation of why your charity matters. Each charity will have a stall for funders, hires and mentors to visit and hear more about your charity. There will also be a chance to give a presentation about your new charity at the conference. The Charity Entrepreneurship team may also put you in contact with specific important funders outside of the fundraising conference or other contacts, such as industry experts, who could help your project.  We will provide both formal and informal mentorship opportunities to all our incubated charities. All our charities will be invited to join in on 3 weekly one-on-ones (over skype calls if the charity is founded in a different location). One will be with a member of our CE team who has started a charity before; another will be with one of our alumni charities, who have started their charity in the previous few years; and the final one will be with other charities started in the same incubation round as you (your classmates from the program). These calls are designed to help you gain insight and advice for the next step of making your charity successful. There will also be a Slack channel for you to share thoughts with the community and get in contact with specific people.  Starting a fully registered charity takes time. Often, the process of actually becoming a registered charity takes 6 to 8 months. For most charities, this means having to operate without official registration for a large part of their first year. However, our incubated charities will be put under the legal housing of The Charity Science Foundation of Canada for this time period. This is an umbrella organisation which multiple charities (including Charity Entrepreneurship) function under. This will mean that your charity can get started straight away. Though this legal incubation is only for whilst you wait for your registration to come through, it will mean that your charity is not hindered as other new charities are, and allows you to spend time acclimating to running a charity before it becomes a legally independent entity.  You will also be joining a community of charity-builders from which you can learn and benefit from. There will be a communal Slack to keep the community in touch, as well as meet-ups and other social events. If you stay at London after the incubation program, you will be invited to join our co-working office for your first year free of charge. The Charity Entrepreneurship team as well as other charity entrepreneurs will also be based there, and so you will be free to arrange meetings or just chat to any of our or their teams. These are the benefits we expect to be able to provide, but they are not rights. You or your charity could be excluded from some or all of them based on its conduct. Did you know that CharityEntrepreneurship can help you start
an effective charity for animals? If you want to be the first to know when we will start accepting applications to our incubation program, subscribe to our mailing list.  This ask report considers switching people’s consumption of chicken to beef. Although there are many initiatives attempting to create dietary changes, encouraging specifically the change from chicken to beef is a highly neglected area. This is despite beef cows having much better lives than broiler chickens, and it taking many more chickens to create equivalent amounts of meat. This gives weight to the belief that encouraging the switching of consumption from chicken to beef could have impressive positive effects on the welfare points within farmed animal agriculture. Less intuitive, but just as important is this initiatives’ potential positive effects on wild animal suffering. Creating more cow pastures would decrease wild animal habitats, and thus reduce the amount of net-negative lives produced. However, there are reasons to believe that such an intervention wouldn’t be able to achieve this potential. There is little evidence that interventions aimed at mass dietary change are successful, and externalities such as higher carbon emissions from cattle farming puts even more strain on the intervention. This combines with the fact that most of the difference in welfare points stem from the wild animals affected, and the increase of their welfare is dependent on a long and sensitive causal chain (which we explain further in the report). It could be that this is overall positive, but we remain uncertain, thus adding more scepticism to the intervention’s potential for positive change. Our preliminary research would suggest that this is not a very promising intervention, having high levels of uncertainty. We expect this to fall into the bottom 5 of our ask reports. This report considers more deeply the positives and negatives of this intervention, as well as what effects it may have on wild animal suffering.  Ask reports Our priority ask reports are focused on what are the particular improvements or changes that can be “asked” for from corporations, governments, or individuals. Going cage free, making dietary changes, regulating slaughter practices, and many other asks all serve as examples here. They are compared based on the strength of the idea (including the evidence base and estimated cost-effectiveness), limiting factors, execution difficulty, and externalities. All of these factors together could begin to suggest which asks might be the most effective when combined with a priority animal, country, and approach. However, these ask reports are short summaries of longer unpublished reports and, therefore, even if an ask looks promising this does not necessarily suggest that it will end up being a promising charity once paired with other elements and cross-compared to the other strongest possible charities. It just suggests that it is worth further and deeper investigation from our team. You can see our full planned research process here. Did you know that CharityEntrepreneurship can help you start
an effective charity for animals? If you want to be the first to know when we will start accepting applications to our incubation program, subscribe to our mailing list.  This ask report considers preventing practices of mutilation on factory farms. There are many types of mutilating practices which are commonplace on factory farms. This report focuses on the consequences of the beak trimming of layer hens, turkeys and broilers; toe cutting amongst turkeys and broilers; and the desnooding of turkeys. Trying to reduce these practices can seem like an intuitive way to increase the welfare of these animals. This is backed up by evidence suggesting that some of these practices give chronic pain to the animals involved. For example, there is some research suggesting that debeaking may cause hens serious pain and discomfort for up to 35% of their time alive. However, there are also reasons to be sceptical of this intervention’s effectiveness. For example, in farms where the conditions are poor, some mutilations can have positive effects, such as toe cutting preventing aggressive scratching behaviour. This scepticism is strengthened by an uncertainty on how to read data such as decreased activity in de-beaked birds. Our preliminary research seems to suggest that this is not a very promising intervention, only giving between 2.5 and 5 welfare points to the animals involved. Overall, we expect preventing mutilations to be in the least promising third of asks. This report considers more deeply the positives of the intervention, and the reasons to be sceptical of its capacity for large welfare improvements.  Ask reports Our priority ask reports are focused on what are the particular improvements or changes that can be “asked” for from corporations, governments, or individuals. Going cage free, making dietary changes, regulating slaughter practices, and many other asks all serve as examples here. They are compared based on the strength of the idea (including the evidence base and estimated cost-effectiveness), limiting factors, execution difficulty, and externalities. All of these factors together could begin to suggest which asks might be the most effective when combined with a priority animal, country, and approach. However, these ask reports are short summaries of longer unpublished reports and, therefore, even if an ask looks promising this does not necessarily suggest that it will end up being a promising charity once paired with other elements and cross-compared to the other strongest possible charities. It just suggests that it is worth further and deeper investigation from our team. You can see our full planned research process here. Did you know that CharityEntrepreneurship can help you start
an effective charity for animals? If you want to be the first to know when we will start accepting applications to our incubation program, subscribe to our mailing list.  Old post on scale (that people generally did not understand/disliked it). Scale, or importance, is held as one of the 3 criteria to consider when evaluating an intervention for promisingness. With the idea being that large scale problems might suggest area area will be more effective to work, on assuming it also scores well on the other criteria. Some interventions are predicated on very strong scale arguments, such as far future or wild animal suffering. However, we have found that scale specifically is quite a poor indicator of the promisingness of an area. Organizations tend to be incentivised to scale both from an impact perspective and from a personal perspective. However, all organizations, eventually, hit a limiting factor that makes it hard to scale faster. For some organizations, it might be the total scale of the issue. For example, perhaps when working on a nearly eradicated disease, the limiting factor might just be how much more of the problem there is left to deal with. This would be a case when the traditional use of scale comes to almost the same result as the limiting factor model. Both models suggest this would not be a great area to work on due to the problem scale being quite small (currently). However, there are many times when it diverges. For example, certain issues might have a massive problem scale, but be quickly limited by some other factor. Givewell has talked about surgeries being limited by the supply of surgeons - this is not a scale of problem issue specifically, but it is a limiting factor. A scale model might suggest that if there is a ton of surgeries still to be done then this is a worthwhile issue to focus on. But a limiting factor model would suggest that it would be quickly capped by the number of surgeons. Below is a very simplified comparison. Scale model Limiting factor model As you can see, the results end up being quite different: surgeries are limited by the talent pool far earlier than vaccinations become limited by anything else. The magnitudes of the categories were set to be more cross-comparable (e.g. 1 million compares to 10 full-time staff). And both get limited several times before their problem size limit. In this case, it would not even matter if surgeries had 10 times the scale (say, 200 million people affected) if they will be stopped by talent, logistics, and funding before they can even help 20 million people. These numbers are estimates, but given our work and research in these areas we are confident both of these will hit a limiting factor far below their problem size (or what is often referred to as ‘Scale or importance’). A common response is that scale is only one of the factors considered when evaluating an intervention. However, things like ‘logistical limit’ fall under the radar of tractability/solvability, and there are two problems with this. First, tractability is not really currently used in this way. Right now, lots of claims are being made along the lines of “cause X should be focused on more due to it having a huge problem size” with no further reference to tractability. Secondly, tractability is often seen as the speed at which you will make progress as opposed to a specific factor that will stop growth from occurring. For example, an intervention could be very shovel ready, but only at a small scale before its limiting factor comes into play. If we go back the surgery charity example, it could be that 3 surgeons want to start a charity, and for them it is very tractable and shovel ready, since their marginal effort is great and, at a very limited scale, their solvability rate is very high. The endeavour will run into specific “scale” issues involving a limiting factor of ‘hiring other surgeons’, And this ends up feeling more like a scale issue rather than a tractability one. Another common concern might be funding limits, which on their own is are not hard limits like problem size. However, while something like a funding limit can be improved upon with more fundraising and field building, this is not an easy task. For the money ranking, I do not think you would just put down the amount you have fundraised for the area, but a reasonable bound for how much could be fundraised, while taking into account the current donor space and a reasonable amount of time (e.g. 2-5 years). This can change over time, but so can the size of the problem: factory farming is a growing problem and global poverty is a shrinking one, but that does not change the importance of having sense of their scale. A claim that I hear a lot in the animal space is that Wild animal suffering is such a huge scale problem that we should seriously consider working on it. Many people would suggest that Wild animal suffering is an issue with a much larger scale than something like vaccinations based on the pure number of beings affected. This claim is definitely true, since there are trillions of wild animals and only ~20 million people in need of any single vaccination. But if we look more closely at its limiting factors, I think this claim is pretty misleading.  The problem size limit is indeed huge. In fact, it has to be cropped, or otherwise it would go all the way to the top of this post and the other sections would become impossible to see. However, that is not really what matters. Even if wild animal suffering is a huge problem and even if there is only a very limited amount of funding and talent that wants to work in the area, you will bump into problems with scaling far before it starts to matter if there are a billion wild animals or a billion billion. In the practical cases, when comparing these interventions, if a charity were founded in both of these areas, the vaccination charity would be able to get to a much larger scale than the wild animal suffering-focused charity could. A claim that “we should work on intervention X due to its massive problem scale” seems quite inaccurate. These sorts of arguments are extremely common for wild animals specifically and more broadly in EA.
Researching to determine the causes’ limiting factors generally ends up with more time being spent on considering the funder and talent space compared to, for example, mapping out the specific number of animals affected by any given intervention. And it usually ends up with a set of fairly different interventions looking promising. Of course, the perspective changes depending on what you are looking to do in a given area. For example, when considering donating to a charity, the main thing examined by Givewell is room for funding. They are looking for an intervention for which its limiting factor to doing more good is funding. Some interventions might be very promising, but due to talent, logistical problems, or the size of the problem limitations, even if Givewell gave them more funding, they would not necessarily be able to create more impact. Organizations with room for more funding are generally stopped not by other factors but by ‘room for funding’ itself. Due to Givewell being a funder, it makes sense for them to take a careful look at room for funding as that is the limiting factor they can improve. As a charity entrepreneur, what the funding space looks like for a given organization should play a big role in what charity to found. As an employee at an NGO, you mostly have to consider how much of a limiting factor talent is for the organization. These models are really simplified on both the scale and the limiting factor side, and I think there are other possible ways to use scale differently (or use tractability in a different way to cover some of the same concerns). I do not think 100% of EAs use a simple scale-based way of looking at problems, but I do think a large % of EAs use a fairly simple “size of the problem” based way of considering scale without thought to the % of the problem they can solve, given the first limiting factor that will stop growth/progress.  Organizational self-confidence is seen as a very positive trait and is often embraced by new start-ups and nonprofits. The concept of self-skepticism is arguably as important but is often neglected. Self-skepticism cautions us to clearly measure our impact before declaring ourselves effective or expanding our organization. We believe that if a healthy dose of this was applied to the charity sector, it would make the world a much better place much faster. Below is an outline of our organizational self-skepticism checklist. It breaks down into two main categories: (1) do not assume a priori that the organization is better than the evidence suggests, and (2) constantly seek and use critical feedback. Organization does not assume that they are better than the evidence suggests
Organization seeks and uses critical feedback
We feel as though one of the largest realizations that has made us far more effective was when we started applying a much stronger self-skepticism to our own ideas. Often, we can be harsh and critical when it comes to others’ ideas, but have a much harder time seriously evaluating our own impact. First published at Charityscience.com in 2014 Did you know that Charity Entrepreneurship can help you start
an effective charity? If you want to be the first to know when we will start accepting applications to our incubation program, subscribe to our mailing list.  First published at Charityscience.com in 2014 Many charities claim to accept and even enjoy feedback (both positive and critical), but I find that charities have two kinds of set-ups for feedback:
There is a huge difference between these two, but people often think both of these make an organization open to feedback. Studies have shown that people are convenience maximizers and want to put in as little effort as possible. If something is a step harder there is generally a huge drop off rate. For example, if you ask someone to give feedback, but make it inconvenient or subtly discourage it, the amount of real feedback you will get will be a small fraction of what would have been given if it was made easy. If I wanted to make it seem like I was accepting feedback, but did not really want to receive or take into account large amounts of feedback (particularly negative feedback), I could do a number of things. I could discourage feedback by:
I could make it inconvenient to give feedback by:
I could make it unpleasant to give feedback by:
If I see an organization doing these things with regard to feedback, I get the sense that they do not really want to improve based on others' suggestions. Taking negative feedback in particular can be hard, but it’s an important skill to learn and it allows ideas to be improved much faster. We will never be able to solve the really important problems if we cannot admit that we are not doing everything perfectly Did you know that Charity Entrepreneurship can help you start
an effective charity? If you want to be the first to know when we will start accepting applications to our incubation program, subscribe to our mailing list.  First published at Charityscience.com in 2015 When a charity is created most people think about the altruistic intentions behind its creation. They think that the founder wanted to improve the world or wanted to further a specific cause. While I think that this is true in nearly every case, there are also other strong motivations and sometimes these can interfere with or even supersede the organisation’s stated mission. I recently became aware of an expensive student volunteer exchange program, giving the first world college students a chance to help people in the developing world. When I complained to a fellow effective altruist that I thought the program was ineffective compared to top GiveWell recommendations, he observed that the charity seemed fairly effective – only at a different goal. Once I’d considered that the charity might be aiming to provide an enjoyable experience for college students, things started to make sense. Their website shows how many students they have helped, and writes largely about the positive experiences these students had. Very little focus was placed on the outcome of the work in the developing world. We have written before about how many charities measure intermediate metrics and gave a few reasons why this happens. Yet another reason is that some charities do not have ‘improving the world’ as their primary focus. Some examples that come to mind of the other goals that charities may have:
Now, of course all charities have many goals aside from their primary mission, and often these other goals can improve a charity’s performance. For example, growing a charity that is doing great work can be a very positive thing, even if done partly due to raw ambition. But the goal of growth could also push an ineffective charity to expand, taking away donations from effective ones. These side-goals become very worrying when an organization starts prioritizing them over the “bottom line” of the amount of good being done. How to tell if an organization is over-prioritizing side-goals? One simple way is to look at where the organization puts its time, skills, and money. Does the charity seem to be strong in some areas but not those most connected to its impact? Does it seem that they are more focused on increasing donations than on evaluating their impact? These might be signs that other goals are being prioritized, possible unintentionally, over the goal that really matters. Did you know that Charity Entrepreneurship can help you start
an effective charity? If you want to be the first to know when we will start accepting applications to our incubation program, subscribe to our mailing list. Why top performers shouldn’t go to university. There are better ways to signal competence1/16/2019  In this post I am not going to argue that university is largely about signaling competence; Brian Caplan and many other writers have already provided a fairly in-depth look at that. What I am going to argue is that if your main reason for going to university is to signal competence, there are better ways to do it, particularly for EAs who have a lot of talent and dedication. These other ways to signal competence are less well known, but worth considering for EAs who are trying to build career capital or just their career in general (although I think this advice varies quite a bit based on what career paths you are considering). There are few routes to becoming, for example, a doctor without getting a lot of schooling, but if you are considering working in the nonprofit world, EA world, or a low-barrier-to-entry corporate job (including stuff like programming), a degree is far from the optimal move. People think of a degree as robust, but I think that is not as clear as it might first appear. Many of the EAs I have seen get a degree and later move into an area where the degree is much less useful, e.g. studying economics and getting into programing after a bootcamp, or studying poverty and then going into Animal Rights. I also think degrees give people some space to procrastinate and think about their ultimate career choice (something that is best to think about sooner rather than later). What do I mean by “better ways to signal competence”? Broadly, I mean “ways of signalling competence that are more effective at producing results to achieve your goals”, particularly EA type of goals. For example, if an action is about equally effective as a signal of competence, but also takes much less time or has more direct impact, I would consider that better. Generally, people will look at the most impressive couple of things you have done on your resume, and if these are good enough, your degree (or lack of one) won’t matter. For example, if you have written a very popular book, few people will look at what your degree is. If you apply for Charity Science and you have historically worked for Givewell, I barely notice the degree you have. Throughout this post I will cite the EA movement pretty heavily for examples, since it’s the area I know best and the area I think most people on this forum will care about. However, I have found the same trends to be true in (a lot of) other areas as well (e.g. I have worked in education NGOs and Animal Rights NGOs that used the same approach, and I know some folks who have used it in for-profits). The rest of this post will consist of examples of the kinds of things EAs could do to signal competence in lieu of a degree. Writing books and content in general  A lot of EAs have gotten their reputation from writing, whether on a personal blog or through contributing to something like the EA forum. Having high quality writing shows that you are competent and intelligent; it also gives me a sense of what kind of things you care about enough to write about. Putting written content together into something larger like a book can be/is a very effective demonstration of competence, though, of course, this takes a lot of time relative to random writing (but way less than the 4 years it takes to get a BA). And in addition to straight up signalling benefits, writing a useful book or useful blog posts contributes something to the world: for example, it can get new people to hear about an important cause or develop new frameworks for a movement. Another benefit of writing is that it can allow you to target the group you are interested in working for. For example, if you want to work in EA, writing a few good blog posts for the EA forum will help your applications a lot. The same goes for many other industries as well. Bootcamps and incubation programs  Attending something like a programing bootcamp or a incubation program can serve both to teach you many skills (in most cases more than a degree does per time invested), as well as be a great demonstration/signal of both intelligence and competence on a resume. Much like writing, it can also more easily be targeted towards industries you want to work in, although many programs (e.g. YC) will just be generally impressive across the board. Getting into these programs is hard, as is doing well in them, but they are almost always much quicker than getting a degree. Working or interning The first thing you should always be considering when thinking about a degree is: how does this compare to an equivalent amount of work experience? For example, a BA typically takes 4 years. That’s a lot of work experience. If you are comparing a degree to a basic service job, the degree looks pretty good, but if you’re comparing it to an entry level job in your industry of choice, it’s a lot less clear. 4 years of experience working and interning in the EA movement will go a lot further than a degree when trying to get a hard-to-get job in the movement. The same goes for direct work in poverty, AR, and, I would guess, x-risk. Many of Charity Science’s senior hires have been from our intern pool, when an intern was partially impressive. Some of them had degrees, others did not, but the demonstration of work ability on our direct project was much more predictive than their degree. On the flip side, I see a lot of EAs put in pretty much time and effort into a degree and then be disappointed by the relatively low status positions that are open to them in EA. You can, of course, combine these approaches (e.g. take an internship every summer), but generally, if you are strong enough to get into an Ivy League college, you can get an entry level job at an organization and prove your ability via working there. Often, your most recent and impressive work experience will overshadow your degree and be the main thing future employers look at. Founding organizations or projects Running a local chapter, founding a small project (even if unsuccessful), or starting a full-scale organization can make a huge difference on your resume. If you think of many folks running cool projects in the EA movement, you likely know them by their projects, not their degrees. Founding projects also demonstrates the ability to be self-motivated, a key element of many jobs that is much less tested by formal education. Many people think they need education to found these sorts of projects successfully, but it's much more about general ability and process than it is about a degree. And many in the EA movement are able to be helpful with advice, so it's not like you are on your own. Self-teaching via online courses  One of the things I love to see on applications, and which I know other EA organizations look for, is some evidence of self-teaching. Have you gone through a Coursera course on statistics? If so, that is a great sign for both competence and self-motivation. This is both quicker, cheaper, and more targeted than getting a full degree. Each of these methods will fit some people and not others, and I think a large percentage of people should still go to university. But I think not going, and doing other counterfactually prestigious and impactful things instead, should be seriously considered by very high ability EAs. Did you know that CharityEntrepreneurship can help you start
an effective charity? If you want to be the first to know when we will start accepting applications to our incubation program, subscribe to our mailing list.  He quit! It was a tricky decision that Bill had been considering for months. He was an impact-focused EA, and although he thought his job was fairly high-impact he was pretty sure he was very replaceable. In fact, he was unsure he was even needed at the organization, since many of his tasks could have been done by a less experienced employee. And he was one of the five members of the senior team! There was about 3.5 members worth of highly difficult work and Bill figured that if the work was re-shifted they would not even notice his absence. When Bill told his team about it they were heartbroken. He was a great employee and they thought his work was not as replaceable as he was thinking. But Bill had done the math and he was set on his decision. The EA organization did not collapse; in fact, for 3 months everything went totally smoothly. The organization continued its work at a bit slower rate and with the 4 remaining senior team members working a bit harder to pull the extra weight. Some tasks were given to more junior employees and were done well, others seemed like juniors’ tasks but required senior staff knowledge to do efficiently, and were thus done poorly or slowly. All being said, the organization seemed fine and Bill was having a strong impact in another organization that needed him so much that work slowed down to a crawl on his every day off. Bill felt confident he had made the right choice. Sadly, on the 4th month after Bill had left things changed. The organization which was able to work effectively with 4 senior members ran into a problem. One of their employees, Sandy, had to leave suddenly, since their husband had fallen extremely ill and needed almost full-time attention. The work, which has been shouldered by 4 people now fell onto the shoulders of three employees, meaning that their organization had no slack; it had already been stretched to its very limits. Sandy loved the organization, but had little time. The other employees worked incredible hours and rapidly tried to hire a replacement, but, of course, that was just extra work that they did not have the capacity to handle. The remaining team did what they could: one of them got sloppy, getting everything done but at crappy quality, another simply could not handle the task load and was always weeks behind on every task, missing important deadlines, including legally mandated ones. The third employee barely slept and worked 12 hours a day, everyday, but after a few weeks burned out dramatically, and was only able to perform at 25% of their normal work ability. The organization groaned and limped on for another 4 months before finally shutting down, 8 months after Bill had left. Even more tragically, 12 months later Bill’s organization also had to grind to a halt, as their overstretched team could not work without him, and Bill needed to take 2 weeks off to fight a strong cold. No one blamed Bill. If anything, it was just bad luck, they said - him leaving and Sandy’s husband getting sick. But really, when Bill left he took much of the organizational slack with him, making the organization fragile to shocks and changes. If it was not for Sandy's husband, crisis would have occurred 3 months later, when one of their largest donors retired and the organization needed to invest much more senior staff time into fundraising than expected. An organization that has been stretched to its limits cannot handle the expected, predictable, and inevitable shocks that happen. Many EAs make the same mistake as Bill. Being crucially important to an organization does not mean you are crucially important every day, and an organization that needs every staff member performing at their peak (or even median) to function efficiently will break over time and often. Sometimes, the effects will be soon after, whereas at other times it might take years for the impact to be felt. However, there will always be variance and times will get tougher than people initially expect. A more ideal model to have, when considering an organization, is that at any time any single employee could disappear and your organization should still remain productive and able to stick to its deadlines. Taking into account organizational robustness when hiring and when changing careers is an important factor that could lead to different choices on both the organization’s and the individual’s part.  Many EAs are constantly considering their personal impact in an organization. A factor that is often under emphasised is the benefit of organizational slack. For example, many organizations are set up in such a way that if one employee was unable to work, the entire organization would slow down to a crawl. This obviously makes the organization very sensitive to both large shocks (like an employee falling majorly ill, being injured, or quitting) and small changes (e.g. an employee getting sick for a week or taking some time off without warning due to a family emergency).
No person can be available for a 100% of the time and unpredictable unavailability happens to both SR and JR staff. If an organization does not have alternative means for getting the work done, it can really harm the organization. The lack of accounting for this happens most often at the higher levels of an organization. For example, many CEOs make the organization dependent on them to the point where if they left, the organization would collapse. This is a suboptimal structure, even if the CEO has no plans to leave: what if they get sick, or what if their family member falls ill? It only takes one of the hundreds of possible (and some fairly frequently occuring) events to put a single member out of commission. CEOs are not the only ones who do not take organizational slack and robustness into account. I have seen multiple senior staff members feel as though their impact is not important due to the organization having some robustness. If you are so integral to your organization that it would collapse when you leave then that is not good for the organization. A high-impact position could be one where you have three talented staff members and, in theory, the job could be handled by two. This allows you to jump onto new opportunities or have the necessary robustness in the face of hardship. But often, I have seen employees leave strong, robust teams under concern that “the organization would survive without them”. This ask report focuses on improving the environmental conditions of factory farmed animals. Specifically, it is focused on improving management of dissolved oxygen levels for fish. Environmental factors can influence disease and injury rates as well as stress and anxiety levels. There is a wide variation of improvements possible in the environmental conditions for farmed animals, and many well-established charities tackling these. Among others, we explored interventions like improving light management or decreasing stocking density at broiler chicken and turkey farms. A relatively neglected area, however, is managing dissolved oxygen (DO) levels for farmed fish. Dissolved oxygen is the most important indicator of water quality and is critical for fish welfare. Evan small variations in DO levels can be associated with increasing cortisol levels in the blood. Preliminary research suggests that proper DO management can make impressively cost-effective improvements to animal lives. We estimated that this intervention can gain fish 21.5 welfare points, which is considerably more than what could be achieved by a charity aimed at increasing the space given to broiler chickens. We expect this to be in our top 5 most promising ask reports we will create in this research. This report considers why this is, and what bottlenecks this initiative may face.  Ask reports Our priority ask reports are focused on what are the particular improvements or changes that can be “asked” for from corporations, governments, or individuals. Going cage free, making dietary changes, regulating slaughter practices, and many other asks all serve as examples here. They are compared based on the strength of the idea (including the evidence base and estimated cost-effectiveness), limiting factors, execution difficulty, and externalities. All of these factors together could begin to suggest which asks might be the most effective when combined with a priority animal, country, and approach. However, these ask reports are short summaries of longer unpublished reports and, therefore, even if an ask looks promising this does not necessarily suggest that it will end up being a promising charity once paired with other elements and cross-compared to the other strongest possible charities. It just suggests that it is worth further and deeper investigation from our team. You can see our full planned research process here. Did you know that CharityEntrepreneurship can help you start
an effective charity for animals? If you want to be the first to know when we will start accepting applications to our incubation program, subscribe to our mailing list.  There are billions of animals who live in extremely painful conditions, but there are also hundreds of ways to help them. From methods as direct as rescuing a single animal from a horrible life to means as wide-reaching as working with governments and corporations in order to set up long term policies for improving the lives of millions of animals. Given the ongoing suffering and all the possible ways to help, why would anyone concerned with animal issues choose to focus on something as abstract and long term as research? Hundreds of years ago, the state of medicine was very different. There were doctors, but their understanding of how the human body worked was rudimentary and their tools were limited. The health of the populations they worked with suffered as a result. Doctors would save hundreds, but hundreds would also die due to infection or complications that the medicine of the time could not handle. Thankfully, a few individuals, some of them doctors that could have been saving a life every day instead of taking a step back, considered the problem in the long term. What tools could help not just this patient, but patients everywhere? They asked themselves, what pieces of knowledge could change the field of medicine as we know it? These individuals did not save a life the day they asked that question, but they saved thousands and millions of lives over time via better methodologies and tools (e.g. germ theory). Hospital policy changed, doctors around the world utilized the new knowledge, and the world as a whole benefited, even if it meant that we lost those doctors’ contributions to more direct practice. In the long term, they made a bigger difference. Our current understanding of animal issues is, sadly, very similar to where medicine was hundreds of years ago. We can carry out some helpful interventions, but there are large gaps in our understanding and very few people working on research that is focused on improving animal activists’ techniques and abilities. A doctor from 500 years ago would not be allowed to practice medicine today, for so many patients would suffer under their care. On that note, medicine is not unique, and many fields, particularly young ones, can benefit from having a portion of the experts in their field working on research. As a movement, we owe it to animals to spend our money and time in the best way possible.  Consider the following. Maybe, as an activist, I learned about these issues from a documentary and feel most compelled to make a documentary myself in order to show the mistreatment of certain species, but who am I really trying to help here - myself, or the animals? Animals do not care if it is a documentary or a flyer or a government lobbyist group that eventually improves their lives. They only care that their lives actually improve. In addition, consider that maybe the animal that was focused on in the movie (e.g. cows) is not, in fact, the most important animal to help as an animal rights advocate. I, like you, am not alone in this endeavour of helping animals. There is a huge community spanning the globe with thousands of people who care just as much as you and I do. Therefore, I need to consider what the most important thing to do is, given that certain actions could have a far greater effect than just the ones I personally see as impactful. By doing research instead of aiming to help directly, animal activists can become far more effective. In case of animal issues, we currently have too few studies showing us what works and what does not, and it's hard to compare different interventions that an organization could undertake due to limited data. Of course, some research has been done. For example, in order to compare our charities’ interventions, we had to create a system to compare animal welfare. Also, Animal Charity Evaluators had to create an estimate for when clean meat might hit the market, and Open Philanthropy had to do research on animal consciousness to determine how to compare different animals. Still, much more is needed, and meta-research could and should be conducted in order to determine how animal advocates and organizations should be investing their time and money. This is not to say all research is equal, or that all research already done in the animal space is valuable; far from it. Our research needs to be as animal-focused and deliberate as our activism, if not more so. Doing good research and having animal activists update and upgrade their expectations and approaches could be the difference between a hundred or a thousand lives saved at the end of the day. Not everyone will be a perfect fit for research, but for those who are it is likely one of the most impactful things one could do to help animals in the long term. This reasoning is a big part of why CE is focusing on research, and why we might even recommend a separate research charity, solely focused on animal issues, in our 2019 recommendation round. Did you know that CharityEntrepreneurship can help you start
an effective charity for animals? If you want to be the first to know when we will start accepting applications to our incubation program, subscribe to our mailing list. This ask report focuses on providing free or discounted contraceptives. Contraceptives are a well-known global poverty intervention, but in so far as they affect human population they also have major effects on the environment and animals. This report primarily considers the effect that a contraceptive charity could have on animals, although more extensive reports would consider the full range of benefits, including its effects on humans. The intervention ended up looking surprisingly impactful for animals, particularly if conducted in countries with high need for contraceptives and high fish and poultry consumption.  Ask reports Our priority ask reports are focused on what are the particular improvements or changes that can be “asked” for from corporations, governments, or individuals. Going cage free, making dietary changes, regulating slaughter practices, and many other asks all serve as examples here. They are compared based on the strength of the idea (including the evidence base and estimated cost-effectiveness), limiting factors, execution difficulty, and externalities. All of these factors together could begin to suggest which asks might be the most effective when combined with a priority animal, country, and approach. However, these ask reports are short summaries of longer unpublished reports and, therefore, even if an ask looks promising this does not necessarily suggest that it will end up being a promising charity once paired with other elements and cross-compared to the other strongest possible charities. It just suggests that it is worth further and deeper investigation from our team. You can see our full planned research process here. If you want to receive information about our latest reports and be the first to know when we will start accepting applications to our incubation program, subscribe to our mailing list.
 Written by: Joey Savoie Time capping can be defined as fixing the number of hours for a certain task, research project or decision and keeping our research within those bounds. Most tasks can be completed at different levels of depth and research itself is never-ending - a single topic could often be researched in an hour or could equally have an entire PhD made out of it. The same can apply for website design, outreach, polishing or many other tasks that an organization engages in. Given tasks that are not time capped, people will generally spend more time on doing what they find fun or what they get absorbed in instead of what is best to put hours into in the long run. By setting a time cap on a task we are pre-determining how important that task is relative to other counterfactual tasks. This approach often results in more getting done at some cost of depth, as often 90% of the value of tasks is captured by the first 10% of the effort . There are a few specific kinds of tasks that benefit especially from time capping. Research and decision making are tasks that frequently result in endlessly flexible deadlines without a clear ‘good enough’ point. Research Research is one of the foremost areas that can benefit from time capping. At Charity Entrepreneurship we allocate a specific time frame for every research project. This has allowed our team to cover a lot of ground in a predictable way, and to cover the ground we need for making a specific decision within a clear time period (e.g. conducting research for a year and then recommending a list of top charities that could be started). Many research teams could think of situations where twice as much research, but with half the time put into each piece, would likely result in more good for the world. For a more concrete example: we had a very specific time budget for our animal reports. For each of the reports we could have gone much deeper (we ended up spending 1-5 hours per report and published a 1-page summary for 15 animals). But it would have been at the cost of breadth: for example, we could have spent 2-10 hours per report, but only covered 7 animals. Or, in theory, covered 30 animals at half the depth. The key questions to consider were what the purpose of these reports was and how big a role did they play in our endline goal (starting effective charities). What level of depth would give us enough information so that we could start to compare and consider which animals would be a priority? We decided that 1-5 hours would give us enough information for the soft prioritization of which animals to focus on. I think highly intellectual cultures (such as the EA movement) tend to undervalue this sort of time-capped research approach, and I often see comments on research, even very deep research, that more or less translate to “put more time into this research”. Of course, sometimes it is true that more time should be put into a specific branch of research, but I very rarely see it the other way around - comments that roughly translate to “you should have put less time into this research”. It's become a cliche in academic research to say “more research is needed,” but in some areas this is really not the case, and particularly so once counterfactuals are taken into account. Time capping, I think, is the one step that can be used to improve the situation. If someone wants to make the case that we should have covered 7 animals, but at double the depth, I am very interested to hear the considerations in favour of making this tradeoff, but if they say that more hours put into the research would make it better without a thought towards counterfactuals then it’s harder to engage with. Decision making Decisions are infinitely complex and, much like research, it would be easy for a person to spend anywhere between 1 minute and multiple years to consider complex decisions. Some decisions are sufficiently complex that the perfect answer can never be found; just better and worse guesses. Given the uncertainty and complexity of the world, but also the importance of making many decisions (often hundreds a day), time capping the more lengthy decisions seems like an optimal solution. This stops analysis paralysis and constant indecisiveness. It also gives important decisions a fixed deadline and timeline for when they need to be made. Using an example within CE: at the end of the year, we ultimately have to choose what are the best charities for us to recommend. This decision will almost by definition always be incomplete and subject to revision. But like with the research above, the important question is what are the counterfactuals? If CE, for example, did 5 years of research and decision making in the animal space, would it result in higher impact charities recommended at the end? Almost definitely. But we also have to consider the impact of a strong charity, or two, that could have been started 4 years earlier, as well as the cost of research. CE could cover and recommend charities of mental health, poverty, far future, and meta science. If 2 charities came from each of those areas during those 4 years that would be 8 charities not started for the end benefit of a better animal recommendation. Some decisions are so complex that it's easier to have impact in multiple fields (or double the impact in a single ‘best guess’ field). Our team ended up thinking that it would be quicker and higher impact to run a year of CE on both animals and poverty issues than it would be to research and decide which one is of higher impact. Using this system will not always result in the correct decision, but it saves in time what it loses in precision. Sometimes the best decision is the one that is good enough, given the limited time and knowledge. Time capping a decision puts into perspective how important this choice is in comparison to all the other choices, research, and tasks. It also allows you to look back on your decisions and feel as though you made the best choice you could in the time that you gave for the decision.  The first thing to consider is whether you need a job to prepare yourself for charity entrepreneurship (CE)? A number of people have been surprised at the impact they can have relatively early in their career. In fact, we generally think that having the right goals and personality are far more important for CE than specific background experience or degrees. Often, the number of diverse new skills you will have to learn will make any single background only minorly important relative to your speed of being able to learn new things and meta habits, such as task management. With individuals who apply to our incubation camp, we will try to inform those who could have been accepted if they had had more experience. And we aim to teach the individuals who get into our program the skills they would otherwise learn through many years of work experience. We will do it in a condensed and focused manner, so that more ground could be covered in a few months as opposed to many years of more passive learning on the job. Another option that we recommend getting a short term job or internship, should you want to gain skills during the year before applying for the CE incubation program. Taking on an internship between February and April can teach many skills and pass on many of the habits of an organization, yet still allow for a relatively quick founding of a charity at a minimal amount of time lost to skill-building.  For the people who are positive that CE is not a fit for them now, but think it might be in the future (e.g. in 2020 or later), the best kind of work experience we recommend is the following:
Small nonprofits will give you a better feel of working in CE directly (as your charity will start out very small), both work-wise and culturally. It will build a wide range of experiences as you will often be needed to wear a lot of different hats (a key skill for CE). Many small charities will end up giving you more responsibility within a shorter time frame. They also tend not to have the more established seniority-based systems that larger nonprofits often do, but which make it hard to grow. Culturally, they tend to be less rigid and have less established systems with the trade off of less professionality and with more job ambiguity. Overall, smaller nonprofits will stand much closer to simulating the first few years of founding a charity than the larger ones. Impact-focused charities will teach many of the skills that are hardest to learn through other work and volunteering experiences. Few charities are as single-mindedly focused on impact as the most cost effective ones. An organization’s focus will not only affect the skills you will learn (e.g. how to get website traffic vs measuring and evaluating your impact critically) but also the deeper attitudes you will end up building (e.g. it is easy to found a charity based around measuring the wrong metric). Well-run charities will teach you habits that will benefit your startup in the future, since even if you do not want to you will often end up replicating both the good and bad parts of the organizations you have worked for. This is part of the reason why work experience is less important than people think, since the habits you might pick up at a poorly run or non-impact focused can lead your charity down worse paths than coming in with a fresher slate for an incubation or founding setting. Well-run charities will allow you to pick up more cross-applicable meta habits, such as management, organizational structure, and task management.  Just like working for a small charity, getting a more diverse role will teach a wider range of skills than getting a very specialized role. Managing a diverse team can also create many of the same benefits. One exception to this is internships, even specific ones, that can teach a lot of specific skills in a short time span. Generally, we emphasise that size and focus are more important than the specific cause, but it is a bonus if the charity is also working within the broader cause area (e.g. animal issues, global health) that you would like to one day found a charity in. Some organizations that we think meet many of the above criteria include (those with active job or internship openings are linked below): Givewell-recommended or incubated charities
ACE-recommended charities Overall, we caution people against putting off their plans of founding a charity in order to build experience, but instead suggest they try to build experience in more rapid ways, such as through internships, incubation programs, and by talking to founders directly. That is, unless they have tried to found a charity and run into a block based specifically on needing more experience. Many other factors, such as value drift, changing life circumstances, and the possibility of reduced funding and mentorship support in the future make now a particularly good time to start a charity - even with imperfect experience. Ethical pest control This ask report is focused on considering more humane pest killing and controlling mechanisms. There are possibly billions of rats and pest birds, as well as many other species of mammals and insects which are counted as pests. These animals are often killed non-humanely, and yet the animal advocacy movement has been relatively inactive within this problem. Few organisations have attempted to reduce the suffering of pests, and those that have did not scale up. Overall, a charity built around ethical pesticides seems moderately promising. This report considers various possible interventions and the crucial considerations involved.  Ask reports Our priority ask reports are focused on what are the particular improvements or changes that can be “asked” for from corporations, governments, or individuals. Going cage free, making dietary changes, regulating slaughter practices, and many other asks all serve as examples here. They are compared based on the strength of the idea (including the evidence base and estimated cost-effectiveness), limiting factors, execution difficulty, and externalities. All of these factors together could begin to suggest which asks might be the most effective when combined with a priority animal, country, and approach. However, these ask reports are short summaries of longer unpublished reports and, therefore, even if an ask looks promising this does not necessarily suggest that it will end up being a promising charity once paired with other elements and cross-compared to the other strongest possible charities. It just suggests that it is worth further and deeper investigation from our team. You can see our full planned research process here. If you want to receive information about our latest reports and be the first to know when we will start accepting applications to our incubation program, subscribe to our newsletter.
Once a month we will send you a summary of our progress.  Authors of the research: Joey Savoie, Karolina Sarek, David Moss When recommending different charities to found in the field of animal advocacy, a unique question to consider is what animals should be prioritized. For some interventions, this question is not necessary. For example, when “stunning before slaughter laws” were passed in the EU it affected a great variety of animals. On the other hand, though, recent cage-free campaigns targeted battery cage chickens’ welfare concerns, instead of cows’, pigs’ or fish welfare. This leaves us with the question of which animals should be our top priority for new charities. A perfect general prioritization does not seem possible, as some interventions will work better for certain (for example, cute) animals than others. Broadly speaking, however, it does still seem like some animals will end up being a higher priority across many interventions. There are a few different factors we considered when prioritizing between animals, including:
 There are many other factors that could be considered but these factors end up covering a lot of ground. They can be combined to create a promisingness ranking for a given animal. This promisingness ranking could direct future resources and efforts (for example, the next target of a corporate campaign). Overall, when considering all of these factors, we end up thinking the above list roughly represents the order of priority within animals. Based off of this system, we think fish (both wild and factory farmed), turkeys, wild bugs, broiler chickens, and wild rats are the top priority animals for new charities to focus on. If you want to receive information about our latest reports and be the first to know when we will start accepting applications to our incubation program, subscribe to our newsletter.
Once a month we will send you a summary of our progress.  Authors of the research: Karolina Sarek, Joey Savoie, David Moss After spending considerable time on creating the best system we could for evaluating animal welfare, we applied this system to 15 different animals/breeds. This included 6 types of wild animal and 7 types of farm animal environments, as well as 2 human conditions for baseline comparisons. This was far from a complete list, but it gave us enough information to get a sense of the different conditions. Each report was limited to 2-5 hours with pre-set evaluation criteria (as seen in this post), a 1-page summary, and a section of rough notes (generally in the 5-10 page range). Each summary report was read by 8 raters (3 from the internal CE research team, 5 external to the CE team). The average weightings and ranges in the spreadsheet below are generated by averaging the assessments of these raters.  The goal of Charity Entrepreneurship is to compare the different charitable interventions and actions so that new strong charities can be founded. One of the necessary steps in such a process is having a way to compare different animals in different conditions. We have previously written both about our criteria for evaluating animals and about our process for coming to that criteria. This post explains our process and how the results for this system are being applied to different animal conditions. One of the goals of our system was to be applicable across different animals and different situations. We ended up comparing 9 animals (Humans, Hens, Turkeys, Fish, Cows, Chimpanzees, Birds, Rats, Bugs). These animals are not based on consistent biological taxonomy due to limited information being available on certain types (e.g. there was enough information on rats specifically to do a report on them, but for wild birds we had to look at a variety of birds to get sufficient data). We are not concerned about this limitation, as most of the interventions we are considering would hit a wide range of animals (e.g. a humane insecticide would most likely not be target-specific, so the most relevant data here is an index for bugs as a whole as opposed to an index on a specific species.) The reports are formatted so that it is easy to quickly grasp the main information connected with the specific rating. Each report is a summary page with the key information and a short description as to why the given rating, and thus, should be polished and readable to all. Each report was time capped at 1-5 hours, so they are limited in both scope and depth. We are keen to get more information on any of these areas (particularly information that is numerically quantified or related to wild animals, as this information was the hardest to find). Sample report:  After each of the reports were drawn up, each summary report was read and evaluated by 8 raters. We tried to get a diverse set of raters but all with a broadly utilitarian and EA framework. Three raters were from our internal CE research team (the staff who created or contributed to the reports) and five raters were external to the CE team, but involved in the animal rights’ research space (e.g. working or interning for EA animal organizations). The CE research team talked over ratings and disagreements openly, but the external raters did not see or disclose any CE ratings until after they had put in theirs. Ethically, people were best described as classical utilitarians, but with some slight variation (e.g. some more prioritarian, some negative leaning utilitarians). We liked the concept of multiple independent raters as there are many soft judgment calls and increasing the numbers of people doing ratings seems to mitigate specific biases and fallacies. This system has also been used before, and to good effect, by GiveWell. Ultimately, we ended up with a wide range of ratings going from 81 (strongly net positive) to -57 (strongly net negative). Some of the reports were pretty surprising and ended up changing our intuitions (for example, many wild animals were worse off than in our initial views). Others were not that surprising (for example, the rankings of factory farmed hens).  Our full spreadsheet, with all the ratings as well as links to the 1-page reports, gives specific descriptions as to why certain animals and situations received certain ratings. We feel as though there is lots of room to improve these numbers, particularly with deeper investigation into the lives of wild animal. But we limited our time on these reports due to finding that, historically, within our cost-effectiveness analysis, factors like these did not end up carrying the most weight or being the source of highest variability. For example, the cost of an intervention can vary by several orders of magnitude, and more logistical factors were more often the deciding factor when deciding between the most promising looking interventions. If you want to receive information about our latest reports, subscribe to our newsletter. Once a month we will send you a summary of our progress.
High welfare meat This ask report is focused on meat certified in programs that can make meaningful differences in animals’ lives. Having meat consumption switch to higher welfare meat could be more tractable than having people switch directly to veganism and, depending on your ethics, more important. This intervention can make animals go from net negative lives to lives worth living but it also brings a large number of crucial ethical and logistical considerations. We cover some of them in this summary report.  Ask reports Our priority ask reports are focused on what are the particular improvements or changes that can be “asked” for from corporations, governments, or individuals. Going cage free, making dietary changes, regulating slaughter practices, and many other asks all serve as examples here. They are compared based on the strength of the idea (including the evidence base and estimated cost-effectiveness), limiting factors, execution difficulty, and externalities. All of these factors together could begin to suggest which asks might be the most effective when combined with a priority animal, country, and approach. However, these ask reports are short summaries of longer unpublished reports and, therefore, even if an ask looks promising this does not necessarily suggest that it will end up being a promising charity once paired with other elements and cross-compared to the other strongest possible charities. It just suggests that it is worth further and deeper investigation from our team. You can see our full planned research process here. If you want to receive information about our latest reports, subscribe to our newsletter. Once a month we will send you a summary of our progress.
Food fortification This ask report is focused on the food fortification of factory farmed animals’ feed. Micronutrient fortification is one of the most well established and cost effective interventions in global health, and all beings, including both humans and factory farmed animals, can benefit greatly from the right levels of micronutrients. Food fortification is an unusually direct and cost-effective way of addressing major sources of suffering (e.g. bone breaks in egg laying hens) and, overall, looks moderately promising. This report considers multiple micronutrients and supplements that could be added to an animal’s feed to increase its welfare.  Ask reports Our priority ask reports are focused on what are the particular improvements or changes that can be “asked” for from corporations, governments, or individuals. Going cage free, making dietary changes, regulating slaughter practices, and many other asks all serve as examples here. They are compared based on the strength of the idea (including the evidence base and estimated cost-effectiveness), limiting factors, execution difficulty, and externalities. All of these factors together could begin to suggest which asks might be the most effective when combined with a priority animal, country, and approach. However, these ask reports are short summaries of longer unpublished reports and, therefore, even if an ask looks promising this does not necessarily suggest that it will end up being a promising charity once paired with other elements and cross-compared to the other strongest possible charities. It just suggests that it is worth further and deeper investigation from our team. You can see our full planned research process here. If you want to receive information about our latest reports, subscribe to our newsletter. Once a month we will send you a summary of our progress.
 Animal advocacy is a huge area and there are thousands of possible ideas to investigate, which could all be the basis for forming charities. Our research process goes through multiple steps to compare and consider areas and ideas to help found the most effective charities. The research process involves multiple steps of differing breadth and depth. It would be impossible to go in depth with thousands of ideas; and while it would be possible to cover a huge number of ideas very shallowly, this would most likely not provide enough detailed information on whether a new charity in the area would be effective. Many research processes, including ours, thus involve varying levels of depth.  Broad Understanding Our first stage is what we call “broad understanding”. We have written a full post on it here. This is comprised of broad, often cross-cutting, reading, research, and projects that will help with gaining an understanding of the area and inform later decision-making. A few of the many things we did in our broad understanding stage were conducting interviews with 30 experts in AR, take an online course on animal husbandry, and read a variety of books by many different sources. This research was aimed at both inspiring new ideas outside of our more standard animal activism, and to get as wide an understanding of the issues as possible. After this, we felt pretty confident with listing a very wide range of possible charity ideas and being relatively sure we didn't omit opportunities simply because they fell outside the established AR perspectives. Priority Reports The second stage of our research is prioritization within domain. In an ideal world, we would have time to look at each possible idea in some depth, but as a result of the broad research stage, we have a list of several hundred possible ideas. In practice, it would not be possible to evaluate each of these ideas to a high level of scrutiny, given the time we have. However, subcomponents of an idea can be more easily cross-compared (such as which animal is most important). These subcomponents could then be combined in a short list of fully developed, specific charity ideas (e.g. Government lobbying for water quality aeration improvements for catfish in Thailand.). We broke up a charity idea into four subcomponents, each of which will have an individual priority report, a comparison spreadsheet, and a list of priorities within that component. The four subcomponents are animals, countries, asks, and approaches. The animal priority research would include both factory farmed animals (cows, pigs, fish, birds, etc) as well as wild animals (bugs, rodents, larger mammals, etc). Animals would be prioritized based on the number of animals, the amount of suffering per animal, the number of causes of the suffering within the animal, neglectedness, and the animals’ probability of sentience. These factors will suggest which animals are promising to work on and will eventually be combined with other elements into a strong charity idea. Countries would include locations across all 5 continents, with 5 factors being considered. The number of animals produced within the country, the number of priority animals produced, neglectedness as measured by the ratio of funding to animals produced (funding/number of animals), tractability, and if it has any limiting factors that would affect scale. We expect these factors to lead us to countries that might be currently overlooked by the animal movement or which are disproportionately important due to the size of the animal population that can be addressed by a charity. Asks tell us what the particular improvement that an activity would be aimed at would be like. This could be cage free, dietary changes, slaughter practices, or any other ask that could be made to a corporation, government, or individual. They would be compared on the strength of the idea (including the evidence base and estimated cost-effectiveness), limiting factors, execution difficulty, and externalities. These factors could begin to suggest which asks might be most effective when combined with a priority animal, country, and approach. Approaches encompass the different ways in which you aim to get an ask applied. They would include government lobbying, corporate campaigns, and individual outreach. The same ask could, in theory, go through any or multiple of these channels, but, overall, it seems that some channels have been historically more successful than others. We have not yet determined the main factors we will consider when comparing these approaches. Charity Idea Creation The third stage of our research will involve combining the top priorities researched above into coherent possible charities. Not all combinations of a top animal, ask, approach, and country will be applicable or coherent. For example, even if China is a top country and government lobbying is a top approach, they might not be a good combination. After we have combined the ideas that seem internally valid to our organization, we will then speak to experts in the animal community, government officials, non-farming corporations (such as retailers), and the broader farming world as a whole to get a sense of the ideas’ viability and to vet them externally. Finally, the specific ideas that continue to look promising after the external vetting will be put into a spreadsheet for the final phase of research. Priority Charity Reports The final and most important set of reports will be our priority charity reports. This will involve diving deeply into a small number (~20) of the most promising specific charity ideas. The criteria will be similar to our ask report criteria but in much further depth. For these charity reports we plan on looking at four broad areas with 16 sub-areas. Ordered below, in rough order of importance, these are:
Each targeted report will follow a system and set of questions very similar to our broad intervention research, aiming at systematic, deliberate research for each area. Unlike our other reports where we plan on publishing short summaries, the most promising of these reports will be between 10-50 pages and we intend to publish the full reports (as well as a 1 page executive summary) so that people looking to found these charities can learn as much about them as possible. They will lay out all the pros and cons of a specific charity idea alongside a cofounder profile for showing who might be a good fit to run them. They will also include implementation details, such as first year plans and theoretical budgets. The goal is to be specific enough so that a founder could pick up the idea and found an effective charity with minimal further research. Other Research We expect some cross-cutting research to come up throughout the process, and thus expect to publish a post covering our methodology or research findings about once a week throughout the year (for example, our animal reports), although we expect the bulk of our research hours to go into the process outlined in the previous section. If we end up hiring more research staff, it is possible we will be able to cover more ground or go into more depth in certain promising areas. Considerable hours are also spent on non-research activities, such as outreach, logistics, and the CE incubation training camp. In Summary We expect to go through 4 phases of research that will progressively narrow down a very large option space in order to arrive at 2-5 recommended charities to found in the animal advocacy movement. Timeline updated and example links added January 2019.
Estimated hours: ~2000 focused hours or about 54 FT staff weeks. |
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