Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program - What To Expect

​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:
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• Giving and receiving feedback
• Spreadsheets and quantitative decision making
• Task planning and organization
• Introduction to advanced Effective Altruism concepts  
• Early stage management, hiring, and firing
• Charity Entrepreneurship in comparison to other career paths
• Communication skills focused on analytical audiences
• Wellbeing, mental health, and sustainable work output
• Job advertisements, attracting, and retaining talent
• Fundraising, networking, and grant writing
• Independent learning, self motivation, and problem solving
• Research interpretation, synthesis, and acquisition.
• Operational logistics and charity registration
• Budgeting and organizational financial planning
• Testing and determining optimal co-founder fit
• Short- and long-term organizational strategic planning
• Measurement and evaluation and applications in difficult contexts
• Basic statistics and applied informal bayesianism
• Organizational power structures and board management
• Creating cost-effective analyses, interpretation, and program improvement
• Project partners and governmental relations
• Deep comparison of recommend charity ideas.
• When to shut down or scale down your project and when to pivot/Shutting down, scaling down, and pivoting
  
  

In this first month, you will also be given tasks to complete with your classmates. These will be practical tasks, such as setting a budget for a hypothetical start-up. These will allow you to work with all the other people on the course within the first month. This is designed to give a sense of what working with each person is like, helping you to identify potential good fits for a charity co-founder.

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 2

The 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.

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