Personally during the recent donation discussions, I experienced it as a notable surge in the Forum feeling like a warm, nice place to be. Like a temporary surge in the Forum strongly reflecting the extent to which EA is a community full of caring, dedicated people; and letting you see them as people or something. I think it'd be nice if some of that energy continued somehow. 

Throwaway idea: a monthly question-post/prompt from the Forum team, pinned for a while, that people can answer in the comments, or if they feel like it use as a prompt for writing full posts. And the questions are not so much aimed at like "answers will be novel intellectual contributions", but more like that the answers will make it visible how individual people are thinking about common questions, putting ideas into practice in their life/career/donations etc? 

(Am not attempting to address tradeoffs etc.)

I'm happy to confirm that we can now accept Gift Aid (tax-deductible) donations from the UK, via this page on Giving What We Can's donation platform.

EDIT 1st Dec 2025: I'm happy to confirm that we can now accept Gift Aid (tax-deductible) donations from the UK, via this page on Giving What We Can's donation platform.

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Great nudge, thanks Neel! I've updated the post and webpages to make this clearer now.

Extra notes:

• It's likely that we'll have an online platform for allowing UK donors to fund us tax-deductibly / with Gift Aid later this year or in early 2026. If anyone would like to be notified if/when this becomes the case, please fill in this form [link removed].
• If anyone would like to make a substantial UK donation, say above £25,000, please do get in touch! Even if we're not able to set up an ongoing route via a public platform, we'll do what we can to facilitate it.

For background: yep, Aleks is correct. We're a not-for-profit company in the UK, but not a UK charity, and as such can't claim Gift Aid on direct UK donations. We do have 501c3-equivalent status allowing US grantors to fund us easily, including Every.org, which collects tax-deductible donations from US individuals, and grants them on to us. And yes, this was a decision made in part because of administrative costs, though we're open to the possibility of becoming a UK charity later if it seems worthwhile.

Hi! We're keeping an eye on how big a portion of our funding comes from AGI company employees, but yes, we're very happy to receive such donations at the current margin, thanks.

(Responding in my capacity as Director of Ops at Forethought.)

Hi Rockwell! 

Yes, in most relevant senses that's correct. We're a new team, we think of ourselves as a new project, and Forethought Foundation's past activities (e.g. its Fellowship programs) and public presence have been wound down. We do have continuity with Forethought Foundation in some ways, mainly legal/administrative.

For another perspective: personally I feel like the most important aspect of “good ops writing” is something like “making it really easy for the other person to do exactly the thing they need to do and get the info they need, even if they're just quickly skimming^[1]”. I'm thinking of things like:

• Good use of formatting, e.g. bold, bullet points, etc; so that someone who's skimming it at a glance will easily identify the parts relevant to them or where they need to engage further.
  • The opposite of this: important facts being hidden in the middle of long plain blocks of text, meaning people will only notice them if they're reading carefully
• General clarity, e.g. wording and sentence structure not being confusing
• For messages: clearly identifying what actions are required vs. optional; or if the message is just an FYI with no action needed
• Having anticipated questions the reader will have and provided what they'd want. But also balancing this with not making the action-relevant parts too long.

1. ^{^}

   I don't think this is only important because of readers who are busy / not very engaged. I think even for a really engaged reader, it's useful to be able to identify the most relevant parts at a glance before going deep.

Thanks, Eli! This seems great to me and I'm glad to have things like this out there.

I wanted to provide another perspective on a couple of points. 

(For context, I've recruited for a junior ops role once, and for a senior ops role once. Unsure how much the below applies to other hiring managers.) 

On writing skills and quality of work tests: 

• I agree that people probably underrate how important writing skills are for success in an ops role.  However, that said, when recruiting I only pay attention to writing quality in some contexts, mainly because there are times when I’m more interested in candidates being able to spend their time/effort on other parts of the application, or on minimising time. 
• In application form answers, I usually don’t pay attention to the writing quality ~at all, since I expect candidates will vary a lot in how much time they had available to do the form, and at the first stage I much prefer a sketchy application to no application at all. (I’ll usually include a note in the form to say that.) 
• In work tests, I’ve usually tried to indicate cases where writing or polished-ness is something I’m looking at or not. 
  • E.g. in a recent senior ops hiring test, I had a strategy task which was to sketch out a plan for a major organisational decision. I was most interested in testing good judgement – like seeing how candidates generate and prioritise relevant considerations for a complex decision like this – and didn’t want them to spend time making the writing pretty rather than producing more/better content. So I said something about how I’m interested in the content and clarity-to-me over style and polish.
  • Whereas for test components that, e.g. to write an email, message or policy; then I definitely will be looking at the writing quality and polishedness.
  • (That said, I do agree that spending 10-20% of time checking seems widely good.)

On quality of application materials, I agree that a CV/LinkedIn etc. that clearly aims at the role requirements is likely to be strongest; however I'd also add that a non-personalised CV is a lot better than no application at all! At stage 1 ensuring that as many good people apply as possible is one of my top goals.

On unclearly relevant experience, one tangential point. Here is an extract from the generalised feedback I sent to applicants rejected at stage 1 of my junior ops hiring round in 2022.^[1] 

Among very early-career candidates, e.g. those just out of university, the strongest candidates were those who could show some signal of their operations ability. For example, organisational work for student projects/societies or local charities, or personal-life things like setting up a task management system, organising a group trip or helping a friend with a visa application.

Relatedly, among people with work experience that is not closely related to this role, at times I felt it would be beneficial for them to put less emphasis on their most impressive but less related experience, and more emphasis on their most relevant experience, even if it seems less impressive. There was a group of candidates with substantial experience in roles such as communications, consulting or people management, whose application concentrated on how that experience transfers to this role.^[2] If these candidates had more directly relevant, but less impressive experience, such as those I mentioned for recent graduates in the previous point, I think they would have benefited from mentioning it, even if it was a long time ago.

(This role was more about fairly “nitty gritty” logistics, finance, HR, things like that; rather than e.g. a lot of project management or comms where I’d probably weight broader kinds of experience higher.)

1. ^{^}

   I.e. a document outlining the most common reasons I did/didn't advance people to the second stage; I didn't give personalised feedback at this stage. (I planned to give personalised feedback for later stages, but unfortunately didn't get around to it. If you're one of the applicants from this 2022 hiring round who asked for feedback but I didn't get back to, my apologies for that.)

2. ^{^}

   To be clear I do think broader experience adds something! But it only speaks to certain parts of what I'm looking for. 

Agreed; but I'd also add that I think in any role, the default assumption is that if you're selected for the job, you're likely to be at least somewhat better than the next best candidate. Applying for the job is a great way to find this out, and if you're uncertain about the counterfactual, you can also be open with the team about this and ask them how much they prefer you to the next best candidate – I've done this before and got replies that I think are honest and open. (Though some care is needed with this reasoning: if everyone did this, they'd just end up down at the best candidate who doesn't think to ask this.)

But yeah agree that the gap between you and the next best candidate is likely to be bigger for a less conventionally-appealing project.

(Additional musing this made me think of: there's also the consideration that the next-best candidate also has a counterfactual, and if they're aligned will probably themselves end up doing something else impactful if they don't take this job. A bit of a rabbit hole, but I think can still be useful: e.g. you could consider whether you seem more or less dedicated to a high-impact career than the typical applicant for the job. Or could ask the hiring manager whether they had promising community-external candidates, and whether they think you being aligned adds a lot to how well you'll do in the role.)

Fully agree. And a flip side of this: reading this list also seems very valuable for people looking to recruit for early-stage projects. Putting yourself on the more reassuring side of as many of these points as is achievable is likely to aid recruitment, and reduce risks around staff retention, satisfaction and public image. 

Some of the points won't be possible in every situation (e.g. things that cost a lot when you're tight on funding); but others are likely achievable for everyone, e.g. clarifying expectations around the items on this list, having a written agreement (even if informal) detailing what each side is committing to.

Just wanted to echo this point about reducing work hours! In cases where this option is available + financially viable, I think it can be very worth considering. I did this a few years ago when I was in a non-impact-driven job, reducing my work schedule permanently from full-time to 4.5 days per week then later 3.5. I used the other time for small volunteering and consulting opportunities in EA (though finding them involved some luck), which I think really helped me towards eventually moving into a permanent direct work role later.