To me, a fellowship implies a higher degree of training and involvement than just a course. It's a combination of education and experience, and it seems to me to be the best word for it. And yes, the fact that it's something EAs tend to understand easily makes it a better word to use for that purpose. But I'm open for suggestions if you have better ones!

I like that phone metaphor better.... I think I'll switch to that! Thanks for the idea.

Thanks for posting this - in my sessions with varying EA orgs, I'm finding myself trying to prove the point of why they should be investing in branding and marketing as an effective way to increase funding potential and impact. In order to function like a non-profit not exclusive to EA funding, this is vital for the organization's survival. I'll definitely refer people back here as it comes up!

Do you have any insight into what type of efforts these funds are allocated towards?

I think you're quite right - and if we're going to port it over to the analogy, I would venture to say that if you know you're I'm going to need to run a high resource task at some point, you need to conserce capacity to be able to extend the limits as needed. I don't normally need to process and analyze gigabytes of data, but I need the ability to be able to on my device.

Not yet, no. That comes next, once we have the articles of incorporation.

I very often encourage people to do exactly that - find out what their unique personal strengths and talents are optimize for a job that uses their strengths. It's better to find a job that uses your talents in a cause area that you only like than to find a job that doesn't utilize your skills in a cause area that you love. The latter tends to lead to burnout, failure and frustration, while the former helps you be happy, productive, successful and impactful. I personally use the Gallup Strengthsfinder to assess talent.

It's not a necessity to have these within EA. It is a necessity to have good resources. There are also some cases, such as with finances and legal matters, that having a specialized service provider will allow more people to be helped effectively since they'll have a greater degree of familiarity and expertise with common EA org problems. And if we do have an EA that does a good job providing those services, I'd rather prioritize using those folks and if we don't know of them I'd like to.
In general, I'm finding that there are many similar patterns to what most EA orgs need, and the objective needs to be finding them quality resource providers and making them easily accessible.

I totally agree with you.
The other problem with outside experts is the same that anyone faces - who do I use? Which company is good? Pre-covid, I had been working on a problem in the small business community that created something very similar because of the hesitancy of humans to trust, especially when a lot of providers aren't as good as they claim to be. So I do think there's a trust factor that's important regardless, and if we don't have the talent in EA, I would consider bringing people out of EA into the community to fill those gaps.