Many thanks to @Felix_Werdermann 🔸 @Engin Arıkan and @Ana Barreiro for your feedback and comments on this, and for the encouragement from many people to finally write this up into an EA forum post.

For years, much of the career advice in the Effective Altruism community has implicitly (or explicitly) suggested that impact = working at an EA nonprofit. That narrative made sense when the community and its talent pool were smaller. But as EA grows, it’s worth reassessing whether we’re overconcentrating on nonprofit careers, a trend that may be limiting our community’s impact and leaving higher-leverage opportunities on the table.

Why Now?

As the EA movement has grown, it has attracted far more talent than the nonprofit sector can realistically absorb. This creates an urgent need to develop alternative pathways for talented, mission-aligned people. Under the current status quo, many end up feeling frustrated after going through multiple highly competitive recruitment rounds with little chance of success. We see this reflected both in community discussions (e.g. numerous EA Forum posts here, here, here and in our own career advising sessions.

Beyond these strategic pressures, there are also good reasons to believe that even if the talent bottleneck did not exist, diversifying career paths would still be valuable for advancing the cause. A broader distribution of talent increases our ability to influence powerful institutions, spread ideas, and embed animal-focused perspectives in places where they otherwise would never appear. 

In short, this is both a response to immediate pressures within growing talented job seekers in EA and a proactive strategy to accelerate change for the animal welfare movement. By diversifying where our talent goes, we make the movement more resilient, more influential, and better equipped to achieve lasting impact. 

Important Caveats

This argument is not universal. In fact, there are clear exceptions where nonprofit roles remain both highly impactful and very hard to fill:

• Leadership roles in highly effective nonprofits – still disproportionately influential and crucial.
• Major donor fundraising – where a single strong hire can make or break millions of dollars in funding.
• Charity entrepreneurship – especially in animal welfare, where new organisations created by talented founders can deliver outsized impact.
   

These roles remain among the most impactful and neglected in our ecosystem and are still reported to be bottlenecked by talent: 

By Charity Entrepreneurship/AIM, here for founding new animal welfare charities. Note, this does not seem to be the case for Proveg’s Kickstarting for Good, incubator.

By Animal Advocacy Nonprofits themselves in our bottleneck survey in  2024, 2022 & 2021. 

If your skillset doesn’t align with these roles, either immediately or with realistic upskilling, the question becomes: where can you generate the most impact instead?

The argument for roles outside of non-profits

Institutions Dwarf Nonprofit Capacity

The potential expected value of these roles is huge! People inside major organisations control budgets, networks, and levers of influence that nonprofits cannot come close to matching.

Consider a few examples:

• Legal & General is one of Europe’s largest asset managers, with over £1.1 trillion in assets under management. That gives it enormous potential leverage over investments, some of which could be steered toward impact-aligned causes (e.g. alternative proteins, ESG mandates).
• Compass Group, a global foodservice company, oversees animal welfare standards across a $31 billion supply chain.
• The European Commission creates and updates legislation that governs welfare standards across all EU member states. The countries of the European Union contain over 2.3 billion land farm animals and 1.1 billion farmed fish whose welfare can be affected by these regulations.

Currently, much of the EA / animal advocacy strategy is focused on lobbying people inside these institutions to adopt better policies. But what if more mission-aligned people were insiders themselves, pushing change from within? They’d carry credibility, gain access to decision-making forums that external advocates can’t reach, and help shift the internal commitments of these massive institutions to align with campaign goals.

One animal advocacy group we interviewed in Southeast Asia described how a single representative inside a well-known retailer was able to successfully push for a cage-free transition, a change the group believes would likely not have succeeded without that insider’s influence. That individual then went on to persuade other food companies to follow suit, leveraging their credibility as an industry professional rather than being seen as an external “animal advocate.”

Salaries Are Covered Outside the Movement

When someone works at a nonprofit, their salary must be covered by donor funding. This means expanding organizational capacity always requires raising additional money first. For example, hiring just 10 more nonprofit staff would require roughly $800,000 in extra annual funding^[1]. 

By contrast, when someone takes a role in a billion-dollar company (or any influential for-profit) and advocates internally, their salary and training budget is covered by the company at a scale nonprofits rarely offer. Not only does this conserve movement resources but it also has the potential to bring new resources into the movement they can build skills that they can bring back to non profits later or donate a portion of their much better paid salary. Therefore it enables the individuals to have other pathways to impact beyond their direct role.  

Counterfactual Impact Is Often Greater

In nonprofits, the counterfactual impact of your role “in simple terms” is the difference between you and the next candidate. Sometimes that’s significant (e.g., a senior role that might otherwise remain vacant or bottlenecked positions as listed above). But often it’s negligible, essentially a coin toss between two equally strong applicants.

Outside nonprofits, the counterfactual is usually starker. If you don’t take the role, it’s almost guaranteed to go to someone who doesn’t care about animals. Issues may be ignored entirely. But if you do take it, you can ensure animals are represented in decision-making, sometimes at an extraordinary scale.

A Healthier Distribution of Talent

There is real value in distributing our collective power and skills across different sectors rather than clustering almost exclusively in nonprofits. Concentration risks inertia, while a more strategic spread of talent allows us to drive change from multiple directions. In practice, one receptive person in the right position inside a major system can sometimes be more useful to nonprofits than working directly for them — and can even determine whether a campaign succeeds or fails.

For all these reasons, we shouldn’t spotlight only nonprofit roles. If we truly want to grow and scale our advocacy, we need to step into other pillars of power: business, government, academia, and media industries. For some EAs, this won’t just expand their impact, it may also be a relief, freeing them from the bottlenecks and burnout of nonprofit competition.

Why This Might Be Wrong Advice

As with all career guidance, this should not be taken as generic or overly confident advice. Career impact depends heavily on personal fit, and it’s always time-bound. The landscape changes. One of the strongest reasons I currently prioritise this line of thinking is that having mission-aligned people in positions of power outside nonprofits is relatively neglected. If that changes, the advice will need to change too.

The Challenges of External Roles

For-profits have different accountability structures. Nonprofits are held accountable by their impact on animals. Companies are accountable to profits, and governments to political outcomes. This can lead to a few additional problems 

• Risk of value drift. Unlike in nonprofits, you’re unlikely to be surrounded by people who share your values. In for-profit or political environments, there are strong pressures to conform to profit motives or institutional priorities. It takes unusual resilience and persistence to stay mission-driven when you may be the only one in the room advocating for animals.
• Limited focus on animals. Nonprofits are laser-focused on animal outcomes. By contrast, most external roles only touch animal issues tangentially. For many jobs, helping animals might only be a small percentage of your responsibilities.

In addition, the actual potential to have impact in these roles is largely unknown and not recommended for people who want a “safe bet” or quick results :

• Driving change in large institutions is hard. Big companies and governments are complex. Progress can be blocked by stakeholders with conflicting interests, political gridlock, or sheer inertia. It’s possible to spend years working up the ladder only to discover that meaningful change is not as easy as initially thought.
• Uncertain track record. We can make assumptions based on research, expected value, and a handful of promising case studies, but this path is still underexplored. Outcomes may vary dramatically between institutions, making it hard to predict impact in advance.

Why These Risks Still Seem Worth Taking

All of these concerns are valid, but they can often be mitigated with the right strategies: building peer networks for value alignment, selecting roles with genuine leverage, and preparing people for the resilience these environments demand. Additionally as mentioned above their are other ways in which working in these environments can bring in new resources beyond the direct impact of the role itself.

The greater risk seems to lie in not trying. If mission-aligned people avoid these roles, they will be filled by individuals with no concern for animals. We will then spend our resources lobbying them from the outside, rather than having insiders at the table shaping decisions directly.

Why Steering Everyone Toward Nonprofits Might Hurt the EA Community

Nonprofit Roles Are Saturated

In animal advocacy, it’s not uncommon to see many strong applicants for a single opening, with 500-2000 applications for a publicly listed role. That means many talented, motivated people are set up to fail, not because they lack skill, but because competition is high and the opportunities are scarce.

Nonprofits Have Low Absorbency

Due to limited funding and resources, there is a natural ceiling on how many people can realistically work in nonprofits. Globally, the effective animal advocacy nonprofit sector advertises roughly 700 new jobs per year, and only about 50 of those are truly high-leverage roles.

Given the size of the EA community today, even if 100% of those jobs were filled by EAs, a huge number of talented people would still be left without high-leverage opportunities. Many end up wasting their skills and energy waiting for the next opening rather than applying them elsewhere.

As EA grows, the community needs to shed its implicit assumption that impact equals nonprofit work. The institutions shaping animals’ lives at scale are overwhelmingly outside our sector. We can’t afford to leave them staffed only by people indifferent to our goals.

Too Many Advising Channels, One Bottlenecked Funnel

Over the years, more organisations have sprung up to advise on nonprofit careers. But if the outcome is still dozens of candidates chasing one job, we’re amplifying frustration.

Unless we widen the scope, we’ll waste talent, frustrate promising people, and risk disillusioning a new generation of advocates.

Nonprofits are not a good fit for everyone, and they may be a much better fit for roles in other sectors. 

A narrow focus on nonprofits excludes:

• Specialists whose skills don’t map neatly to nonprofit needs.
• People with ambitions in business, policy, academia, or creative industries.

• Individuals whose personal fit doesn’t align with nonprofit realities.

  By broadening our funnels, we can mobilise far more talent for animals and broaden our circle of allies. Demonstrating only one pathway limits the type of talent and people we can genuinely influence to use their career to make progress for animals.

Important Final Caveats

• Nonprofit roles remain vital, especially leadership, fundraising, and entrepreneurship. But if we truly want to build a resilient, scalable movement for animals (and beyond), we should encourage more EAs to step into positions of influence across all sectors, not just compete for the same handful of nonprofit jobs.
• Personal fit really matters. For some people, nonprofit roles may align better with their skills, motivations, and working style. For others, external roles may provide both a better fit and a greater chance to make a difference. Trying to force every square into a circle isn’t good for either party and will not lead to long term job satisfaction
• Not every role outside nonprofits is impactful. Some positions carry enormous potential to shift institutions or markets; others offer little to no leverage. Distinguishing between the two is critical and not always easy to spot at the surface. At AAC, we have been conducting research to help decipher these and will continue to do so.

Because of the complexity of navigating this largely new and explored career path, we encourage anyone considering their options to reach out for a 1:1 career advising call with Animal Advocacy Careers. We’d be happy to help you think through where you can contribute most effectively to helping animals with your career and understand more about your personal fit and where you can sustainably help animals most.

1. ^{^}

   Faunalytics estimates the average salary for a nonprofit role in the U.S. at around $80,000 per year — and about half of all roles in our sector are U.S.-based. This figure does not include additional employer costs such as health insurance, payroll taxes, and benefits, so the real cost per hire is even higher (though salaries can be lower in other regions outside the U.S.).