James Herbert

Co-director @ Effective Altruism Netherlands
1691 karmaJoined Working (6-15 years)Amsterdam, Netherlands
effectiefaltruisme.nl

Bio

Participation
1

I'm currently a co-director at EA Netherlands (with Marieke de Visscher). We're working to build and strengthen the EA community here.

Before this, I worked as a consultant on urban socioeconomic development projects and programmes funded by the EU. Before that, I studied liberal arts (in the UK) and then philosophy (in the Netherlands).

Hit me up if you wanna find out about the Dutch EA community! :)

Comments
239

  1. Should we work with EA-aligned orgs to support them methodologically with their impact management and MEL, or with non-EA orgs to motivate them to shift towards a more EA-aligned approach regarding impact management?
    1. Not sure, both options have their merits. The Mission Motor is focused on doing the latter for animal welfare organisations, maybe touch base with them to see what their experience has been (if you haven't already).
  2. Do you know EA-related orgs that could need support with impact planning (e.g. with developing a Theory of Change), tracking, or analysis?
    1. I know lots of city and national organisations funded by the Centre for Effective Altruism's Community Building Grants programme would like to improve their M&E (including ourselves at EA Netherlands, but we've already got outside support). Perhaps you could contact Naomi, who is responsible for this programme.
  3. What is your intuition on the level of capacity spent on and knowledge about impact management in EA organizations?
    1. I'm most familiar with community-building EA organisations like ourselves. My impression is that EA CB orgs tend to do better than the average non-profit, but we're still nowhere near as good as we ought to be.
  4. Do you work for an organization yourself (or know one well) that might want to build a ToC with us or do a tracking or measurement workshop?
    1. At EA Netherlands we're already getting outside support with our M&E but I think other national organisations would be interested. Again, I'd consider contacting Naomi from CEA. Right now she's putting together the programme for our next retreat and several requests have been made for M&E training. 

Eyy! I grew up in the North East so it's great to see this happen. Love the branding too. 

Oh this is great, thanks for putting it together!

There's also a Cole Killian EA Forum account with one comment from 2022. Looks like he's deleted things though. I googled the post 'SBF, Pascal's Mugging, and a Proposed Solution' and found a dead link. It's on Internet Archive though, you can check it here

This is cool and I didn't know it existed. Thanks for sharing!

How confident are respondents, or people in general, about the results of the valuable skills question? This feels particularly relevant to me at the moment as a community builder.

Could you flag which questions you felt most comfortable with? Or least comfortable with? Whichever is easier :)

I think this post exemplifies great community-building practice - identifying a real gap, testing a plausible intervention, and iterating based on feedback. The Impact Workbook is a thoughtful and structured way to help students move beyond the introductory stage, and it’s really impressive to see an MVP already in action. 

One thing that could make this even stronger is more explicit success metrics - this could be something relatively simple, e.g., usage stats. I also second Alex's comment - it would be great if you had more guidance on how organisers can implement this in their own groups, perhaps a short ‘How to Get Started’?

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