​Not yet another article about remote work…! At Charity Entrepreneurship, many team members are eager to go back to our London office when the current situation allows. We miss the funny conversations between tasks, the shared lunches, and the common game nights. At the same time, we have found that remote work is feasible and a necessity for many charity entrepreneurs.

New Incentives, for example, has operated as a remote organization for years, both internationally with founders spread out over different countries, and in Nigeria with no offices. While not all organizations might go as far, several 2019 incubatees have also moved to remote operations to some degree, for instance, Fish Welfare Initiative and Suvita. ​

​At the start of our 2020 Incubation Program, Charity Entrepreneurship released the handbook, How to Start a High-Impact Nonprofit. Now we’re sharing it with the broader community.

​From the broad principles of decision-making down to the nitty-gritty of cost-effectiveness analysis, the handbook covers all the tools a charity entrepreneur needs to found and scale an effective nonprofit. It draws on our team’s extensive firsthand experience both as founders and as mentors to other charities. Additional contributors include charity entrepreneurs Peter Brietbart (Mind Ease), Aaron Hamlin (The Center for Election Science), and Varsha Venugopal (Suvita) – our thanks to them and to everyone who supported this vast project. 
With over four hundred pages of content, the handbook offers an encyclopedic guide for charity entrepreneurs from seed to scale-up. Going beyond information, our handbook provides the building blocks. Templates and exercises help you create your own content, inspired by what worked for charities like Fortify Health, Animal Advocacy Careers, and Fish Welfare Initiative. 

 
​“100% of participants in CE’s incubation program are excellent managers.” That’s the impression one could get reviewing surveys on participants’ preferences for the two-month program. Usually, nobody thinks that we should put an emphasis on management in our courses. To be fair, there are many good resources on managing people out there. Moreover, many participants have managed staff before. 

Not too far off the famous experiment from the 1980s according to which 8 out of 10 drivers consider themselves above average. I definitely don’t fall under the illusion that I am a better driver than average (one friend avoids getting into a car with me after a road trip in Ireland… in my defense, they drive in the left lane). But, heck, I have definitely also overestimated my management skills in the past and still learn on a daily basis.

Here are some of the lessons on management we’ve learned at Charity Entrepreneurship – at times naturally, occasionally the hard way.

​Charity Entrepreneurship co-founded Charity Science Health in 2016, and helped launch Suvita through our 2019 Incubation Program. Today we’re proud to announce that the two organizations are joining forces to form a COVID-19 response team, in collaboration with Dr. Sebastian Bauhoff of Harvard and his research team. ​

The art of task management can seem elusive, with monk-like adherents following complex sets of belief systems to arrive at the holy grail of maximum productivity. While advanced users of task management and productivity techniques might indeed beat the average entrepreneur by far, the Pareto principle applies here as well: 20% of effort may give you 80% of the benefits. Pareto Productivity presents simple task management guidelines that go a long way. So feel free to cancel your 21-day productivity retreat and return the fancy sleep tracking ring. This will get you covered in much less than one Pomodoro slot.

1. Focus on high-impact tasks only
2. Check whether someone else can do it and don’t reinvent the wheel
3. Use a task management tool
4. Box your time
5. Review your progress
6. Work in deep mode
7. Reduce or structure meetings
8. Don’t forget the other (more) important stuff

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Charity Entrepreneurship is part of the Effective Altruism movement. If you’re going through our incubation program, it’s likely that your potential donors, employees, partner organizations, and other stakeholders come from the effective altruism community.

While the basic premise of effective altruism seems simple, the set of ideas considered “common knowledge” among people heavily involved in effective altruism can be quite complicated. In some ways, we might conceptualize effective altruism as a field of study - it has a few frequently cited influential thinkers, a set of widely read canonical works, an internal jargon, and several diverging schools of thought. If you’re new to effective altruism, becoming well-versed in this contextual knowledge will help you communicate with other people in the movement more easily.

​From a starting point of 188 ideas, we selected the top 24 for further research through an idea sort. This Idea Prioritization Report is the second stage of our research process, and ranks the 24 ideas from most to least promising. Now the top 7 ideas will move to the next stage: 80-hour reports, which we will release in the coming weeks.

Have you ever imagined not being able to control your own fertility? According to the United Nations Population Division, in 2019, 190 million women worldwide reported that although they did not want to become pregnant, they are not using any method of contraception. This gap represents ten percent of all women of reproductive age worldwide, and is referred to as the unmet need for family planning. With an increasing number of women of reproductive age each year, the gap has remained the same as twenty years ago. The number of women with unmet needs has gone up by 34 million since 2000 [1]. ​

From a starting point of 256 ideas, we selected the top 31 for further research through an idea sort. This Idea Prioritization Report is the second stage of our research process, and ranks the 31 ideas from most to least promising. Now the top 7 ideas will move to the next stage: 80-hour reports, which we will release in the coming weeks.

From a starting point of 299 ideas, we selected the top 33 for further research through an idea sort. This Idea Prioritization Report is the second stage of our research process, and ranks the 33 ideas from most to least promising. Now, the top 7 ideas will move to the next stage: 80-hour reports, which will be released in the coming weeks.

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​From a starting point of 395 ideas, we selected the top 22 for further research through an idea sort. This Idea Prioritization Report is the second stage of our research process, and ranks the 22 ideas from most to least promising. Now the top 9 ideas will move to the next stage: 80-hour reports, which we will release in the coming weeks.