Program Manager, Charity Entrepreneurship

Application deadline: 27th October 2024, 11:59 pm London UK time. Applications will be processed on a rolling basis, so early applications are encouraged.

Expected Hours: Full-time (35 hours per week)

Location: London (strongly preferred; visa sponsorship and moving costs support available) or remote 

Compensation: Based on needs and location, the typical range in line with our salaries across the organisation is £40,000-50,000 gross per annum.

Start date: As soon as possible, ideally January 2025

How to apply: Complete our initial application form by clicking Apply

For more information about this role, and to ask any questions you may have, please sign up to attend our Q&A webinar with Samantha Kagel, Chief Programs Officer, on October 16th at 3pm BST.

We also recommend reading through our applicant resources.

In Short

Our prior Program Manager has moved up to the role of Chief Programs Officer on our executive team. As such, we are looking for a deeply impact-motivated Program Manager to run our flagship Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program. In this role, you will train, advise, and pair exceptional potential founders through a twice-annual, two-month training program. This culminates in supporting the founders through a seed fundraising round and the launch of new charities delivering exceptionally cost-effective programs at scale across global development.

Our program has incubated more than 40 new charities over the past five years, with many receiving recognition from charity evaluators such as GiveWell and Animal Charity Evaluators as field-leading organisations.

About Ambitious Impact (AIM)

Ambitious Impact (AIM) is a growing nonprofit organisation running training and incubation programs aimed at establishing and supporting a flourishing high-impact, effectiveness-focused philanthropic ecosystem, with a lively community office in East London.

More information is available on our website.

About the Role

The Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program is a twice-a-year intensive training program enabling cohorts of 8-16 exceptionally talented international entrepreneurs and nonprofit professionals to launch outstandingly cost-effective, evidence-based new nonprofits in the space of two months. 

The program chiefly consists of a twice-annual sequence.

• Preparing the upcoming cohort and running the initial book club where participants deep dive into our handbook and the recommended idea reports
• The two-month program itself, which includes a 2+ week in-person section and consists of training and coaching participants to select co-founders and ideas
• Post-program support to the new founders, providing ongoing guidance and facilitating connections with our networks of mentors and alumni.
• Evaluation and improvement work for the program itself, and the post-program support and evaluation plus improvements period. In between, the team 

The Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program team chiefly consists of ~two FTE preparing and running the program and interacting regularly with the recruitment team (for finding and selecting the ideal program candidates), the research team (for selecting and adapting the ideal charity ideas for the program participants), and the operations team (for supporting the incubated projects immediately upon launch through the program). This role reports to Samantha, our Chief Programs Officer, and works closely together with Steve, the second Program Manager who focuses mostly on participant training and coaching.

Specific Responsibilities

The exact %s of these will depend on what will be most impactful and the interests and skill areas of the successful candidate, but will likely look something like this:

Direct Program Management - 40%

• During the preparation phase:
• Clearly and proactively managing timelines and communications with internal staff, external partners, and program participants
• Improving systems such that running the program becomes more efficient and effective round over round
• During the program phase for 8 weeks twice a year (February to March and August to September):
• Facilitating training sessions - discussions, presentations, workshops - with participantsbased on best practices
• Providing key feedback on participant project work on short timelines, including on materials such as cost-effectiveness analyses, geographic assessments, theories of change, budgets, pilot plans etc.
• Mentoring participants directly in 1:1 calls and chats
• Guiding participants through two intense in-person weeks in our London office, including in their co-founder and charity idea testing and decisions
• Towards the end and immediately following the program:
• Helping participants develop our raw researched top nonprofit ideas into organisations ready to implement a first pilot within mere months of graduating
• Advising participants on key decisions regarding their charity and providing encouragement and support to get their project proposals across the finish line in time for the seed network funding circle to award seed grants
• Connecting graduates with suitable mentors from our network and identifying, engaging, and onboarding new mentors

Alumni/Community Management & Development - 40%

• Identifying, championing, and, where suitable, delegating post-program support initiatives that would improve charity outcomes (e.g., speed, likelihood, and size of impact)
• Creating opportunities for connection, collaboration, and cross-learning of our growing alumni and extended community
• Managing a growing extended community of mentors, advisors, and service providers that could support our charities at different stages of their development (e.g., seed, pilot, scale-up, external evaluation)
• Managing shared digital knowledge and communication bases like our resource hub and 300+ member slack community
• Evaluating opportunities and focusing on the most impactful ones

Program Improvement / M&E - 20%

• Carrying out and improving our internal program monitoring & evaluation:
• Collecting and assessing feedback from participants and alumni
• Prioritising areas for improvement
• Brainstorming and deciding on solutions
• Implementing or delegating improvements
• Identifying priority gaps in program curriculum and structure based on M&E, proactive research, and later charity outcomes
• Designing or adapting existing content, including applied projects, workshops, or written material, to support program goals

Future Growth Trajectories

This is a senior role within AIM, but future growth and expertise development trajectories for excelling hires could look like:

• Focusing on charity strategy development and advising: a hire with more experience and expertise in launching, piloting, and scaling could play a more active hand in revamping our content and mentoring charities on their strategies from the outset; i.e. advising closely on plans, giving more feedback on early project plans, mentoring directly post-program, etc.
• Leaning into building out a thriving alumni ecosystem: optimising our post-program coordination, expanding our partnership work, spending more work on post-program content and community, coordinating our networks of alumni and mentors, creating digital/in-person events, and other strategies to help our charities and their staff reach & expand their potential
• Becoming an expert in M&E: playing a heavier role in the impact assessment & optimisation of Charity Entrepreneurship as the key impact arm of AIM. This would involve more collaboration with our research and recruitment teams to improve our systems and feedback loops, and/or our M&E specialist working to create early internal evaluations of our charities and later external evaluations
• (At some point) going through our Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program themselves as a participant, bringing all the built skills and expertise to bear in their own nonprofit

About You

The role is most suitable for a mid-level professional (3-5+ years of experience) with a background in running programs or nonprofit organisations. An ideal candidate may bring experience in launching and implementing new or early-stage programs or in conducting earlier stage intervention research or monitoring & evaluation work, particularly in LMIC contexts. The applied experience will be invaluable in training, pairing, and advising the next generations of incubatees who are aiming to launch some of the most impactful nonprofits in the world.

We expect excellent candidates will meet many (but not all) of the criteria below. We encourage you to apply even if you do not meet all of the listed characteristics. In the past, we've offered positions to applicants who demonstrated strong overall potential, providing training to address skill gaps. We prioritise high general ability, a strong work ethic, and alignment with our values, methods, and approach to maximising global impact over specific prior work experience or backgrounds. We sketch a picture of potential ideal candidates to give a more concrete sense of what particularly strong candidates might look like, not to discourage interested readers from applying.

The Ideal Candidate:

• Personality traits:
• Conscientious and organised
• Has a bias toward action
• High emotional intelligence
• Calm under pressure when others around them may feel stressed out (i.e. program participants making important decisions)
• High standards and a constant desire to improve
• Excited to ruthlessly focus on only the most effective tasks
• Highly collaborative, low personal ego
• Keen to give and receive feedback
• Quick and self-driven learner
• Excited to advise and learn across a range of cause areas and interventions (global health & development, animal welfare, policy…)
• Competencies / abilities:
• Highly organised and autonomous, able to run projects with many moving and constantly changing parts from start to finish and call in external input or support where needed
• Generalist, with a good balance of “people” and “project” skills
• Can sensitively deliver critical feedback and nudge participants into more impactful directions while leaving them feeling optimistic and motivated
• High cultural sensitivity (our participants are from all over the world) and ability to flexibly communicate with a wide range of stakeholders (e.g., potential candidates, mentors, funders)
• Able to analyse and synthesise information from a range of quantitative and qualitative sources (e.g., putting together ideal co-founder pairings on the basis of numerical information from surveys and program project performance ratings plus qualitative information from 1 on 1s)
• Experience / technical skills:
• Interest in and knowledge about the charity sector and a sense of key factors that make organisations successful
• Deeply results-focused and impact-minded
• Some prior experience with interventions and sectors from our key cause areas of global health & development, animal welfare, and policy, or occasional exploratory cause areas (e.g., biosecurity and meta charities)
• Has some basic familiarity with a range of sources of (especially empirical, quantitative) evidence and can (learn to) both teach and advise on them

Desirable Skills and Experience Include:

• Experience delivering programs in nonprofit or government settings, ideally in LMICs
• Experience in founding or working at early-stage organisations
• Foundational (empirical, nonprofit) research literacy
• Basic quantitative and spreadsheet skills
• Knowledge of Global Health & Development and/or Animal Welfare and/or the EA space and an existing network in one or more of these

What We Offer

• A job with a large, tangible impact on the world - your work will attract and select the founders of new field-leading charities and for-profit companies, as well as high-impact researchers and AIM staff
• High levels of intellectual challenge, autonomy, variety, and learning on the job
• An informal, fun, warm, and supportive work environment with high talent density. Our office in East London houses about 50% of our staff, dozens of charity founders and staff, and hosts a range of co-working opportunities and social events for the wider impactful entrepreneurship London community
• Become a part of our international network of ambitious, driven entrepreneurs and highly talented philanthropic professionals
• A true start-up culture, including low bureaucracy, a quick and collaborative work spirit, and high levels of talent density
• Significant opportunities to attend events and conferences to represent AIM, including international travel

Benefits

• A flexible working schedule, 30 paid days off per year, and unlimited sick leave
• UK visa sponsorship, if needed, as well as support with moving costs if relocating to London
• An annual costs-covered retreat to bring our whole team together to celebrate our achievements
• A workspace in our vibrant central London office, which is a hub for our program alumni and high-impact organisations/professionals 
• Parental, dependents, and compassionate leave schemes
• A range of other benefits, including a payroll giving scheme, staff tenure donation scheme, contributions towards professional development and IT costs, and a workplace pension
• We are open to discussing specific personalised perks or benefits that may enhance your work experience

Application Process

Our application processes aim to be highly predictive, time-effective, and informative for you. Our process consists only of stages that our best evidence suggests are predictive of success on the job (such as test tasks) rather than more common but less predictive stages (such as cover letters). We only invite candidates to the next stage if we think they have a good chance of passing it, and take care to choose tasks and interview questions that will also give you a good sense of the role and our culture.

Applicants will be asked to complete the following stages:

1. Submitting our general application form (30 minutes to 1 hour),
2. A general test task (2-3 hours) with the top 10 to 30 candidates,
3. An initial interview (15 minutes) with the top 10-20 candidates,
4. A test task simulating the work you would do in your role (2-3 hours) with the top 5-15 candidates,
5. A final, more in-depth interview (~60 minutes) with the final 2-5 candidates.

We will also conduct a reference check before making an offer. Each stage typically takes 1-2 weeks from the end of the application deadline, and we hope to make an offer within ~8 weeks of the application deadline. Ideally, the candidate will begin onboarding as soon as possible after an offer is made. We strongly prefer candidates to join the team by January 2025, but we would consider a different date for an ideal candidate.

​We are committed to fostering a culture of inclusion and encourage individuals with diverse backgrounds and experiences to apply. We especially encourage applications from women, people of colour, and neurodivergent people excited about contributing to our mission. AIM is an equal opportunity employer. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability or have any other related questions about applying, please contact [email removed - click apply for more details]

A Final Word

Thank you for taking the time to consider applying for this role. If you do not think this specific role is a good fit for you but are excited to work with AIM, please feel free to fill in the same application form as a general expression of interest in working at AIM. Alternatively, consider signing up for our newsletter to be notified of future vacancies and sharing this job description within your network with other potential applicants.

For any questions, reach out to [email removed - click apply for more details].