​A focus on co-founder pairing and usable outputs for your charity (e.g. a fundraising plan)—these are the two tenets Charity Entrepreneurship’s (CE) 2020 incubation program for high-impact NGOs is built on. This allows participants to hit the ground running with their charity startup after only two months. ​

Unlike in previous years, we are considering multiple different cause areas this year, which leaves more room for cause comparison. We think that generally, both entrepreneurs and donors have specific cause areas in mind when they attend or support our program. However, some have asked us for a sense of how the different cause areas, and more importantly, charities within them, compare. We think each area has its strengths and weaknesses and at this level, it's hard to reliably compare because many assumptions (both ethical and epistemic) need to be made.
​
We are considering the following four areas:

• Mental health
• Family planning
• Animals
• Health policy​

​“Why take this risk?” Mentioning at a family gathering that you would like to become a charity entrepreneur might trigger looks of concern and opposition. What about the high failure rate of startups, the low entry salaries, and the need to work around the clock? There are potential personal challenges related to charity entrepreneurship. Neglecting them would be dishonest. Yet often these challenges are either exaggerated or can be dealt with successfully. 

Let’s go through them one by one:

1. Uncertainty and a high risk of failure
2. Financial limitations
3. Separation from friends and family
4. Work-life balance
5. Unglamorous work

​Your charity startup just hit the ground running. You are passionate about your cause, you just gave a big talk at a conference, and you've set up a shiny website. All is looking great. Yet your organization might still fail: it might collapse or not have any impact. Here are six ways a charity startup might fail -- and how to prevent this scenario.

1. You picked an ineffective intervention.
2. You chose the wrong co-founder or partners.
3. You don’t understand your beneficiaries.
4. You prioritize research instead of focused implementation.
5. Your fundraising is not working.
6. You transition leadership too quickly.

Government outreach is one possible approach for helping animals. It has advantages over other approaches because enshrining welfare into law eliminates most of the concern about recidivism that occurs with other methods, such as corporate campaigns. However, like other approaches, government outreach also has its flaws, which, due to differences in each country’s legislative system, will vary in severity from place to place. Its effectiveness depends on some key questions. Is there popular support for legislative change in the country? What is the likelihood of success for creating legislative change? And if they succeed, will animal welfare laws be enforced?
​
To answer some of these questions, this approach report examines governmental outreach for dissolved oxygen for fish in Taiwan and feed fortification for egg-laying hens in India. Using a cluster approach, we examine many sources of evidence that could support or disprove their expected impact. We also present the remaining crucial considerations surrounding these approaches. Our tentative conclusion is that lobbying for dissolved oxygen in Taiwan is likely moderately cost-effective, and feed fortification in India is one of the less cost-effective interventions we have considered.​

​We often get asked for advice about a charity idea somebody has had. Every charity and entrepreneur will need different advice, but in this post we will cover the most cross-applicable advice that virtually everybody could benefit from:

• Generate and compare at least ten different options
• Really research your ideas -- and try to destroy them.

It’s a decade since the launch of philosopher Peter Singer’s seminal The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty. The book, which argues for our obligations toward those living in poverty and outlines paths for action, led to the founding of an organisation of the same name and gave momentum to the then-emerging effective altruism movement.

Now, the updated tenth-anniversary edition of The Life You Can Save is available for free as an ebook and audiobook. This is exciting news for those of us here at Charity Entrepreneurship. By drawing attention to the huge potential of effective charitable interventions, The Life You Can Save has been a major inspiration to CE’s founders, as well as many alumni and staff.

​​In my work as a research analyst for Charity Entrepreneurship, I have been assessing possible animal welfare campaigns. The first thing I found is that finding the correct welfare asks for corporate or government campaigns is really hard. The scarcity of information in animal advocacy relative to other cause areas means that accurate decisions are harder to make. Establishing reliable metrics to assess ideas is essential to avoid wasting time. One way of doing this is to think about how to approximate the endline metric we are trying to maximise: counterfactual impact. 

We at Charity Entrepreneurship recently ran our first formal two-month charity incubation program in London, which resulted in the foundation of around five counterfactual new charities.
​ 
This post provides a brief overview of the application process that we used to select our 13 program participants and its outcomes. The main goal of the application process was to identify the candidates most likely to successfully found and execute one of our recommended charity ideas. We hope that this post will be useful for future applicants and other organizations in the effective altruism (EA) community.