TLDR: Our handbook How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit is available now on Amazon! 

How did this book come to be?

This book was created out of content used for the annual CE Incubation Program, originally a list of blog post readings. That list evolved into a single document and was simplified into a far-too-long CE handbook, which was used by our 2020 cohort. It was always primarily aimed at a small, highly involved audience who was keen to found impactful projects. Over time, we have reworked and tweaked new editions based on the experiences of our charities and the content of our program. As we iterated, the handbook improved, and we now feel that, although far from perfect, it is at the stage where it could be useful for a broader audience than CE program participants alone.

The Charity Entrepreneurship (CE) handbook is an EA-aligned source of practical advice on early-stage project management and includes useful decision-making tools, templates, success stories, and the philosophical underpinnings of why charity entrepreneurship could be an impactful career path and how to run a project well. 

We’re proud that Peter Singer wrote a short foreword message and recommended our book, stating: “Clear, thoughtful, engaging. Excellent advice for nonprofit entrepreneurs.”  

You can buy the handbook on Amazon as an ebook or as a paperback (you can keep shipping costs down by ordering from your country’s specific Amazon account, like Amazon.co.uk, .de, or the one closest to you).  All the proceeds of the book will directly support our work and help launch new charities through our Incubation Programs.

EA chapters and groups can get it for free through EA Books Direct. (If the book is not yet on your group’s order link, you can reach out to ed@eaoxford.com to add it.) 

Not just for charity entrepreneurs? 

We believe that charity entrepreneurship is an incredibly impactful career path, and this belief has been the driving force behind this book’s creation. But we also believe that the contents can be useful to a larger pool of EAs.

Many EAs take on complex projects, typically in small teams, trying to drive ambitious results. If you’re collaborating with other EAs and constantly making decisions when the available information is incomplete and the stakes are high, or if you try to streamline your standard operating procedures and narrow down on optimal theories of change and endline goals, the Charity Entrepreneurship handbook might be helpful. 

How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit covers:

• Assessment of your personal fit for founding an organization
• The decision-making tools you can apply to your most important decisions
• Best practices in fundraising and building support
• How to measure impact and optimize as you test and improve
• Tips on choosing the right mentors, advisors, and board members
• The fundamentals of daily operations, running legally, and registering as a charity
• The range and value of the resources–from ready-made templates to critical applications–available to you.

The book also features interviews and contributions from past charity founders who share their experiences, inspiration, know-how, and advice. We certainly don’t have all the answers, and there is always more to learn. But we do move quickly and show real results, and we are confident that this material could help many people in EA accelerate their work and maximize their impact. 

 But wait, we’re never finished! We are always open to updating. If you’d like to get involved in making this book even better, please submit suggestions for improvements to future versions. 

Please review the book on Amazon or Goodreads and share the link with friends. 

This book had many contributors, editors, and volunteers, and we would love to thank them all (but it would take a whole other blog post – you can take a look at the book’s preface to see all those who helped make this book a reality).