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FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
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The next rounds of the program will run February-March and August -September.
Our Incubation Program is run online with two weeks in person in London to connect face to face with your instructors and fellow participants. Transportation costs will be covered.
People from most countries should be able to come to London for a short trip on a holiday visa. We’ll help successful candidates in thinking through their visa options.
The program is entirely free. All necessary materials are provided. We cover your transport and accommodation costs for in-person components. Meanwhile, we cover your living expenses with stipends so you can focus fully on the program. Most candidates take $2000-5000/month, based on their individual needs and cost of living. If your financial needs are higher, for example because you have dependents or live in an expensive city, we encourage you to request more, and we're committed to accommodating reasonable requests: money shouldn’t be the reason great talent doesn't found a charity. If the concern that you might not be able to cover your costs during the program is stopping you from applying, get in touch with Emma (emma@charityentrepreneurship.com). We feel strongly that finances shouldn’t stop top founders from starting a charity.It’s equally important to us that we use funding responsibly to help beneficiaries as much as possible. To this end, we encourage those with lower financial needs (e.g. no dependents, low cost-of-living location) to request lower stipends so that the leftover money can go towards helping beneficiaries.Note that this is separate from your salary once you found: you set that yourself, paid from your organization's budget. And if you don't end up starting a charity, we provide a further three months of stipend plus career support as a safety net.
WHEN AND WHERE DOES THE PROGRAM RUN?
You will receive a message from CE staff within 3 weeks of the application deadline to let you know if you are moving on to the next application round. If we have not contacted you within 3 weeks of the application deadline, feel free to reach out to candidates@charityentrepreneurship.com
Yes. A number of founders were only accepted on their 2nd or 3rd attempt. We ask you to wait a full year (skipping one round) and use the time to improve your fit: taking on leadership, building skills through impact-driven work, gaining relevant professional experience, or further education.
APPLICATIONS
Anyone from any country can apply. The program is mostly run online, so there are no barriers to participation. All costs of travel and accommodation for in-person weeks are covered.
Yes. A number of founders were only accepted on their 2nd or 3rd attempt. We recommend waiting a full year (skipping one round) and using the time to improve your fit: taking on leadership, building skills through impact-driven work, gaining relevant professional experience, or further education.
We are significantly more likely to accept people who, if they decide to start a charity, anticipate doing so soon after the program. With this in mind, we recommend you apply in the year you would like to found an organization. In the meantime, sign up for our newsletter to get notified when applications open each year.
CAN I ATTEND THE PROGRAM?
The best way to know for sure if you would be a good fit is to apply. We generally search out people who are open-minded, excited to learn, driven, and passionate. If this sounds like you, check out our article on traits that make a great nonprofit entrepreneur and take our quiz:
If founding a charity feels like an exciting opportunity to you, we encourage you to apply! Even if you aren’t a perfect fit for our program, you’ll be one step closer to finding your true career path.
Credentials are less important in entrepreneurship than in other fields. When selecting candidates, we're far more interested in what skills and knowledge you can demonstrate than in your academic history. For example, completing a self-directed project is an excellent indicator that you are a good fit for charity entrepreneurship, as the ability to take initiative and work independently is absolutely necessary for the career.
Generally, some useful skills and educational background knowledge include management (particularly nonprofit management), statistics, study design, monitoring and evaluation, ethics, accounting, writing for public audiences, and marketing.
Most importantly, you don’t need to have prior experience in starting a charity. That’s what the program is for.
Of course, project and professional experience is helpful, but it’s not necessary. Many of the leading charities in the Effective Altruism movement were started by people with little or no prior experience in the field (e.g., GiveWell, the Centre for Effective Altruism, the Against Malaria Foundation, etc.).
Entrepreneurial and organizational experience can be useful. Experience in managing individual or team projects (including discussion groups, conferences, papers, and fundraisers) will serve you well as well.
WHAT BACKGROUND DO I NEED?
CHARITY IDEAS
THE PROGRAM
No, we encourage you to start one of the new charity ideas that we recommend from our research. Our team has conducted hundreds of hours of research to identify the most promising interventions and cause areas. We believe that the skills required to start and operate an effective charity are very different from the skills required to do excellent research. If you are open to multiple ideas, you will have an even better chance of being accepted into the program.
No. Applicants often have an initial preference. However, during the program, you will learn a lot more about the options and where you might be best suited given your background and predispositions. Usually, applicants choose the intervention they think would have the highest impact and where they would have a comparative advantage. Finding a suitable co-founder during the program might also influence your final decision on the idea you pursue. It’s great to have a sense of what you’re interested in, but an open mind never hurts.
Yes, though it's rare. We assess your idea on the strength of its reasoning and evidence, the same bar our own recommendations have to clear. If it doesn't meet that bar, we may still offer you a place working on one of our recommended ideas. Whatever happens, disclose your idea up front: hiding that you intend to found your own idea will count against you.
It's unlikely: around 95% of the proposals we recommend for submission to our seed network get funded. If yours isn't among them, you can seek funding from donors outside the network. And if you decide not to pursue the charity, we provide a three-month transitional stipend and career guidance while you find your next role. Our alumni are in high demand (after all, they’re selected for being very talented and have been given world-class training) and so many go on to senior roles in our ecosystem of charities or at AIM itself. We have a near-100% track record of connecting participants with impactful opportunities.
For the two months of the program, it needs your full attention: five days a week, eight hours a day. We pay a stipend that covers your living costs so this is financially possible. A small number of participants have combined the program with ongoing work commitments. If that's your situation, tell us up front and we'll try to find a solution that works. Similarly, you should expect that leading a charity startup is a full time job.
Many research organisations like GiveWell, calculate the cost-effectiveness of global health and poverty programs by comparing their outcomes to the impact of direct cash transfers, which serve as a benchmark. A direct cash transfer is an unconditional payment of money to individuals or households to improve their economic and social well-being. Cash transfers, such as those provided by GiveDirectly, are well-studied and offer clear, measurable benefits, like increased household consumption and improved well-being. This makes cash transfers a reliable baseline for assessing whether other interventions achieve more value per dollar.
To calculate cost-effectiveness, we can:
quantify the benefits of a program in terms of health improvements (e.g. DALYs or QALYs), income gains, or spillover effects (such as community-wide health benefits)
monetise these benefits by assigning dollar values to life-years saved, health improvements, or long-term income increases.
Divide the total program cost by the monetised benefits to calculate cost-effectiveness, which is then compared directly to the impact per dollar of cash transfers.
Make adjustments for uncertainty, operational risks, and variations in effectiveness across different populations.
If a program delivers substantially more health or economic benefits per dollar than cash transfers, it is considered to be very cost-effective and likely worth funding.
Cost-effectiveness is a much less developed tool within the animal welfare space than it is in global health and development. The animal movement does not have widely used metrics for cost-effectiveness like cash benchmarking or $/DALY. Therefore, external evaluations use many different metrics, though the most common are animals helped per $ and animal years affected per $. The problem with these metrics is that they do not consider how much these animals are suffering, which makes it hard to really evaluate how promising different interventions are.
Because of this, AIM has created a metric called Suffering-Adjusted Days (SADs) which is a measure of days in pain for each animal with various adjustments for: the intensity of pain (building off Welfare Footprint Project’s work), sentience, and welfare range. This is the metric that we use when evaluating the cost-effectiveness of our recommended interventions and we have a cost-effectiveness bar of 30 SADs/$. This metric is also started to be used by other organizations in the animal movement, most importantly by Animal Charity Evaluators which is the main evaluation organization in the movement.
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