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by Josh Axford
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CommunityCentre for Effective AltruismOperationsOrganization updates
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CEA’s Operations team provides the financial, legal, administrative, grantmaking, logistical, and fundraising support that enables CEA, 80,000 Hours, the Forethought Foundation, EA Funds, the Centre for the Governance of AI and Giving What We Can to run efficiently.

We are rapidly increasing our capacity:

  • In 2022 we will support a budget of $80m, up from $50m last year. The legal entity currently employs over 60 staff and we expect that to grow to 110 in 2022. Just scaling up to handle this rapid growth has taken a lot of work.
  • To handle this, we’re growing our team. We are looking for:
    • A Grants Administrator to help us process over $30M in grants annually across multiple EA organisations.
    • An HR Associate to help support 80+ people across 7 major EA organisations.
    • A Salesforce Engineer to help us build a CRM that can automate key processes and help us better understand data from our programs.

Key progress:

  • Recent hires:
    • Andy Tao is joining our team as a Finance Associate, allowing us to support an increasing amount of financial activity across the legal entity.
    • In November, Callum Howard joined the operations team, leading on the finance associate hiring round and adding capacity to the team as a generalist.
  • Office management: The office is now fully up and running. 
    • Jonathan Michel started as Office Manager and has had an immediate impact. 
    • We’re still making improvements to the functionality of the office - lighting, catering and reconfiguring space to increase capacity. 
    • Users seem happy, and we’ve recently surveyed them on overall satisfaction and possible further improvements.
  • Improvements to financial systems: 
    • Audits were completed for both the UK and US
    • No significant issues were raised and there was a reduction in control points
    • The company card scheme (Soldo) continued to be rolled out and improved to allow for efficient business expenditure
    • Back end automated systems were developed to track reserves of each organization in real time
    • Integration between our grant making system and our accounts were established to reduce error rates in accounting
    • Automations were implemented to ensure that the EA Funds balances are accurate and updated in real time (including grants approved but not paid)
  • Budgets and financial forecasts: Budgets, financial forecasts and funding gaps were created and approved for all constituent orgs.
  • Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software: 
    • An MVP (minimal viable product) was developed for the groups team to allow them to track key metrics of the various groups they are supporting. This was launched at the end of Q4 with the work continuing in Q1 2022.
    • A management hub was developed for group organizers - a beta version of this was tested by a user adoption team. After receiving valuable feedback the plans needed to be re-evaluated.
      • The focus switched to creating a lite version of a CRM tool for group organizers to manage their groups and an additional “data bridge” to allow for group organizers who use airtable to share their groups data.
  • Annual feedback:
    • As we did last year, we asked the people we support how satisfied they were. 100% responded and the average score was 8.6/10 (8.7 in 2021). 
    • We identified a number of improvements and projects from the feedback we received. 
  • Internal Wiki/handbook: 
  • We are continuously updating this resource to reduce the amount of requests the ops team needs to address.
  • Visas:
    • We switched immigration support in the UK to a much more professional outfit. 

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calebp21
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Thanks for writing this post. I appreciate these kinds of updates from EA orgs and I like how 'to the point' the Key Progress section is, it gives a lot of concrete information about what the team actually does.

I think that given that the post seems to be aimed at encouraging people to apply based on their fit it could be useful to add some details about what might make someone a good fit. Ops is a pretty vague label and I particularly like this post as it paints a clear picture of what it might look like for someone to be in ops roles at different types of organisations and points at some concrete attributes of people that could be a good fit.

I think pulling in some information from the jobs ads or providing some links to other articles that might give people more insight into their personal fit could be really valuable!

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Yonatan Cale8
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CRM:

My prior is that if you're setting up a CRM from scratch, use monday.com, not Salesforce and not an in house solution, if that's what's implied here:

An MVP (minimal viable product) was developed for the groups team

I can elaborate why.

 

My second prior is that the cost of switching CRM is pretty high, and I'm only suggesting anything at all since you seem to be very very early stage in this. I hope I'm right.

 

Of course I know nothing about your situation, so if you already considered Monday, just ignore my suggestion.

 

I have a friend who works there and could probably get you inside help (a call with a person who'll help you evaluate it? Maybe set it up for you?). And of course there's a huge discount for nonprofits, like most solutions.

 

[I have no conflict of interest here, I don't work there myself]

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Ben_West🔸2
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We currently employ over 60 staff and we expect that to grow to 110 in 2022.

The "we" in the sentence is CEA, not the ops team, right? I might suggest clarifying that in the post, as the rest of the post uses "we" to refer to the ops team.

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Josh Axford5
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Edited. Thanks for making a product which allows for such easy editing! 

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