PROGRAMS MANAGER

Deadline: September 17, 2023
Expected hours: Full-time (35 hours per week)
Location: London (preferred) or remote
Pay: £35,000 - £45,000
Fill out this form to apply

Charity Entrepreneurship is a growing non-profit incubator that launches multiple high-impact charities every year through our incubation programs. To allow us to scale from one charity Incubation Program a year to two Charity Incubation Programs, two Grantmaking Programs, and potentially another third program per year, we are now looking for a Programs Manager to join the Programs team and help make our vision of a high-impact, results-oriented, diversified nonprofit ecosystem a reality.

We are looking for a new Programs Manager who can help us scale by making a large contribution to our Programs Department which creates program content, project manages and implements our programs, and leads their continuous improvement. As our first Programs Manager hire, this individual will have the opportunity to have a large impact on the success of our programs.

ABOUT THE ROLE

How this role is causing impact

Our Research department develops the charity ideas that our incubatees go on to found, our Recruitment (Outreach & Vetting) department ensures that we find the best, brightest and most altruistic participants for our programs, and our Programs department actually delivers the training that enables participants to have a massive positive impact. Without our Programs Manager hire, we’ll be unable to scale to four or more programs each year and to continue to improve our program quality, thus this is a key position that will significantly increase the impact of our programs..

How our programs overlap:

Both our Charity and Foundation Programs run for a little over two months and involve training participants on the decision-making skills and best practices needed to maximize their impact, including, but not limited to: cause prioritization, strategic decision-making, cost-effectiveness analysis, monitoring & evaluation, creating or evaluating theories of change, operations, and hiring & managing people.

How our programs differ:

Our two programs focus on the execution and funding sides of the non-profit sector respectively. Our Charity Incubation Program helps to match our very talented incubatees with a charity idea, a co-founder and seed funding so that they can start a highly impactful charity. Our Foundation Incubation Program, on the other hand, supports philanthropists as they make the key decisions that will determine their future impact: What is your grantmaking scope, structure and strategy? What is your process for vetting people and grants? By enabling participants to reach more thoughtful answers to these questions, that make use of their comparative advantages, this program leads to large amounts of charitable funds being deployed more impactfully, and the overall charity grantmaking space to be more coordinated and diversified.

The Programs Team

The Programs team currently consists of 2 FTE working on the classic Charity Incubation Program and 1.5 FTE working on the Grantmaking Program, so the new hire will likely start off working on the Grantmaking Program with the Foundation Program Manager, but may be expected to move flexibly between the two and potentially even the new third Program depending on organizational needs and the new Programs Manager’s skills and experiences.

Eventually, there will be scope for this Program Manager to specialize, either by program (Charity vs. Foundation) or function (project management vs. content development).

Scope for advancement: Over time, we aim for each program to have a Program Director who will typically be a senior member of the Programs Department who has demonstrated high ability and role fit for the increased decision-making and management responsibilities in leading a department.

Key responsibilities:

Specific responsibilities will partly depend on the successful applicant’s skills and interests, and will include a combination of the following:

Project management (including both the preparation and implementation) of our programs. There are a lot of moving parts!
Creating and improving program content, including:
- Creating written content for both the training programs and our forthcoming “How to Launch a High-Impact Foundation” Handbook,
- Creating video lectures,
- Designing projects for participants to complete to hone their decision-making skills,
- Designing interactive activities (e.g. a debate about or recommended charity ideas, or a grantmaking simulation),
- Identifying gaps in our curriculum based on the real world challenges faced by new charities and foundations and designing interesting and instructive content to fill those gaps,
- Evaluating our suite of readings, videos, projects and discussions to:
  - Update the sequencing to maximize the learning and enjoyment of participants,
  - Identify the weakest content that can be replaced,
  - Identify the strongest content that we should double down on.
Helping to run the programs, which may involve:
- Facilitating activities with the charity founders and/or participating foundations, both remotely and in person,
- Providing feedback on their project work,
- Moderating group discussions of course content,
- Mentoring program participants in 1:1 calls.
Continuous improvement: Leading the process of assessing our performance after each program and collating the feedback of participants and CE staff to prioritize improvements for the next iteration.
Systematizing our programs for robustness and efficiency: Creating and documenting systems so that the process of preparing for and running our programs becomes faster, more efficient and easier to teach to new team members.
Shaping our programs’ future direction: How do we scale our programs’ impact 10x?

About this role

Responsibilities

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 are looking for high general ability and a value/methods-aligned mindset more than significant prior work experience or specific backgrounds.

What we need:

We’re looking for a talented generalist who is:

Organized, conscientious, and reliable
Able to work both autonomously, and in a small team
Highly impact-driven and results-oriented with a very strong work ethic
Able to work in a fast-paced and rapidly changing environment
Strong written and verbal communications skills, and confident interacting with a wide range of stakeholders (foundation founders, grantmakers, future and current charity founders from all over the world, experts…)
Passionate about quickly learning new skills and passing them on
Comfortable with numerical quantification and simple spreadsheet calculations
Well-versed in the effective altruism community
Friendly, humble personality, and excited about the job
Excited to support programs across functions (nonprofits, grantmaking) and cause areas (especially animal advocacy, global health, effective altruism meta, mental health, and family planning)

Bonus points for:

Experience creating training content or running training programs
Experience working in a small/young start-up
Experience working for a foundation or other grantmaking body
Experience working in effective altruism (volunteering, independent projects, internships, and jobs all count)

About you

What we are looking for

What we offer

WHAT WE OFFER

Most of all: A job that has a huge tangible impact on the world - the program you create will help new charities to have maximum impact through their operations and foundations to have maximum impact with their grants
High levels of challenge and learning on the job in a widely useful set of skills, including grantmaking and cross-applicable communication 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
An informal, fun, and supportive work environment
Become a part of a diverse, dedicated, close-knit team of 16 EAs
Plenty of opportunities for learning and growth across all topics relevant to operating or funding effective nonprofits
Build your network among CE’s vibrant community of highly talented and dedicated EAs, including the 23 charities we have launched so far
Become a part of an international, diverse, dedicated, close-knit team of 18 impact focused charity workers
Build your network in the EA community, among a number of new and established foundations we work with, and withini CE’s vibrant community of highly talented and singularly dedicated EAs, including the 27 charities we have launched so far.
Plenty of opportunities for learning, growth, and connection across departments and communities - our lunch breaks are some of the best learning opportunities we know of!

Perks and benefits

Flexible working schedule and 30 paid days off per year
5-10% of work time and dedicated budget of £500 for personal development and learning (plus lots of learning on the job)
50% reimbursement of IT and costs of strategies you find useful for increasing your productivity up to £500 a year
Salary and moving costs to London are flexible depending on employee needs and fall between $40-60k USD
For an outstanding candidate, more perks and benefits could be included
Title can be adapted depending on experience and concrete responsibilities

ABOUT CHARITY ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Our track record

Charity Entrepreneurship is on a mission to cause more effective charities to exist in the world.

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 (will be publicly available in late 2023).

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.

Will you join us?

Our culture

CE is an intense, 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 as well as 1:1s during work hours, and have built an active and connected community of charity entrepreneurs and impact focused indidauls. 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.

APPLY NOW

Our goal is to make our application process both time-effective and interesting for you. The application process involves four stages:

submitting our general application form (30 minutes),
a test task simulating the work you would do in your role (2-3 hours),
an initial recorded interview (15 minutes),
a more in-depth test task in other areas of this role (2-3 hours),
a final, more in-depth interview (1 hour), and
a reference check.

Each stage typically takes about ~1 week starting from the end of the application deadline, and we hope to make an offer within ~6 weeks of the application deadline. Ideally, the candidate will begin onboarding as soon afterwards as possible. On request, we offer feedback to candidates who make it far into our process.

Commitment to diversity and equal employment opportunities

We are committed to fostering a culture of inclusion and encourage individuals with diverse backgrounds and experiences to apply. We especially encourage applications from women and people of color who are excited about contributing to our mission. Charity Entrepreneurship is an equal opportunity employer. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, or have any other related questions about applying, please contact joey@charityentrepreneurship.com

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 for CE a little unconventional (e.g. mention personal projects, courses, 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.

Apply now