1. Applications are now open for our first ever round of the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program dedicated exclusively to animal welfare. Learn more about what’s different this round here and apply here.

2. AIM itself is hungry for talent (nom nom!). We’re seeking applications from ambitious people for a wide range of roles to scale our impact. Are you generally talented? Express your interest here. Are you specifically talented? Express your interest here.

TL;DR

AIM has a reputation for extreme frugality on pay. It was earned but it’s now out of date. Over the past few months we have:

• Refreshed our salary policy. Pay has gone from nominally to genuinely needs-based: the full-time London range is now £40,000–90,000 gross (adjusted for location), and the process is built around staff asking for what they genuinely need, with no negotiation and no interrogation of lifestyle choices. Since launch, the average salary has risen by roughly £10k. We’ll revisit the range over time as we learn how broad a talent pool and range of life circumstances it covers.

• Overhauled program stipends. A flat default of £1,900/month has become self-selected amounts based on individual circumstances. We expect most participants to land between $2,000 and $5,000/month, with a significantly higher ceiling available for those with higher needs.

• Changed our founder salary advice. Founders set their own salaries out of their seed grants. Historically those salaries clustered in a narrow range despite very diverse life circumstances, a sign we hadn’t made founder pay genuinely needs-based. Our advice is now modelled on our staff policy, with no mandated range or ceiling.

If AIM’s pay was the reason you didn’t apply to a role or program, or didn’t refer someone who would be great, we hope you’ll reconsider.

Context

From frugal roots

AIM (formerly Charity Entrepreneurship) has always run cheap. Joey (co-founder and former CEO) took the lowest salary in the organisation for most of its history. As of a few months ago, all staff earned between roughly £42-55k (full-time equivalent), with a median around £49k. Staff costs make up over half of our expenditure, so pay restraint has been one of our strongest levers on the ‘cost’ side of ‘cost-effectiveness’. Our frugal norms influence areas besides pay, from equipment, to incubatee accommodation, to which offices we choose and how we’ve run them.

Upsides

Money we don’t spend on ourselves can go to effective charities tackling problems like poverty and factory farming, and we broadly buy Peter Singer’s argument that taking much more than we need is hard to justify when it could do so much more to help those with much less. This has never been only about salaries: staff bring their own devices, benefits and perks are minimal, and we scrutinise our operating costs the way we scrutinise program costs. Flat, restrained pay, tied neither to seniority nor tenure, has kept internal pay politics low and selected for people motivated by the mission rather than the package. Most importantly, the charities we incubate take cues on spending norms partly from us, so frugality at AIM compounds across the ecosystem. For most of our history, funding has been the biggest bottleneck to how much impact can be done in our ecosystem, so we guarded preciously the norms that allow us to stretch available funding as far as possible.

Downsides

Our frugal policies have downsides that we’ve underweighted for years. A staff survey this April gave us new insight into these downsides.

1. Reduced access to and retention of top talent: On access – at least three times in the past 18 months we missed our preferred candidate for a role over a gap in the order of £5k/year, and salary is the most common reason promising people turn us down when we try to headhunt them. On retention – in the April survey, 35% of staff said they would be at least somewhat likely to seek another role within 12 months if their salary didn’t change.

2. Unsustainable staff finances/distress: In the survey, 47% of staff said they rely on support from a partner, family, or friends to make their finances work, and 88% said they were saving less for the long term than they would like. Staff also reported not feeling comfortable asking for a salary that meets their needs (median response: somewhat disagree), and the survey write-up described a subtle culture of shame around expressing financial needs at all. And it may not stop at our own staff: we have heard informal reports of (in some cases, serious) financial strain among founders of incubated charities who took their salary cues from us.

3. The mission-alignment filter is weaker than it looks: Low, flat pay doesn’t only select for people who care about impact; it selects for people who can afford to care at these prices: those with low financial needs, prior savings, family money, or a higher-earning partner.

4. There’s more to maximizing impact than minimizing cost: Our goal is maximum counterfactual impact. With limited funds, cost-effectiveness is a dominant lever for that. But spending more does not always mean lower cost-effectiveness: for some inputs, returns increase with spend at first, and below a certain level the spend has roughly zero efficacy. A salary that nobody suitable will accept buys no value at all. Meanwhile, it’s important to remember that cost-effectiveness is a means, not an end in itself. Forgetting this can lead orgs to focus too hard on driving down costs relative to scalability. As the total available pool of funds fluctuates up and down, the relative focus on cost-effectiveness and scalability as levers to maximize counterfactual impact should too.

None of these downsides is an argument against frugality. They are an argument against naive policies. If we’re more intentional about policy and norm design, we can keep most of what we value about restraint while avoiding the majority of these costs.

Our new salary policy

The design process

Our process for arriving at our new policy looked like this:

• Step 1: Staff survey (April 2026) to understand gaps in the current policy and preferences for a new one

• Step 2: Review of salary policies from ten other impact-focused organisations

• Step 3: Mapping the option space and trade-offs. First the remuneration philosophies, meaning the underlying question of what pay should be determined by. Then the design choices for operationalising whichever philosophy you pick (formulas, bands, floors and caps, negotiation or no?).

• Step 4: Selecting the philosophy and design that best fit team, exec, and board preferences

• Step 5: A long slog of debates on how to operationalize it.

• Step 6: Tested a draft policy on a sample of the team, to understand how it would be received and how much it would cost.

• Step 7: Legal review (given it’s an atypical policy)

• Step 8: Board approval

The policy

We genuinely considered a wide range of options^[1] and thought we might land somewhere very different to the status quo. However ultimately we are maintaining the remuneration philosophy we always aspired to: pay at AIM should be needs-based. That means two things:

1. Salary restraint: pay should be enough to support a modest, sustainable lifestyle, not something staff seek to maximise.

2. Adjustment to individual circumstances: The same modest lifestyle costs different amounts depending on factors like location, dependents, health, and pre-existing debt, so a flat salary would systematically overpay some people and underpay others.

Needs-based pay is explicitly not based on seniority, experience, performance, or market rate. In the April survey, 94% of staff backed needs-based pay, more than any alternative philosophy.

What has changed significantly is how well we implement and follow-through on this philosophy in practice:

• An explicit, wider range. The full-time London range is £40,000–90,000 gross, adjusted for other locations at 50% of the Numbeo cost-of-living difference in either direction (see footnote for examples^[2]). The previous maximum salary anyone earned at AIM was ~£60,000.

• You ask for what you need, and we trust you. Staff work through a private budget template (AIM never sees it), then propose a single figure alongside the main circumstances driving it. We don’t negotiate, interrogate lifestyle choices, or adjudicate what counts as a valid need. We accept asks that are consistent with the policy and that we can responsibly afford.

• Guidance instead of guesswork. The policy includes worked examples of how different circumstances land in different parts of the range, and exec team members have shared their own asks and reasoning as examples. Our Ops team is available to support staff to think through how to get from their after-taxes salary needs to their gross salary.

• A real review process. Salaries are revisited every April and whenever individual circumstances meaningfully change, rather than depending on whoever feels confident enough to raise the topic.

Reflections and rollout

This is still a ‘very AIM’ policy. It requires a very special culture to get right. The challenge is that we need to thread the needle: The salary guidance and norms need to make staff feel empowered to ask for what they really need (otherwise there will be financial stress and retention problems), while also encouraging staff to practice restraint in their salary ask, out of a sense of responsibility to use philanthropic funds in the best interest of beneficiaries.

Just about everyone we spoke to about our proposed policy from outside AIM told us we were insane. “You can’t just let staff choose their own salaries! Everyone would take the maximum amount”. We’d be lying if we said this feedback didn’t make us nervous.

Well, the policy is now live and staff have made their salary asks: The average salary rose by roughly £10k. Asks came in close to what the April survey predicted and well below the ceiling), which suggests that old policy wasn’t leaving most existing staff drastically short of their needs. But we need to remember that existing staff aren’t representative: people with higher needs were less able to join or stay under the old policy, and we expect many future hires to make fuller use of the range than the current team has.

Program stipends

We have also changed stipends for Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program participants.

Back in 2019 when we began there were no stipends. Later they became opt-in, and eventually by 2022 they became a default of £1,900k/month, with folks encouraged to take less if they could and allowed to, but dissuaded from, asking for more. This equates to ~$30,500/yr, and has lost roughly 17% of its real value since 2022.

The truth is that there’s a norm, from AIM to the Bay, that founders – for-profit and non-profit alike – typically earn little at the start of their founder journey. From the perspective of salary restraint (see above) we think taking less than the maximum salary you can command is a good thing. But taking less than you need is not. And letting (in-the-scheme-of-things) small amounts of money block someone from founding a field-leading charity is just plain dumb.

So stipends now work like our staff salary policy: participants self-select an amount based on their individual circumstances, with a standard range of $2,000 - $5,000/month, and a significantly higher ceiling available for those with higher needs.

It’s important to us that meeting financial needs isn’t a blocker to the best talent founding a charity, so we will actively encourage those with higher financial needs to request higher stipends, and we are committed to accommodating those requests where reasonable.

It’s equally important to us that we use funding responsibly to help beneficiaries as much as possible, so we will encourage those with lower self-assessed financial needs (e.g. perhaps they have no dependents or live in a low cost-of-living location) to request lower stipends, leaving more money to go towards helping beneficiaries.

Two clarifications: The stipend is not the same as your salary once you found a charity: you choose your own salary, paid out of your seed grant (more below). And under our legal obligations as a charity, AIM can provide stipend to cover the cost of participating in the program, but not as a route to personal financial gain.

Founder salary advice

Founders of AIM-incubated charities set their own salaries, paid out of the seed grants they receive through our seed network. That is not changing.

In practice, though, the salaries founders have chosen have fallen within a fairly narrow range, despite very diverse life circumstances. If salaries tracked needs, the range would be wide: a recent graduate sharing a flat does not need what a sole earner supporting a family needs. Either founders have been anchoring on our norms and on each other rather than on their own circumstances, or people with higher needs haven’t been founding at all. Probably both.

The same logic as with stipends applies. Taking less than the maximum salary you could command elsewhere is a good thing, and our founders generally do. Taking less than you need is not: it can lead to time-money trade-offs that hurt your work productivity, it can lead to financial stress that degrades your judgment, and a superstar founder who quits (or doesn’t found in the first place) because the finances don’t work costs beneficiaries far more than paying a livable salary.

So the advice we will give founders going forward will be modelled on our staff policy: work out what you need for a modest, sustainable life given your actual circumstances, and pay yourself that. There are two deliberate differences from the staff policy.

• First, your year one salary doesn’t have to be long-term sustainable, as it’s just for one year. It is a reasonable choice to run your first year lean, deferring some long-term savings while you prove the model, even though we would not endorse this as a permanent arrangement. Lean shouldn’t mean taking on debt or irrational risks.

• Second, there is no mandated range or ceiling. Your salary is constrained by your own budget and what seed funders will support, not by AIM’s internal salary strategy.

Was pay your blocker before?

If you ruled out applying to work at AIM or to found a charity through our program because of pay, or stopped short of referring someone for the same reason, we would ask you to look again. We’re still a frugal organization – this isn’t the place to make your first million – but our new salary and stipend policy can accommodate a far wider range of life circumstances, and therefore, we hope, a far wider pool of talent.

This isn’t the end of our journey with this topic. We will monitor whether we’ve over or under-shot the mark in terms of the balance of cost and benefits, and will course correct as we see fit.

Thanks for reading!

Before you go: wanna found an animal charity?

Applications are open for our first ever round of the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program dedicated exclusively to animal welfare, and the new stipend policy applies to it. If finances were part of what held you back from founding before, this is the round to test that again. Applications close September 13. Learn more here, apply here, or join one of our upcoming webinars.

Founding not for you? Well do you wanna come work at AIM instead? No? We’ll forgive it. So long as you refer a superstar or three to our program. Okay you can go now!

Recently, we wrote about why now might be the best time ever to start an animal charity. In short: the bottlenecks that limited us to incubating roughly two to four animal charities a year are easing on both sides, us finding more superstar founders excited to work on animal welfare and mid-stage funding becoming less of a limiting factor than it was a few years ago. Meanwhile, the animal movement needs more new interventions and organizations in the pipeline so that efforts to fix factory farming can scale in the coming years. The low-hanging fruit hasn’t been picked because barely anyone is in the orchard: Incubating more trailblazing animal charities is one way to help address this.

That post explained why we’re running a dedicated animal round. This post explains what’s different about it.

What’s different about this round

1. Everything is pointed at animals. Our incubation program was built to accommodate a wide range of charity types, and we’ve long hypothesised that more focused rounds, where the approach is tailored to a specific type of charity’s needs, will increase our hit-rate of field-leading organizations. This round we put that hypothesis to the test: Our research process, our recruitment priorities, the program structure and curriculum, the program managers and the mentors are all being rebuilt around what animal charities specifically need rather than what works on average across cause areas.

2. We’re recommending frontier problems, not fully-scoped solutions. Historically our research team handed founders a specified intervention to implement. This round, mostly, we won’t. (More on this below).

3. Three funded months to explore. Because we’re recommending problems rather than fully-scoped solutions, you won’t submit a seed funding proposal at the end of the eight weeks. Instead you’ll submit an “exploration plan” for how you’ll immerse yourself in the stakeholder and industry landscape, and design and test candidate theories of change before choosing what to pilot. Stipends will continue throughout the three-month exploration phase, plus a dedicated grant to cover the costs involved (e.g. flights, contractors, materials). And if you already know what you want to build and scale, you don’t have to wait — you can submit for seed funding whenever you’re ready. The exploration phase is there to provide you the freedom to explore rather than having to submit a premature funding proposal bears little resemblance to your eventual plan and budget needs.

4. Time in San Francisco. As always, the program includes 2 mandatory weeks at the AIM office in London to spend time with your cohort and to immerse yourself in our community of entrepreneurs. But this time, that will be followed by several weeks in San Francisco, optional but strongly recommended, timed to overlap with EAG Bay Area and the Sentient Futures Summit. The point is (1) to test your early thinking on the movement’s thought leaders while it’s still cheap to change your mind, and (2) to inspire you to think bigger. All expenses paid, visa support available for the UK and US.

5. Aaron Boddy is helping run it. Aaron co-founded Shrimp Welfare Project through our program in 2021, having previously not thought much about shrimp at all. Today, SWP provides electrical stunners to dozens of shrimp producers in 9 countries, serving 11 retailers. They estimate that their work currently causes 6.5 billion shrimps per year to experience less suffering at the end of their lives. He has done the thing we’re asking founders to do in this next round: explore a neglected problem on the frontier of the animal movement and find and scale new solutions to help them by the billion.

6. Meeting a wider range of financial needs. It’s important to us that meeting financial needs isn’t a blocker to the best talent founding a charity. Our goal has always been to cover the program’s costs and provide stipends so program participants can focus on founding a charity. In practice, our guidelines and norms about these stipends and about founder salaries after the program have made it difficult for people higher financial needs to choose the charity founder path. To this end, we’re overhauling our stipend policy and founder salary guidance: We will actively encourage those with higher financial needs to request higher stipends, and we are committed to accommodating those requests where reasonable. Meanwhile we will continue to encourage people with lower needs (no dependents, low cost-of-living location) to ask for less so the difference goes to beneficiaries. We have an entire post on changes to AIM’s stipend and salary post coming next week.

7. Bigger ambition. We’ve incubated field-leading farmed animal charities before, including two that have been recommended by ACE. Given that we know this is possible and that impact is power-lawed, we are focusing all our effort on creating more field leaders. This means we’re not interested in incubating charities that, if successful, will merely inch the movement’s current trajectory forward. We want charities that shift what the movement thinks is possible.

More on “frontier problems”

Relative to causes like global health, animal welfare has far fewer well-evidenced, fully-scoped interventions that aren’t already being pursued extensively by existing actors. But the good news is that it has plenty of big problems that are eminently solvable and have strong willingness to pay from funders, industry or consumers to solve them. So the founder’s job becomes exploring the problem space and figuring out how to remove the pain point.

This is fairly typical of how for-profit founders and funders think: Knowing the exact solution from the outset matters less than finding a large-scale pain point with high willingness to pay. Backing talented founders with the resources to explore and test solutions makes for a winning investment.

We believe this change will be very exciting for some and very intimidating for others.

• Historically, because we’ve recommended relatively fully-scoped interventions, our applicants have naturally skewed towards people who find this attractive. These folks may find the more open-ended exploration process intimidating. To them we say: worry not! We will still plan to recommend some relatively fully-scoped solutions, as we have always done, so apply now!

• On the other hand, we suspect there is a large set of would-be superstar founders who have not applied to our program because they see exploring and finding a solution themselves as the most exciting part of entrepreneurship. To them we say: this program is perfect for you, so apply now!

The research process

Right now our research team is busy sourcing and assessing over 100 problems at the frontier of the movement and narrowing them to a recommended shortlist. We’ll be assessing each problem on factors like:

• The scale of potential addressable impact

• The economics and how conducive they are to cost-effective interventions

• The strength of the underlying evidence

• The stakeholder landscape (to what extent are there supportive actors / is the opposition surmountable / is the market formal / is regulation enforced?)

• Whether we can already see several plausible solutions worth testing

Illustrative examples we’re excited about

We’re far from locking in any recommendations, but what we can do is share some big picture categories that we’re excited about, going into the process. We won’t necessarily recommend frontier problems in all of these categories, and we’ll almost certainly recommend others. (Naturally, we’ll coordinate with the various other incubators working on animal welfare so that we play to our comparative advantages.)

Welfare tech

i.e. Developing new welfare technology, driving producer adoption of existing technology, or acting as an evaluator or certifier.

• Why it matters: technology can deliver welfare gains at scale without depending on sustained consumer behaviour change, which is extremely hard to achieve.

• Example: bringing in-ovo sexing to major Asian egg producers. The technology to sex embryos before hatch already exists and is being adopted in Europe following chick-culling bans, but the world’s largest egg-producing regions still cull day-old male chicks by the billion.

Enabling primary animal welfare research.

i.e. Getting more, better and faster actionable research produced, for instance by re-granting to academics with milestone-gated funding that pushes on timelines, methodology and relevance to implementers.^[1]

• Why it matters: many solutions can’t yet be designed or evaluated because the underlying science on what actually matters for different species’ welfare is underdeveloped.

• Example: commissioning research to identify which changes to farming practices would most improve juvenile fish welfare, so corporate and funder resources target the highest-impact reforms.

Talent meta-charities.

i.e. Moving new talent into the movement, helping organisations absorb it through management and onboarding support, or upskilling the people already here.

• Why it matters: senior judgment and management capacity, not money, is often the binding constraint on the movement’s growth.

• Example: a structured fellowship placing experienced industry operators into animal orgs, or management training built specifically for animal welfare leaders.

Neglected animal populations.

i.e. Crowding resources into a high-scale, low-attention population the way Shrimp Welfare Project did for farmed shrimp, and LEEP did for lead.

• Why it matters: some of the largest sources of animal suffering are also the most ignored. The first actor in gets to pick the lowest-hanging fruit and blaze a trail for others..

• Example: a welfare organisation for honeybees.

You don’t need to be an “animal person”

The previous post covers this at length, so briefly: you don’t need to be vegan, you don’t need an animal-movement background, and you don’t need to feel much when you see a chicken. You need to take seriously that factory farming is one of the biggest problems of our time, and be willing to follow the evidence on what will fix it.

Key dates and how to apply

The animal round

• Applications close 13th September. Apply here.

• Offers go out in December. Book club in January. Core program 1st February to 5th April 2027, followed by the three-month exploration phase and seed funding from July.

• Webinars (sign up):

  • 26th August with Steve Thompson on how the program works and how to tell if you’re a good fit.

  • 2nd September with Aaron Boddy on exploring frontier problems.

  • 9th September with Emma Stoks on the application and selection process.

• More detail on the program page.

But what about other cause areas?

We will be incubating charities working on health system strengthening, livelihoods and economic growth in H2 2027. You can apply for that program now as well (and there will be another opportunity to do so early next year).

Thanks for reading!

This taxonomy is written from AIM’s perspective, but it may be helpful more broadly:

• If you’re starting a new charity, incubating others, or doing charity idea research: The taxonomy gives you a structured way to think about which ideas to pursue, what founder profile fits, and what research and support each idea needs. This is the audience the rest of the post is most directly written for.

• If you’re at an established org: You can use the taxonomy two ways: (1) To categorize new programs, interventions or strategic pivots (which can be thought of like new charities) with implications for research, staffing and timelines; (2) To map your existing portfolio of interventions to different parts of the taxonomy, with implications for how to think about and manage each intervention.

• If you’re a funder or grantmaker: The taxonomy may help you think and communicate about how different kinds of organizations will have different journeys to impact (different timelines, milestones and risk profiles), and why holding them to the same standards can sometimes be counterproductive.

1. Why a Taxonomy Matters

• Ambitious Impact (AIM)’s incubated charities works across many fields and delivery models -- spanning malnutrition treatment clinics in Northern Nigeria, the United Kingdom’s animal product import policy, and charity fundraising platforms.

• Categories structure our thinking. They allow us to identify key differences between different non-profit ideas and what those differences imply for our operations (e.g., research, recruitment, program training, and incubation support).

• We have tended to default to overly simplistic categories (”human vs. animal ideas” or “direct delivery vs. policy”) leading to poor decisions. For instance:

  • Pairing a new founder with an alumni mentor because both work on animal welfare, when the founder is running a corporate campaign and the mentor ran a direct service provision charity. Often the type of intervention, not the cause, determines what advice is most relevant

  • Applying the same research template to every idea, when the main uncertainty for some ideas is whether the intervention works when executed (e.g. deworming) and for others it’s whether you can convince government to prioritise the issue (e.g. banning lead paint)

  • Investing a similar amount of effort on the CEA for a replication of a global health direct delivery intervention and something far more speculative and harder to quantify ex ante

• A better taxonomy will help each of our teams in different ways:

  • For the research team, it will guide which research areas1 to prioritize, or what to focus on when evaluating a charity idea

  • For the recruitment team, it will tell us us what founder profiles to look for

  • For the program team, what content and support to provide during the incubation program and beyond, depending on the type of organization

  • For future founders, it will help assess whether they are a good fit for an idea, what to focus on in strategic planning, and what their timeline to impact may look like.

Our new taxonomy:

• Our taxonomy has three components (the latter two are the more interesting and new bits):

  • A two-by-two classification of ideas by target outcome and mechanism

  • A spectrum of how much of a track record there is for the charity idea vs. how exploratory it is (explore vs. exploit)

  • A spectrum of whether the core challenge is executing vs. persuading

• This taxonomy isn’t perfect — the categories aren’t mutually exclusive or collectively exhaustive, and many ideas sit across boundaries. All models are wrong, but some are useful. The value is in having a shared language and forcing more structured strategic thinking.

• We recommend using this as a big-picture framework, rather than getting bogged down in the details of how categories are defined and which category a given charity idea falls into. Use it to the extent its helpful. Ignore it where it isn’t.

2. Target Outcome × Mechanism

2.1. The dimensions

2.1.1. Target outcome

The target outcome is the impact the charity aims to achieve. Some of our categories refer to aspects of wellbeing directly (health, mental health), while others refer to intermediate outcomes that drive wellbeing (education, economic development). In animal welfare, it might be a subset of animals (chickens vs. fishes, farmed vs. wild).

In our two-by-two, target outcomes include physical health, mental health, livelihoods, climate change, farmed animal welfare, wild animal welfare, biorisk, artificial intelligence, democracy and governance, and meta-science. There are many different defensible ways one could divide these up. We also have a category for organizations that work towards a number of these outcomes (e.g. effective giving organizations that raise money for a number of orgs).

These groupings aren’t clean-cut (for instance family planning could sit under physical health, mental health or livelihoods depending on preferred framing), but they’re useful because they map roughly to how funders, evaluators and academic literature organize themselves.

2.1.2. Mechanism

The mechanism is how the charity achieves that impact or the type of work it does. We group interventions by their theory of change: a direct delivery charity provides goods or services to beneficiaries; a policy charity works with regulators to change rules; a market shaping charity corrects market failures through incentives; and so on. Two charities targeting the same outcome can use very different mechanisms.

We have ten broad mechanisms, grouped into four broad buckets:

These buckets are far from clean. For example, technical assistance can fall under provider engagement, meta-charity, or system-level change depending on whether the recipient is a clinic, a charity, or a government ministry. Our aim is not to force every idea into a perfect box, but to identify the most useful reference class for research, recruitment, founder fit, and support. Meanwhile, organizations can sit across multiple categories at once or change over their lifespan. We suspect many example orgs may disagree with where they’ve been placed.

2.2. Implications

3. The Execute-Persuade Spectrum

3.1. The spectrum

Target outcome and mechanism are descriptively useful (telling us what a charity does and how) but they don’t always capture the most important differences between ideas or organizations.

One of the most significant dimensions on which charity ideas differ is the degree of control the organizations have over steps along the theory of change. Rather than classifying ideas by the type of work they do, the execute–persuade spectrum assesses the degree to which success depends on the charity’s own operational execution versus influencing external actors to change their activities. The key diagnostic question is: who needs to act for impact to occur, and what’s preventing them?

Consider two health policy charity ideas:

• One aims to secure bans on leaded paint (e.g., LEEP). They work with regulators, who face informational and technical barriers, but have the motivation to act. They provide evidence and technical assistance that make taking action possible.

• Another charity aims to increase taxes on tobacco products (e.g., Concentric Policies). They face organised industry opposition, must build coalitions and persuade policymakers to shift policy in spite of entrenched interests.

• Both are health policy charity ideas, but the first is closer to a logistics challenge, and the second to a political campaign. These charity ideas each require different priorities when it comes to research focus, founder profile and support pre and post-launch.

3.1.1. Detour: Even execution-dominant ideas involve persuasion

It’s worth clarifying that even execution-dominant ideas involve persuasion. This is usually targeted at individuals or entities with operational, rather than political portfolios. For instance, a charity may need to persuade beneficiaries to take up a service, or acquire permission to operate in a hospital from an administrator. This type of persuasion looks more like behaviour change than advocacy. Shrimp Welfare Project needs farmers to operate shrimp stunners correctly; Ansh needs kangaroo mother care nurses to follow treatment protocols; Notify Health needs parents to respond to notifications. This kind of persuasion is qualitatively different from convincing a regulator to prioritise your issue or overcoming organised industry opposition. The key crux is about adoption and compliance within a system the charity has direct access to, not about shifting the priorities or behaviour of powerful external actors.

Meanwhile, execution-dominant charities often eventually need to move toward the persuasion end as they seek truly massive scale, for instance by pursuing government adoption of their intervention.

..back to defining the spectrum:

We’ve divided the spectrum into four archetypical positions. These are not rigid categories – many charity ideas will have defining features of more than one position, and may move along the spectrum as they change strategy.

3.2. Collaborative vs. adversarial persuasion

As charities’ move towards the persuade end of the spectrum they’re more likely to encounter stronger opposition/gatekeepers2. When they face significant opposition, a key strategic question arises: should the charity take a collaborative approach or an adversarial one?

A collaborative approach calls for relationship-builders who can earn trust and find common ground with reluctant actors (e.g. ARMoR). An adversarial approach calls for campaigners comfortable with confrontation and public pressure (e.g. ICAW).

Collaborative and adversarial charities operating in the same space can be powerfully complementary – the “good cop, bad cop” dynamic. An outside campaigner applying pressure can make an inside collaborator’s job easier, and vice versa (e.g. Global Food Partners and Asia Accountability Initiative when it comes to the transition to cage-free eggs).

3.3 Implications

• Vetting and fleshing out the charity idea: For execution-dominant ideas, the key question is how significant the effect size is per beneficiary and whether the charity can solve the operational hurdles to reaching beneficiaries cheaply and at scale. For persuasion-dominant ideas, more energy will be spent on assessing tractability, by mapping the goals, priorities, incentives and resources of relevant stakeholders and institutions. In the persuade end of the spectrum, understanding how decisions are made and what formal and informal rules govern decision-making is important.

• Scoping the charity’s focus: For persuasion-dominant ideas, the high fixed cost of building a stakeholder network and the unpredictable timing of policy windows often favour specializing in a single jurisdiction (e.g. UK government) and becoming the go-to expert on a topic there (e.g. farmed animal welfare policy) who can pick from a range of sensible reforms to advocate for as opportunities arise (e.g. policy windows), as opposed to pursuing a narrow ask (e.g. banning low-welfare imports) across a wide range of jurisdictions. This means that charity idea researchers and founders should likely focus more on picking the right jurisdiction where there are multiple highly impactful and realistic policy asks, instead of picking the right policy ask to push for internationally.

• Founder fit: As ideas move from the execution end to the persuasion end of the spectrum, the founder profile shifts from operational to relational. At the execution end, founders need to be operators: skilled at logistics, driven to continuously and iteratively improve a repetitive process, able to identify which part of the intervention delivers most of the value and double down on that while cutting the fat. As you move toward the persuasion end, you instead may require persuasive communication skills, social and emotional intelligence or charisma (depending on the idea), and a relevant existing network may be very valuable. Where the landscape is contested and the approach is adversarial, founders will likely need to be comfortable with confrontation and resilient under opposition.

• Support and mentorship: At the execution end, the most valuable support is operational: case studies, pilot design, and cost modelling. At the persuasion end, it’s stakeholder mapping, campaign strategy, and media skills. The most helpful mentors will have experience overcoming your dominant constraint, even if in a completely different domain.

• Branding and positioning: At the execution end, org name, website and public profile often matter less. In some cases beneficiaries may never interact with the org’s brand directly (e.g. if they engage only with an implementation partner). At the persuasion end, they matter a great deal: charities are asking powerful actors to trust them and take them seriously, first impressions are hard to undo, and public-facing communications can be weaponised by opponents (in some cases, organizations may need to keep their plans and true intentions private).

• Charity journey to impact: Persuasion-dominant ideas may require an upfront phase of credibility-building – earning brand recognition and trust, and building relationships and coalitions with key stakeholders – before they’ll gain traction. This often takes years, with long periods of apparent stagnation before a window of opportunity opens. Pushing for early traction as you would with an execution-dominant charity idea can sometimes be actively harmful, when it leads to rushed, low-quality engagements that burn bridges with the actors the charity needs to influence. Founders and funders need to be comfortable with long-term bets and harder-to-measure progress.

A charity’s position on the spectrum need not be not fixed. Many execution-dominant charities that achieve proof of concept will eventually need to move toward the persuasion end as they seek truly massive scale, for instance by pursuing government adoption of their intervention. Founders and funders should anticipate this shift and the change in skills and strategy it demands.

4. The Explore–Exploit Spectrum

4.1. The spectrum

The second spectrum addresses a different question: how much of the model is already proven versus how much still needs to be figured out? Accordingly, ideas can be characterised along a spectrum between exploration and exploitation.3

At the exploit end of the spectrum:

• Well-developed, concrete intervention with a strong track record / evidence base

• The charity’s job is primarily localization, implementation precision, and careful expansion: taking something that works and scaling it, or bringing it to a new context

• Narrower confidence intervals: we’re relatively sure it can work and know roughly how cost-effective it can be

• Examples: Clear Solutions, Notify Health (a replication of Suvita, in Nigeria), First Embrace (a replication of Ansh, in Nigeria)

At the explore end of the spectrum:

• Requires significant research and design before a viable model emerges

• Wider confidence intervals (“big if true”): High upside if successful, but lower probability that it will (and low certainty in our estimates of upside and probability of success)

• In practice, the charity is more likely to deviate significantly from how it was originally envisaged

• Examples: Fish Welfare Initiative, ARMoR, Centre for Effective Aid Policy

4.2 Implications

• Vetting and fleshing out the charity idea: For exploit ideas, research emphasis is on validating the evidence, track-record and cost-effectiveness of previous work, and figuring out whether the target context is sufficiently similar to where the intervention has been proven. For exploratory ideas, research emphasis is on whether there is good reason to believe this could work, what key assumptions and known-unknowns the organisation will need to test early and identifying promising paths to consider exploring first. When researching exploratory ideas, people will hit the limits of what can be achieved through desk research sooner. Because animal welfare is a less mature field than global health and development, ideas in this space will be more exploratory on average.

• Founder fit.

  • Exploit ideas need founders who are good at (and excited by)..

    • Figuring out what made something work so they can replicate the ‘secret sauce’ and cut the least valuable ingredients (i.e. 80:20 it). Which parts of the process don’t add value? Which steps can you safely cut to get to scale faster?

    • Building systems, processes and teams that can deliver consistently at high volume

    • Not just copy-pasting, but adapting: paying close attention to the cultural, institutional and logistical differences between contexts, and mitigating what could prevent the model from working and tapping into the new setting’s comparative advantages

    • Finding step changes: not just incremental improvement but reimagining how the intervention is delivered

  • Explore ideas need founders who are good at (and excited by):

    • Navigating ambiguity and charting a path where no playbook exists

    • Balancing the tension between research and action, i.e. spending enough time learning and validating without getting stuck in analysis paralysis

    • Being willing to pivot when evidence demands it, but sufficiently disciplined to test tactics properly before moving on

    • Persisting for years without major wins or even identifying a promising intervention (while being disciplined enough to shut down when the search stops looking promising or it becomes clear you’re not the right team to crack it)

    • Spending significant time on the ground (if the charity directly serves beneficiaries there) – early exploratory work is messy and hard to delegate

  • Both ends of the spectrum require creativity and innovation, but the scope is different.

  • Founders who are less risk tolerant tend to find exploit ideas more appealing and vice versa.

  • As explore ideas mature into proven interventions, the job shifts from discovery to implementation. Founders cannot know at the outset whether they will be a good fit for the eventual intervention, and so may end up hiring someone better suited to execute it, and may move on themselves.

• Information value: Opportunities and obligations. Exploratory ideas can generate impact beyond the charity’s direct work: positive updates on tractability attract implementers and funders (e.g. FWI/SWP normalizing aquatic animal work, LEEP’s success and the subsequent ~$100M directed toward lead) while negative updates can redirect future investment away from dead ends. This means the information value alone can make pursuing an uncertain idea worthwhile – and sometimes, the currency of early success is understanding, not direct impact. It also means exploratory charities may have obligations beyond trying to build an impactful charity: They may need to invest in M&E to resolve specific key open questions raised when they first launched and they will need to put in the work to share what they learn with the ecosystem^[5]

• Charity journey to impact: Exploit ideas often lend themselves to quicker early progress against clear milestones: pilot planning, pilot launch and monitoring, iterating to improve quality, scaling to reduce costs. Exploratory ideas can easily need 2-5 years to find a model that works at all. Sometimes, the reason a charity idea doesn’t have an existing track record to exploit is that it is harder to measure or has long feedback loops. This makes it harder for founders to know whether they’re on the right track and harder to make the case for continued funding. It may be helpful for exploratory charities to have larger seed grants so they don’t face unhelpful pressure to move from explore to exploit prematurely.

5. Conclusion

Taken together, the three elements in this taxonomy give a richer picture of what any given charity idea actually requires. A charity idea’s position on each of these three dimensions has implications for how it should be researched, who should lead it, what support will be most valuable, and what success looks like on what timeline.

This taxonomy is imperfect and will need refinement over time, but having a shared language for the differences that matter most enables more structured thinking and reduces the risk of defaulting to overly simplistic categories that lead to poor decisions.

Curious about what this means for our global health and development work? The short answer: nothing’s changing^[1].

A program built to incubate transformational animal charities

This is the best-resourced and most fit-for-purpose version of AIM’s program we’ve run for animal founders. Our charity incubation program was built to accommodate a wide range of types of charities, and we’ve long hypothesized that running rounds with a tighter focus could enable an even higher hit-rate of field-leading charities.

By focusing this round entirely on animal welfare, we can tailor the research process, founder recruitment efforts, and program content and support to what animal charities specifically need, instead of what works on average across cause areas. The cohort itself will also be more valuable than in a mixed round: every founder will be working on adjacent problems and at a similar stage in their charity’s journey, which makes for more useful peer support and network sharing, and a stronger sense of building momentum together.

Why now

1. The bottlenecks are easing. Until recently we were limited to incubating ~2–4 animal charities per year, held back mostly by volume of top talent and mid-stage funding. Both are loosening up. Our recent cohort saw a particularly high number of top applicants interested in founding animal charities, and major grantmakers have significantly more to deploy than they did a few years ago — the EA Animal Welfare Fund alone has had more funding allocated to it in the past six months than in the previous six years.

2. The intervention pipeline needs filling. The most cost-effective and evidence-based interventions in the field (like cage-free corporate campaigns) have been pursued hard already, and the “what comes next” pipeline is looking thin. This is striking given how little of the opportunity space has been explored compared to a cause like global health. The low-hanging fruit hasn’t been picked because barely anyone’s in the orchard: the movement is talent-constrained, and the people in it are mostly long-time insiders working from a shared playbook rather than outsiders bringing fresh eyes. We need to find the next ten things that could become what cage-free has been (or 10x bigger and better).

3. An exciting partnership. Aaron Boddy (co-founder of Shrimp Welfare Project) has been thinking independently about how to bring bolder, more ambitious animal charities into the world. So have we. Aaron has done what we’re asking these founders to do: bring a fresh perspective to identify, test and scale a bold new intervention. Pairing that with AIM’s incubation infrastructure and track record gives the charities in this round a better shot at achieving the kind of impact that changes what the movement thinks is possible.

You don’t need to be an “animal person”

If you care about doing the most good but have been quietly assuming an animal-focused round isn’t for you, please consider these common misconceptions:

You don’t need to be vegan: Some of the most effective people in animal welfare aren’t. Changing your personal consumer choices is one of many ways to help animals.

You don’t need an animal-movement background: You don’t need to know what the Open Wing Alliance or Prop 12 is or have read any of the canon. The charities that are likely to come out of this cohort aren’t likely to look like activism or corporate campaigning – they’ll be more likely to look like reshaping the incentives that industry responds to, bringing new technology to market, or influencing rulemakers. Business, consulting, science, policy and operational skills are as useful as years inside the movement, often more so. One of our recent animal founders told us he didn’t know what The Humane League was until he’d already founded. That’s fine!

You don’t need to feel a strong emotional pull toward animals: Plenty of people working in this space, including founders of some of the field’s most successful animal charities, buy the moral case for fixing factory farming intellectually without feeling much when they see a chicken^[2]. That being said, if your sense of the case is “yeah, I guess, on paper” rather than “this is by far one of the most important issues in the world” then it’s probably not a good fit.

This doesn’t have to fit into your current career narrative: Some of the founders we’re most excited about only started taking animal welfare seriously in the last year or two, after coming across the numbers and finding they couldn’t unsee them. We welcome newcomers to the issue just as much as those who have been animal-pilled for a decade.

The one thing you do need: The conviction that this matters and the appetite to do something about it.

Why coming to this fresh is genuinely useful

The animal movement is small and tight-knit, which is one of its strengths, but it also means the field tends to converge on a relatively small set of shared playbooks. Most people working in animal welfare have been working in animal welfare for a long time, and the ideas that get pursued tend to be the ones that look reasonable from inside that tradition. That’s part of why so many enormous, tractable problems remain almost untouched. Shrimp Welfare Project succeeded partly because its founders were willing to take seriously a population most advocates hadn’t.

Outsiders bring things this field is short on: fresh eyes to spot new solutions, and skill sets the movement is light on (e.g. the kind of person who can bring new technology to market, influence policy, speak the language of big corporations and sell them on changes they didn’t know they wanted, or design a rigorous field study).

To be clear: being an “outsider” to the animal movement doesn’t mean being dismissive of it. The founders we want take the existing movement seriously and learn its hard-won knowledge quickly.

What we’re looking to incubate

AIM has incubated field-leading farmed animal charities before, including two ACE-recommended ones, but in this round we’re less interested in inching the current trajectory of the animal movement forward, and more interested in charities that could shift what the movement thinks is possible. Shrimp Welfare Project is a good example of this case: it got the movement to pay attention to an overlooked population and found tractable ways to help them by the billion by being open to things that many animal advocates would never consider.

Recent changes to the funding landscape influence which charity ideas are more promising to incubate right now: The potential of charities to scale (larger and faster) is more valuable than it was. Established animal funders have recently increased the amount of money they have to deploy each year. Meanwhile new funders are emerging. Movement leaders are calling for existing actors to increase their capacity to deploy funding effectively, and for new organizations to be founded so we have a strong pipeline of organizations that can put more funding to work in the near future.

Want to learn more?

• Visit this round’s landing page

• Sign up for our next live Q&A webinar