I recently created the first EA group in Romania and about 3 months ago I applied for a grant from EAIF to work full-time on community building. I got rejected and it was hard to get feedback but after a few email exchanges and a lot of conversations at EAG London, EAGx Prague, and online, I left with the following takeaways:
- I should develop a more solid track-record.
- Instead of a generic community building plan, I should find out what comparative advantage my group has and focus on that.
- I should share my plans with the community and ask for feedback.
With that in mind, I rewrote my application and decided to post my plans here. As far as track record is concerned, I have been running the EA Romania group since September 2020, but I couldn’t accomplish much in the first year because of my job and the pandemic. In the past 3 months, however, I have focused more on EA and here’s what I have accomplished so far:
- 205 members in our Facebook group
- 205 likes on our Facebook page
- 54 followers on Instagram
- 8 meetups with 10-15 participants each
- Approximately 20 active members (who come to the meetup regularly)
- 4 applications for the Virtual Intro Program
- 1 application for the In-depth Program
- 1 participant (me) at EAG London 2022
- 4 participants at EAGx Prague 2022
- 1 applicant (me) for volunteering at EAGx Berlin 2022
It is still not much of a track record, but it's better than what I had in my previous application.
Here's the one sentence description of my project:
6-month salary + budget for web design and social media management in order to create an NGO and promote EA in Romania.
And here's the brief summary:
The project consists in creating an “Effective Altruism Romania” NGO in order to promote the EA philosophy in the country with a particular focus on fundraising and tech outreach. We believe community building and value change in general are important and can have a large multiplier effect in most regions. However, there might be a comparative advantage in focusing on fundraising and tech outreach in Romania for two reasons. First, even though Romania is not a high income country, companies here can donate 20% of their profit taxes to local NGOs, while employees can donate 3.5% of their income taxes. This means that if we could convince the top 3 tech companies in Bucharest to donate 3% of their donation budgets to us (at no cost to themselves), this would be enough to entirely cover the costs of this grant. Second, as a developer I am well connected in the tech sector and it would be relatively easy for me to attract human capital to EA tech projects and research positions.
The full budget I asked for was $34,185.00 (6mo salary + website/design), but I have specified that I am open to work with less, with a lower salary or part-time. For more details about the goals, strategy, and my overall background, you can read/skim through the full application here (feel free to add comments).
Do you have any thoughts? I am a bit unsure about who to include in the "references" section. I have included Catherine Low from CEA and Manuel Allgaier from EA Berlin, who reviewed my first application before I submitted it. Any tips about who else I should include, or perhaps some other people I should talk to before submitting the new application?
Hi Vaidehi, thank you so much for taking the time to write all this, it is definitely helpful :)
The benefit of setting up a legal entity in Romania is that it would allow me to get donations. The benefit of a website is also donations. I can't really have an NGO and ask for donations without having a website to show. It doesn't have to be a complex or expensive website, but I do need something. I could even remove website creation from the budget, but then I would have to create it myself and this would consume more of my time. But yes, I can definitely remove the focus from creating content (i.e. blog and social media).
I guess one aspect that I perhaps should make more explicit is how easy it is to get donations in Romania via the tax incentives I mentioned. I talked to my employers and they said many companies allocate their donation budgets based on recommendations by employees, which are relatively rare, so usually each recommendation gets a big chunk of the donation budget. If everybody who comes to our meetups convinces their companies to donate 1k EUR to us, and if at least some of them donate 3,5% of their income taxes, we could raise some funds quite easily. I actually know a Romanian member of the EA community (currently based in Berlin) who has been encouraging me to set up an NGO because she has a company and wants to also convince her family to donate 3,5% of their income taxes to something impactful, but currently this is simply impossible. I don't necessarily have to focus on getting as much money as possible in the short-term, but I do think it's useful to have the legal structure in place so we can slowly start to get donations. My hope is that one day our donation revenue will be greater than the funds we receive, but this is something I can aim to achieve in a long-term basis, so I don't need to dedicate much of my time to this within the next 6 months.
Does it make more sense now? I will update the application in the meantime and try to cut more from my goals and make it more focused and less ambitious, but in principle I still think it's important to have a basic website and a legal entity ready to receive donations, even if I don't focus on fundraising.