We are hiring an Administrative Officer!

Summary

Rethink Charity is looking for a highly skilled, tech-focused generalist to aid us in a variety of tasks supporting our two main projects: RC Forward, Canada’s high-impact donation platform, and our fiscal sponsorship program for promising projects. This is a mostly remote, full-time position open to candidates residing anywhere in Canada or the US.

Key details

• Location: Remote, open to candidates in Canada or the US

• Starting compensation (including benefits): $55,000 - $64,000 CAD

• Role type: full-time (35 hrs/wk)

• Start date: ASAP. June 1, 2022 is our goal, but sooner if we can get through the application process faster (and it works for the applicant), later if we need to extend deadlines.

• Deadline: April 3, 2022. Rolling thereafter.

About us

Rethink Charity (RC) has incubated and hosted many projects since we launched in 2016, including Students for High-Impact Charity (SHIC), which has since suspended operations, Rethink Priorities, which has spun off to become a highly regarded effective altruism (EA) aligned research organization, and EA Giving Tuesday, a successful community building and fundraising event held annually.

Our current primary focus, however, is RC Forward, an online donation platform that Canadians have used to donate over $16 million to high-impact charities since 2017. We are turning our focus to outreach in 2022, after spending the majority of 2021 building an entirely new CRM system to handle donations and improve the donor experience. 

In addition to RC Forward, our fiscal sponsorship program has seen incredible growth since late 2020. It not only allows us to support promising projects that otherwise may struggle to receive resources, but also provides RC with sustainable funding for our entire organization.

What we’re looking for

Our organization is one of humble beginnings, but our projects are outgrowing our scrappy four-person team, so we’re looking for a fifth full-time team member to add some bandwidth to the mix. But with small teams come great (and varied) responsibilities, so we are seeking an experienced generalist who is versatile and can diligently complete a wide variety of tasks and projects and successfully juggle competing priorities.

The things we need the most help with are tech-based, so experienced website (WordPress, PHP) administration skills are a must. Secondarily, experience with data management and quality assurance (QA) will almost certainly play into your weekly routine.

The job is mostly remote (as is our entire team) but we do like to meet in person a few times a year, so living in the Pacific Northwest is a plus, and anywhere in the Pacific Time Zone is the next best. However, anyone living in Canada or the US will be considered.

We’re looking for someone with a cultural fit and a personal alignment with EA. At RC, we have long characterized ourselves as the “every-person’s EA org,” in that it’s our goal to take complex ideas and make them palatable for a wider range of people. We pride ourselves on our high emotional intelligence as a team, which comes in handy when working with everyday donors.

Other qualities we’d look for in our ideal candidate

• Detail-oriented, organized, and conscientious. You feel confident in your ability to keep on top of a large number of open items and next steps while making sure nothing gets dropped.

• Inclined to take full responsibility and ownership over the outcome of a task.

• Optimization-focused; you constantly seek out improvements and question the status quo in pursuit of a better solution or system.

• A clear communicator, and not afraid to ask lots of questions to check your understanding.

• Service-minded and comfortable with some amount of repetition in your work; motivated by the idea of doing whatever will have the most impact, even when it’s not glamorous.

• Can work independently with minimal guidance, as well as collaboratively in a team.

Role requirements

• You live in Canada or the US.

• You have 3 to 5 years experience in operations/administration or as a reliable small-team generalist.

• You have experience with website management (Wordpress, PHP).

• You are familiar with effective altruism concepts and are excited about putting these ideas into practice.

And here are some qualifications that would be great (these are not required):

• You are located in the Pacific Time Zone, or are able to work on this schedule.

• Familiarity or experience with bookkeeping (Quickbooks)

• Familiarity or experience with data analysis/QA

• Familiarity or experience with Salesforce

• Familiarity or experience with Google Sheets and Excel

• Familiarity or experience with Google Ads/Analytics/Optimize

• Familiarity or experience with social media marketing

• Comfort with donor communications

• Familiarity or experience with productivity software (we primarily use Slack, Asana, Notion, and Google Docs/Workspace)

• Ability to speak and write in French at an intermediate level

Don’t meet all of our requirements but think this is the perfect job for you? In the application form, please pitch us why!

The application process

• Please fill out this form. To be guaranteed consideration, the deadline is April 3, 2022. Applications are rolling thereafter.

• Top candidates will be asked to complete one or two video or in-person interviews with our team.

• Finalists may be asked to complete one to three paid trial tasks.

• The top candidate will be offered a 3-month paid probationary position to determine long-term fit.

Please also note that this application will take approximately 30 minutes to complete. There is no advantage to completing the application before the deadline, we will consider all applications equally.

We’re also aware that factors like gender, race, and socioeconomic background can affect people’s willingness to apply for roles for which they meet many but not all the suggested attributes. We’d especially like to encourage those from underrepresented backgrounds to apply.

Thank you for your interest in working at Rethink Charity!

Spotlight interview: Marisa Jurczyk

“I’m a generalist at heart and really like being able to work on a variety of causes. I haven’t felt particularly attached to any one cause area, so I’m most excited about projects that are broadly good for many worthy causes.”

Former Operations Officer Marisa Jurczyk recently left Rethink Charity to pursue an exciting new opportunity: a Master of Public Policy degree at Georgetown University. 

We are a small team, and Marisa worked closely with us all. Dedicated, kind, and creative, Marisa approached her role with integrity and enthusiasm.  Her drive to improve is inspiring, and her departure from the team is a significant transition for us. As we dive into the next chapter for Rethink Charity, we benefit from Marisa’s initiative every day, from the virtual coworking space she set up, to the thorough portfolio of bus-proofing guides she put together so that her many projects can be learned by others, to the automation of numerous processes from the small to the significant. 

Marisa cares deeply about improving the world and puts careful thought into the actions she takes to achieve this. So, as much as we’ll miss her, we’re excited to witness her apply her perspectives in this new stage of her life. 

Before she left, I interviewed Marisa about how she came to work in operations and how this work has shaped her accomplishments and perspectives. 

Megan: How did you come to work in operations? 

Marisa: I started working as a Student Leader Coordinator for Rethink Charity’s Students for High-Impact Charity project back in 2017. Not long after, 80,000 Hours had written their post about the operations management bottleneck, and I was excited by the idea of it. I’d done some work earlier for my university on event planning and realized I liked making things happen from behind the scenes, but I never knew if or how that would translate into a job title. Discovering the operations career path was very much an “a-ha” moment for me.  

After about a year of volunteering with SHIC, Rethink Charity was looking for some operations contractor help, and they asked me if I was interested. So I did that for about a year and a half before I started doing operations full-time in January 2020. It was really lucky timing, and I feel pretty fortunate that it fell into place the way it did. 

Megan: Do you think your role would have been different had there been a physical Rethink Charity office space? Do you think the remote aspect of your role affected it? 

Marisa: I wouldn’t say that it’s dramatically different from having a physical office space, but there are a few differences. In some ways I think being remote saves me some time. Operations staff at physical locations tend to do a lot of physical office management, so because we’re remote, I don’t have to spend time on that and instead I can work on other exciting projects. But on the other hand, being remote presents some challenges with team communication and feelings of belonging, and part of my job in recent months has been to work on improving that. I think the time I spend on remote workspace management is probably less than what I would have spent on physical office management though, and I also enjoy how much room for creativity there is in improving the virtual workspace, so overall I don’t mind having this type of role in a remote workspace.

Megan: At Rethink Charity, it seems like your work has benefited several cause areas: there’s SHIC, the incubation of Rethink Priorities, all the partner charities on RC Forward. When you started with our team, did you have a particular cause area in mind that you wanted to focus on? 

Marisa: When I first started at SHIC, I was really passionate about social justice education, which is part of what drew me to the process, and I remained interested in moral education for a while after. However, I eventually read an article about the limits of activism and education, which persuaded me to think more about how to create systems that make it as easy as possible for people to have the impact they want to have, which fits well into what Rethink Charity is focused on now I think. Both of those aren’t so much cause areas as they are methods to impact I think, and I think that’s in large part because I’m a generalist at heart and really like being able to work on a variety of causes. I haven’t felt particularly attached to any one cause area, so I’m most excited about projects that are broadly good for many worthy causes.

Megan: I infer that operations work can feel pretty detached from the actual positive impact that others experience. Did you get “warm fuzzies” in your day to day role, and if so what from? 

Marisa: Not really in my current role, and certainly not that correlated with the actual impact I had. But I’m not someone who needs or even craves that in my job, so I’m okay with that. I generally get more excited about seeing evidence about impact than feeling “warm fuzzies”.

Megan: What accomplishment are you most proud of from your time at Rethink Charity? 

Marisa: Reviving our volunteer program is probably the accomplishment I’m most proud of. I think our volunteers have added a lot to our organization that my colleagues and I couldn’t have done as well on our own, like polishing up the RC Forward website and using our data to get a better sense of who our donors are and how to serve them better. And, in general, I think volunteering for an organization like Rethink Charity can be a great launching point for other high-impact careers, as it was for me and other past volunteers. I’ve heard a lot of conversation in the effective altruism community recently about how difficult it can be to bridge the gap between nonprofit employers’ needs and passionate people looking to pursue more impactful careers, and I think volunteer programs like ours play an important role in bridging that gap.

Megan: Can you tell me about what you’ll be doing after Rethink Charity? 

Marisa: I’ll be starting my Master of Public Policy degree at Georgetown University!

Megan: Do you think that your experience with operations will affect how you approach what you’re doing next? 

Marisa: In a lot of ways it already has influenced my work outside of Rethink Charity. There are smaller moments when I notice what I call my “ops brain” turning on, for example when thinking about the legal implications of collecting data through a sign-up form. But more generally I do think I find myself asking, “how can we make this work more smoothly?” a lot more often after working in this role for a while. 

Megan: How did you go about deciding to pursue this new opportunity, and do you want to give a shoutout to any decision-making processes or conversations with others that helped you decide? 

Marisa: Back in 2019, I attended a conference where I had a conversation with someone working in AI policy, which got me more excited about the field, in large part because I think the scope of policy’s influence is huge, and so for someone who cares about improving the world, if you’re able to influence policy, you can have a really big impact. I started volunteering with a few policy-oriented organizations after to test my fit, and I just found myself getting more and more excited about it. Graduate school seemed like the next logical step to dive deeper into the field, get connected with peers also interested in policy, and to open up more opportunities in the space.  

Megan: You’re frequently exploring and suggesting ways that we can use apps and systems to improve how we do things. What’s a lifehack or app that you’re excited about these days?

Marisa: I have so many! Lately one of my favorites is Amazing Marvin, which is a task management app, but way better than most task management apps. Essentially, they have a bunch of features and workflows that you can turn on or off based on your preferences, so if you find yourself experiencing friction with your todo list, you can just look through their features to see if there’s something you can turn on to lessen that friction, and if your workflow changes significantly, you can easily switch workflows without having to migrate your tasks to a brand new app. 

We were very lucky to have Marisa on our team, and we wish her the very best in all her future work! 

This interview was inspired by Wild Animal Initiative’s interview with Jane Cappozelli.

Your Rethink Charity donor briefing for Q4, 2020 and Q1, 2021

We’re excited to share several updates since our last briefing. 

The milestones we share below are yours, too: Thank you to everyone who contributed to a fantastic giving season for Rethink Charity’s effective giving platform, RC Forward. Together, you donated $1.9 million CAD in Q4, 2020! This comprised the lion’s share of the $2.6 million CAD total donated through RC Forward in 2020. 

Our work is primarily funded by donations and grants. If you’ve ever donated to Rethink Charity or one of our projects, thank you so much for your support. It makes a real difference in our ability to keep our high-impact projects running! 

Recent headlines

• Rethink Charity: Tee Barnett has transitioned to advisory and board roles, and we recently welcomed two new staff members, Megan Jamer and Ilva Ravinska. Our major RC Forward systems overhaul represents a funding opportunity to increase this effective giving platform’s cost effectiveness and impact.

• RC Forward: Canadians donated $1.9 million CAD over giving season 2020 and surpassed $9.4 million CAD all-time donations to effective charities! We’re looking forward to celebrating the $10 million CAD milestone with you. Check out RC Forward’s new donation tracking page, updated tax credit calculator, and the 39 high-impact charities we currently partner with. 

• Fiscal Sponsorship: Open Philanthropy recently recommended a $1.1 million USD grant to Dao Foods via Rethink Charity, to support work promoting plant-based meat in Asia. (Fiscal sponsorship is a key part of our revenue-generating work to move Rethink Charity towards financial sustainability, so that we can continue to operate high-impact projects.) 

• EA Giving Tuesday: Over 440 donors gave record amounts ($1.6 million USD) to effective nonprofits, raising an estimated $411k USD in counterfactual matching. Learn more at eagivingtuesday.org. 

Rethink Charity updates

News and changes affecting all of Rethink Charity’s present and future projects

• Team: Tee has moved on from Rethink Charity’s staff but remains a part of our team in an advisory capacity and on our Board of Directors. Although we’ll miss him on our core team, we think it’s fantastic that Tee is leveraging his passion and skill for coaching in a new way by leading Counterfactual’s talent development and coaching! We’ve recently welcomed Ilva Ravinska as our fiscal sponsorship project manager, and Megan Jamer as our communications manager. 

• Runway and funding gap: We are fully funded to the end of 2021, but only if we find funders to support our work to build out our new infrastructure, described below. Currently, we plan to fund this critical upgrade by displacing 3 to 4 months’ worth of our runway. We’ll share more analysis of our financial position in the coming months! 

• Building a better RC Forward: RC Forward’s simple website belies its complexity and the resources required to run it. To aid us in our growth, we’re overhauling how RC Forward operates behind the scenes, an upgrade that includes building a new CRM system and donor platform. We’re looking for funders that could help us raise the $80,000 USD needed to complete this infrastructure overhaul, so that we aren’t forced to displace 3 to 4 months of our current runway. We think that funding this project is a great opportunity to have an impact, because these improvements will help us maximize Canadian donations to the dozens of high-impact partner charities featured on RC Forward. We hope you’ll consider supporting our work to build a better RC Forward, so that it can continue to play an important role in the growing, global infrastructure that supports the effective giving community! 

Our project updates

RC Forward

Four new partner charities: New Incentives, Ought, Faunalytics, and Mercy for Animals have joined RC Forward’s list of 39 high-impact partner charities, which means that they’re featured on the RC Forward platform and that donations from Canada are eligible for official donation receipts! 

Seriously generous Canadians: RC Forward donors gave $1.9 million CAD to our partner charities during giving season 2020! This would be remarkable under any circumstances, but is all the more so in the context of a global pandemic. 

All-time milestone: As of January 1, 2021, RC Forward has moved $9.35 million CAD to our high-impact partner charities since late 2017! We’re thrilled to be nearing the $10 million milestone significantly sooner than anticipated.

La version française de RC Forward: Thanks to a meticulous and dedicated team of volunteers, RC Forward’s French website is now live at fr.rcforward.org! Merci, bénévoles!

Volunteer contributions: We are very grateful for the contributions of several skilled and dedicated volunteers, whose work has greatly benefited our projects. Thank you especially to Marek Sklenka (for his incredibly industrious website development help), Litawn Gan (for his enthusiastic help and creative thinking with several data projects), Helena Lang (for her hard work on revenue-generation and translation projects), and Sophie Pelland and Louise Verkin (for their meticulous handling and execution of translation projects)!

Acting on feedback: We improved our FAQ with new information about tax receipts and Charitable Impact, the donor-advised fund we partner with for the international regranting process. We also built a new donation tracking page that gives more information about where your donations are in the international regranting process.

Our revenue-generating projects

Rethink Charity is a small charity primarily funded by donations and grants. We owe our success to the donors and organizations that have supported us over the years. Given our funding needs, we are pursuing revenue-generating initiatives in tandem with active efforts to raise philanthropic funds. Our pursuit of these initiatives is solely to help us grow towards financial sustainability, so that we can continue operating and incubating high-impact projects.  

Rethink Charity fiscal sponsorship

We’re currently sponsoring Dao Foods, Stella Labs, and AI Safety Support (AISS). We previously sponsored and incubated Rethink Priorities until they were able to become a standalone 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

Our fiscal sponsorship services leverage our expertise (developed through our sponsorship of Rethink Priorities and others) to help projects navigate crucial early growth stages. Whenever possible, we fiscally sponsor projects aligned with effective altruism.

We are very happy that Open Philanthropy recently recommended a $1.1 million USD grant to Dao Foods via Rethink Charity. We fiscally sponsor Dao Foods (see our case study), and the two-year grant supports work promoting plant-based meat in Asia. 

Another recent win for our fiscal sponsorship program was the amount of significant positive interest and feedback we received during the EA Global: Reconnect 2021 conference. 

If you know of a project that might benefit from being fiscally sponsored by Rethink Charity, reach out to Ilva Ravinska, our project manager ([email protected]). 

RC Forward private regranting services

We’re testing the returns on leveraging RC Forward’s infrastructure to offer private regranting services to eligible organizations. This project is part of our work to ensure Rethink Charity remains in a financial position to operate and incubate high-impact projects. 

EA Giving Tuesday Donation Matching Initiative

Since 2017, EA Giving Tuesday has organized EA donors around the shared goal of directing more money to highly effective nonprofits. The initiative supports these donors so that they can have the best chances of directing Facebook’s Giving Tuesday counterfactual matching funds. Learn more at www.eagivingtuesday.org. 

As a project of Rethink Charity, EA Giving Tuesday receives regranting infrastructure and team bandwidth, plus help with securing funding. Here are the highlights from EA Giving Tuesday 2020: 

Funding recommended by EA Infrastructure Fund: We’re delighted that EA Giving Tuesday received a $13,000 USD grant from an individual based on recommendations from the EA Infrastructure Fund.

Record donated amounts: More than 440 EA donors gave more than $1.6 million USD during the Facebook match, the largest amount ever donated through this initiative! 

Effective nonprofits received $411k USD in matching! EA nonprofits all together received an estimated $411,693 in counterfactual matching through Facebook’s matching program. The match was extremely competitive in 2020, and our very own Megan from the EA Giving Tuesday team is leading work on the retrospective report for the EA Forum. 

Next steps in 2021 

We’ve already embarked on our Salesforce training in preparation for RC Forward’s behind-the-scenes infrastructure overhaul, which will be completed over the next 5 to 6 months. We’re also growing our fiscal sponsorship program, and are progressing multiple projects to direct more money to effective charities.  

We are also actively fundraising for RC Forward’s overhaul. This project, described above in “Updates from Rethink Charity,” will cost approximately $80,000 USD. This upgrade will benefit our high-impact partner charities by ensuring that RC Forward is resilient, cost effective, and more useful for both our partner charities and their Canadian donors. 

We’d love you to consider supporting this project. If we don’t receive project-specific funding, we will need to displace funds from our operational runway. Our RC Forward overhaul will go ahead regardless, but how we fund it will make a significant difference to where we direct our focus in 2021 and 2022. If you’d like more information about this, we’d be delighted to have a conversation, please reach out to Baxter at [email protected] or book a time chat via his Calendly.

• If you’re in Canada, the best way to support Rethink Charity is to donate here! 

• If you’re outside of Canada, please visit rethinkprojects.org to see your donation options. Thanks for considering us in your plans this year!

Thanks for reading

— The Rethink Charity team (Baxter, Siobhan, Marisa, Jacob, Megan, and Ilva)

P.S. Did you know...

Rethink Charity has been a remote, international team from the beginning. It’s a happy coincidence that five of our team members (Baxter, Siobhan, Ilva, Megan, and Jacob) currently live in southwest British Columbia, Canada! We’re looking forward to real-life coworking at some point in the future. 

These days, the “juggling” emoji in Slack brings to mind our collective wonder at Marek’s acrobatic talents, as captured by Tee during a Rethink Charity social for staff and volunteers.