John Salter
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Participation1
Founder of Overcome, an EA-aligned mental health charity
Posts 14
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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.
Hey Gerry! It sounds like your organisation is working on a really important demographic in potentially a very cost-effective way! I think your application would be more compelling to potential funders if it included answers to the following:
What other funding is being used for this project? Presumably you also have staff to pay etc
This would help donors understand the full cost of supporting a widow right now. If this isn't apparent, most donors will think it's much much higher because if something is missing they tend to assume the worst.
What are your ambitions for the future?
Most of the impact of a grant like this is often in supporting an organisation that will grow into something more impactful over time. EA donors especially care about this, and want to know your longer term plans if possible.
How would your outputs differ without an office?
It's not clear what the $5k itself would buy in terms of additional widows being supported. This, "the counterfactual difference in utility" is the primary thing EA donors think about when deciding to donate.
If you take away one thing let it be this: anything left unclear or unspecified will be interpreted more negatively than if it had been clearly stated. For this reason, you might also want to include an organisational budget and more details on exactly what you're teaching / how you're supporting people with their mental health.
That being said, there are some great things about this application:
- The length is right for the size of the grant
- its written in plain English, which is much more persuasive than any alternative.
- It's great that it's being led by the demographic it intends to serve!
- It does seem like the costs are low and the potential impact is high, which is exactly what EA funders are looking for.
I'd be happy to spend 30 mins helping you work on your application if you'd like (for free). I've been successful in raising money for mental health work in LMICs over the past few years. If that'd be helpful, drop me a message or just leave a comment and I'll reach out by email :)
Strongly upvoted. Catherine is likely constrained in what she can say due to her role, in part, as a mediator between EAs.
Here's a few blunter points I'd add / make explicit:
- EAs / EA orgs that do shockingly poor work sometimes wind up with informal, sometimes unspoken, mutual non-dispargement agreements with their victims. It's rarely ever worth the effort of giving someone a terrible reference because they might retaliate. You need to drag it out of them and listen hard for hints. Promise confidentiality. Don't settle for a short written reference from some HR person. Try get on a call with someone who worked closely with them.
- Do not assume that because a mental health professional advertising EA-alignment means that they'll be making scientifically sound suggestions. Seek independent reviews. Look at the scientific literature for their approach (if there isn't much, that's a bad sign).
- The amount of negative information that reaches you about an organisation / person is not just about their competence / character. It's equally as determined by the cause area and the culture there...
- Different cause areas attract different personality profiles. This leads to very different dynamics in reputation and social information flow. Animal advocacy disproportionately attracts people the empathetic, brave, justice-seeking. The adversial nature of it selectively repels people who're conflict averse. They're thus much more likely to call people out and go to war with each other. Mental health attracts warmer more understanding people whose prime motivation is making people happy. So, you might be more likely to hear negative things about animal advocacy orgs than mental health ones, but you shouldn't assume that we're better to work with necessarily. It could equally be that our peers are less keen to call us out on our bullshit.
- Influential people are much less likely to be called out because they're perceived to be in a better position to retaliate. People who do more stuff are more likely to be called out because they're involved with more people and will fail more often.
I've got a ton of deadlines coming up, so sadly can't reply to comments
If you use LLMs for coding, you should probably at least try the free trial for cursor - it lives inside your IDE and can thus read and write directly to yours files. It's a also an agent, meaning you can tell it to iterate a prompt over a list of files and it can do that for 10 minutes. It also lets you revert your code back to how it was at a different point in your chat history (although, you should still use git as the system isn't perfect and if you aren't careful it can simultaneously break and obsfuscate your code)
It will feel like magic, and it's astonishingly good at getting something working, however it will make horrible long-term decisions. You thus have to make the architectural decisions yourself, but most of the code-gen can be done by the AI.
It's helpful if you're not really sure what you want yet, and want to speedily design on the fly while instantly seeing how changes made affect the result (acknowledging that you'll have to start again, or refactor heavilly, if you want to use it longer term or at scale)
Updating your website feels extremely low urgency as a charity founder. Often you're facing existential threats, deadlines for funding applications, operational issues that can literally be the difference between life and death, and a million other pressing issues you know you'll never get round to because of the aforementioned.
I'm firmly on the side of sharing a draft.
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.