Job description
IMPORTANT
This is our second attempt at recruiting for this role, as the first attempt did not yield a candidate that we considered sufficiently met our selection criteria. This time around, we’re trying a few new strategies to widen the net and improve the quality of applications.
Importantly, if you are excited about working with Charity Entrepreneurship but are uncertain whether you are qualified enough for this role, please do apply nonetheless. We care deeply about mindset and value alignment with our approach and are skilled at finding people with high potential whose growth we are happy to facilitate.
Don’t hesitate to make the content of your CV a little unconventional (e.g. mention personal projects, courses, and experiences that are not strictly professional) if that better demonstrates that you can do what we need and are aligned with our values and approach.
Please also see the position description as published on our website.
ABOUT THE ROLE
Charity Entrepreneurship (CE) is a growing research and training program that launches multiple high-impact charities annually in several cause areas. To find the next charity entrepreneurs for our Charity Incubation Program (and candidates for our new programs), we seek a Director of Outreach to manage and run a team that creates and maintains talent pipelines online and in person.
As we scale up, one of our biggest bottlenecks is finding highly talented, value-aligned people to apply to our program, receive training, and then launch the top charity ideas our research team has found.
Right now, most of our qualified and impactful candidates come from the Effective Altruism (EA) community – therefore, this will be one key focus area for the Director of Outreach (e.g. talks at different EA conferences around the world, connecting with EA university groups, and helping audiences determine whether nonprofit entrepreneurship is a good fit for them). In saying this, the Director of Outreach will also be responsible for developing a plan for diversifying our sources of program participants to ensure a more robust and sustainable talent pipeline.
We have also found that domain expert communities and cause area communities often yield great candidates. For example, a professional working on alcohol regulation might be able to found an evidence-based alcohol policy organisation lobbying for alcohol taxation, or an animal rights activist might be able to found a great charity working on chicken feed fortification to reduce suffering in factory farms on a grand scale (these are true stories from our 2021 Incubation Program).
London-based (preferred) but open to remote candidates, (employed locally via Employer of Record).
How this role is causing impact
In the past three years of running our Charity Incubation Program, we have found that the best predictor of which incubated charities will end up causing the highest impact is the quality of the co-founding team. We estimate the impact of the average Incubation Program alumnus to be equivalent to donating $300,000 USD per year to effective charities, so finding these gems is difficult but extremely high-impact.
Key responsibilities:
- Most importantly: creating, executing, and evaluating an outreach and recruitment strategy. You will have a high degree of agency to determine how CE should engage in outreach activities to create a sustainable and diverse talent pipeline for CE’s programs.
- Setting up fast feedback loops and adjusting activities on the go
- Managing an ambitious and highly dedicated team. The team currently comprises the Director plus two Outreach Managers: one focused on digital media including social media, graphics and general outreach and another chiefly responsible for our event attendance and relationships with EA Group organisers.
- Liaising with other departments in CE to enable inter-departmental cooperation and feedback loops
- Researching cause area and domain expert communities to create talent pipelines for professionals from our cause areas
- Representing CE to EA and non-EA audiences at events such as EAGs, EAGxs, and cause-specific conferences around the world, both as a speaker and an attendee
- Giving talks and workshops for EA or student groups and coordinating other potential events, e.g. book clubs
- Participating in local EA events and helping organise events focused on recruitment
- Accurately communicating both the benefits and drawbacks of the charity entrepreneurship career path to diverse audiences
- Speaking and writing with people from different backgrounds and communities who might be interested in the CE Incubation Program and help them determine whether they might be a good fit
- Searching, identifying, and reaching out cold to potential candidates and following up when necessary
- Maintaining organised databases and pipelines with potential candidates’ data
- Forming connections with EA and domain expert communities and cause area-specific organisations to establish mutual relationships in sharing potential candidates
- Assisting our incubated charities with outreach advice and strategy
ABOUT YOU
We expect excellent candidates will meet many (but not all) of the criteria below. We encourage you to apply even if you do not meet all of the listed characteristics. In the past, we have offered positions to applicants who had strong overall potential and trained them up in the needed skills. We seek high general ability and a value/methods-aligned mindset more than prior work experience or specific backgrounds.
What we need
We’re looking for a talented communicator who is:
- Able to work both autonomously and in a small team
- Highly impact-driven and results-oriented
- Comfortable in a fast-paced and rapidly changing startup-like environment
- A sociable and extroverted person that thrives on meeting and engaging with new people
- Previous experience in communications, marketing or similar
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
- Adaptable to both formal and informal communication contexts, and comfortable adopting different communication styles and terminologies depending on target audiences and their backgrounds
- Comfortable with prioritisation, quantitative reasoning and analysis and using spreadsheets for decision-making, or excited to learn these
- Existing knowledge or excited to learn about CE’s approach, our key cause areas and their respective communities (especially animal advocacy, global health and development, effective altruism, mental health, policy, global poverty, and family planning) to later confidently represent CE to these audiences
WHAT WE OFFER
- Most of all: A job that has a huge, tangible impact on the world – the candidates you find might become high-impact charity founders within months
- High levels of intellectual challenges and learning on the job in a widely useful set of skills
- True start-up culture, including flat hierarchies and low bureaucracy
- Work in our CE office in London, a hub of nonprofit entrepreneurs and staff
- Attend multiple events and conferences like EAGs every year to represent CE
- Build your network in the EA community, various nonprofit communities, and among CE’s vibrant community of highly talented and singularly dedicated EAs, including the 27 charities we have launched so far
- An informal, fun, and supportive work environment
- Become a part of an international, diverse, dedicated, close-knit team of 18 impact-focused charity workers
Perks and benefits
- Visa sponsorship for the right candidate
- Flexible working schedule and 30 paid days off per year
- Parental, dependents and compassionate leave schemes
- A payroll giving scheme, enabling you to donate tax-efficiently to high-impact charities
- A staff tenure donation scheme, where for every year of employment CE will donate £800 to a charity of your choice
- 5-10% of work time and dedicated budget of £500 for personal development and learning (which can be spent on expenses related to caring for one’s mental health)
- 50% reimbursement of IT and costs of strategies you find useful for increasing your productivity up to £500 a year
- An annual costs-covered retreat to bring our whole team together to celebrate our achievements
- For an outstanding candidate, more perks and benefits could be included.
ABOUT CHARITY ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Charity Entrepreneurship is on a mission to cause more effective charities to exist in the world. We launch high-impact nonprofits by connecting entrepreneurs with effective ideas, training, and funding.
Our track record
Since our first research cycle and incubation program in 2019, we have:
- Launched 27 new charities across six cause areas
- Published 30+ research reports
- Grown to a close-knit team of 18
- Released two public Handbooks on How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit and How to Launch a High-Impact Foundation.
- Launched three new programs: our Grantmaking Program, Research Training Program, and our Effective Giving Incubation Program.
- To date, our launched charities have:
- Fundraised over $10M USD, including from Mulago, GiveWell, Open Philanthropy, EA Funds, Founders Pledge, Animal Charity Evaluators, Schmidt Futures, and D-Prize
- Effected policy changes that may decrease lead poisoning in ~322,000 children in Malawi (averting 87,000 DALY-equivalents, or saving 2,900 lives)
- Changed farm conditions for ~420,000 farmed fish and ~1,200,000,000 shrimp,
- Reached 5,000,000 listeners with family planning content in Nigeria, on track to potentially averting ~600 maternal deaths by 2025
- Launched a digital program to prevent postnatal depression in the U.S. that has proven to decrease depressive symptoms in 62% of participants
- Sent SMS reminders about vaccinations to 350,000 caregivers in India
… and so much more. Read more about our charities here.
Our plans
We have big, ambitious plans. After our successful first three years, we are now scaling up across all departments with the ultimate goals of:
- Launching 10+ new charities per year
- Running two CE incubation programs, two grantmaking programs and two other programs per year by the end of 2024
- Investigating and launching charity ideas from four cause areas per yea
- Increasing our team to 20 by the end of 2024
… all coming together to achieve 8x the impact of our previous years at less than 2x the team size.
Our culture
CE is a passionate, informal, and flexible working environment. We believe that friendliness and teamwork, a focus on impact and evidence, critical thinking, and warm connections are key workplace values. The 18 of us stay in touch through weekly all-hands team meetings and socials and 1:1s during work hours, and have built an active and connected community of charity entrepreneurs and impact-focused individuals. Our office in London is a lively and vibrant hub where recent developments in EA and updates from our charities are as likely to be discussed over lunch as what the 80/20 of dental hygiene looks like, or what the effects of different sleep habits on productivity are. We are united by our relentless pursuit of counterfactual impact and a perhaps slightly excessive love of spreadsheets.
Read more about what it is like to work at CE in this blog post.