John Salter
Bio
Participation1
Founder of Overcome, an EA-aligned mental health charity
Posts 10
Comments161
1. Get a pilot up and running NOW, even if it's extremely small.
You will cringe at this suggestion, and think that it's impossible to test your vision without a budget. Everyone does this at first, before realizing that it's extremely difficult to stand out from the crowd without one. For you, maybe this is a single class delivered in a communal area. 30 students attending regularly, demonstrating a good rate of progress, is a really compelling piece of evidence that you can run a school.
- Do you have the resilience and organisation skills it takes to independently run a project?
- Will people actually use it?
- Can you keep your staff?
- Can you cost-effectively produce results?
It can compelling prove the above, whilst having a ton of other benefits.
2. YOU need to be talking to funders NOW
Don't fall into the trap of trying to read their minds. Get conversations with them. Get their take on your idea. Ask what their biggest concerns would be. Go address them. Repeat. Build relationships with them and get feedback on your grant proposals before submitting them.
As the founder, its YOUR job to raise money. Don't delegate it. It'll take forever to get them to understand your organisation well enough, they won't be as sufficiently motivated to perform, and you won't learn. This is going to be a long-term battle that you face every year. You need to build the network, skills & knowledge to do it well.
3. Be lean AF
The best way to have money is not to spend it. Both you and your charity may go without funding for months or years. Spend what little money you have, as a person and as a charity, very slowly. The longer you've been actively serving users, the easier fundraising gets. It's about surviving until that point.
4. Funders will stalk your website, LinkedIn, and social media if they can
As much as possible, make sure that they all tell the same story as your grant application - especially the facts and figures.
5. When writing your proposals, focus on clarity and concreteness above all else
Bear the curse-of-knowledge in mind when writing. Never submit anything without first verifying other people can understand it clearly. Write as though you're trying to inform, not persuade.
- Avoid abstractions
- State exact values ("few" -> "four", "lots" -> "nine", "soon" -> "by the 15th March 2024")
- Avoid adjectives and qualifiers. Nobody cares about your opinions.
- Use language that paints a clear, unambiguous image to the readers mind
OLD: mean student satisfaction ratings have increased greatly increased since programs began and we believe it's quite reasonable to extrapolate due to our other student-engagement enhancements underway and thus forecast an even greater increase by the end of the year"
NEW: When students were asked to rate their lessons out of 10, the average response was 5. Now, just three months later, the average is 7/10. Our goal is to hit 9/10 by 2025 by [X,Y,Z].
Good luck!
I think schlep blindness is everywhere in EA. I think the work activities of the average EA suspiciously align with activities nerds enjoy and very few roles strike me as antithetical. This makes me suspicious that a lot of EA activity is justified by motivated reasoning, as EAs are massive nerds.
It'd be very kind of an otherwise callous universe to make the most impactful activities things that we'd naturally enjoy to do.
Time is precious, so I'm just going to commit to ending my involvement after this comment.
BLUF: I'm not trying to convey "AIM good, WAI bad". Just that "WAI does not appear to be unbeatable and therefore other charities in this space might be better uses of funding" AIM was just an example of a charity which would be very hard.
This critique just seems weirdly anti-science and presumably an issue for all AIM charities / animal welfare charities. you're worried about the replication crisis... then presumably every AIM-intervention based on scientific research should be viewed with a ton of skepticism too?
I didn't claim there was anything wrong with the scientific method. I claimed there was something wrong with academia. Apologies if I am misinterpreting you, but you seem to imply that other charities are around equally as dependent on academia. I think that's clearly false.
Quotes from the post
- "Our primary goal is to support the growth of a self-sustaining interdisciplinary research community focused on reducing wild animal suffering."
- "Here are some highlights of our progress to date... Establishing that wild animal welfare science is a serious academic endeavor, including by... helping to get the NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program established."
If that doesn't make it sufficiently clear, view their grants page; Almost all of their grants went to academics.
Regarding other charities based on scientific research, you can largely tell that they're working within a year or two of them launching. The evaluation doesn't require academics. It doesn't depend on anyone taking published research seriously; the interventions help regardless of whether or not anyone takes the evaluation seriously.
The rest of your writing here seems to assume that I accept that wild animal welfare considerations dominate all others. I don't come close to believing that.
I don't think this is accurate. I think it is true that AIM founded charities pay much less, and so do many startups. But WAI has been around several more years than the oldest AIM animal charities and is significantly more established. I think I'd expect most AIM charities that survive to having 20+ staff, etc to raise their salaries significantly, with AIM itself being an exception to this due to a particular ideological commitment.
I don't think that every AIM charity is field-leading. I'm trying to communicate that for Jason's case to hold true, crudely paraphrased, that when fields funding is scarce we should rally around its incumbents), the incumbent charities need to be hard to beat. AIM is one example of a charity I think is field leading in it's area. I'm trying to show that WAI is not nearly as hard to beat because the TOC seems a lot weaker and the cost is a lot higher.
This seems like it intentionally left off WAI's main program and activity / the source of the vast majority of their impact? A little confused about why you didn't include it and it makes me unclear how much to update on this comment or to take your critique overall
Based on the post, I haven't read much further into their work, it seems that most their value cashes out in published research papers, either of them or their grantees. I included both in the statistics cited above, even preprints. AIM could equally complain that I've left off their research, for-profit incubation program, and researcher incubation program.
Thanks for correcting the numbers and sorry for my sloppiness with them. I think 2 -> 2.5x would be a more sensible multiplier based on what you wrote. I think the conclusion still holds.
Regarding paragraph 2, a charity must hit an exceptionally high standard for me to deem it unworthy of competition, even in a downturn. I accept it's not realistic for the median charity to do that well.
I think there's a ton of obvious things that people neglect because they're not glamorous enough:
1. Unofficially beta-test new EA stuff e.g. if someone announces something new, use it and give helpful feedback regularly
2. Volunteer to do boring stuff for impactful organisations e.g. admin
3. Deeply fact-check popular EA forum posts
4. Be a good friend to people doing things you think are awesome
5. Investigate EA aligned charities on the ground, check that they are being honest in their reporting
6. Openly criticise grifters who people fear to speak out against for fear of reprisal
7. Stay up-to-date on the needs of different people and orgs, and connect people who need connecting
In generally, looking for the most anxiety provoking, boring, and lowest social status work is a good way of finding impactful opportunities.