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 Ariel, Thanks for sharing this document and asking for feedback publicly!
A few thoughts on your application:
General principles :
What I see as the most promising strategy based on your application (and my extremely limited knowledge of Romania):
Strategy feedback :
Feedback on the application itself (vs. the strategy)
I hope this is helpful!
Hi Vaidehi!
Great points! I very much agree with most of your feedback, it's a lean, startuppy approach, so I'm not going to re-write, just say thanks that you wrote it! I would just like to share my view on the donations part. (for context, I am Romanian, living in Berlin).
I fully agree that it's perhaps too early to start the legal entity and it seems a lot better to fund EA Romania from a separate source of income.
That being said, what I do see as an opportunity is to set up an NGO to offer people a super-easy way to donate to effective organ... (read more)