The grand finale of the CE Incubation Program is submission of a written proposal to a seed funding circle of folks who donate to turn proposed charities into reality. We did that, funders approved, and now Clear Solutions – a charity aimed at increasing oral rehydration solution and zinc usage to prevent childrens’ deaths from diarrhea disease – is funded and officially happening!
Our website gives a high-level view of what we’re about, so instead of paraphrasing that, I’ll fill-in a bit of the backstory between on the proposal and seed funding.
Preparing the Proposal
We started the Incubation Program with six 30-50 page research reports into promising charity ideas, and by the final weeks Charlie & I had expressed our preference for the ORS & zinc idea and knew that within the Charity Entrepreneurship structure, we were the pair to pursue it. Despite the detailed research report in-hand, building on that and creating a compelling proposal for actual implementation was a substantial effort.
In the early days of running with a specific idea, there are still a huge number of unknowns. In our case, they fell mostly into 2 groups:
1. Translating high-level principles into realistic on-the-ground specifics
Our starting points:
- ORS+zinc can reduce diarrheal mortality in 0-4 year-olds by 90+%
- Community Health Workers have been shown in a 2016 Uganda randomised controlled trial (RCT) to be highly effective at increasing ORS+zinc usage rates (+30%) if delivering them door-to-door for free.
- Countries with particularly low ORS usage and high numbers of child deaths from diarrhoea include Chad, Nigeria, Madagascar, Niger, Ethiopia.
Turning these into a concrete One Year plan, estimated budget and funding request, cost-effectiveness analysis, geographic assessment, etc for the Proposal is quite an ask when one has 2-3 weeks, limited ability to talk to established experts (since we’re just 2 random guys – not even a nascent organisation until we’re actually funded!), and little-to-no experience of working on those countries.
However, it’s amazing what one can find with some online research, talking to previous CE founders and mentors, and making some educated assumptions about how things would go. ORS+zinc as an area of intervention has quite some history, which is a both blessing and a curse in our position (more on that below) – but at least there’s a lot of academic research and implementation reports, mostly from 2010-2019.
2. Understanding the landscape of other actors and our niche within that
We under-estimated quite how much activity and funding there has previously been in promoting ORS+zinc. With the benefit of just a few weeks hindsight, it’s obvious that something very cheap, proven effective at saving lives, and simple to establish at scale would not have been overlooked by the Global Health community for 20+ years! In fact, 2005 to 2017/18 was a period of intense focus upon ORS+zinc by some of Global Health’s biggest players (CHAI, PATH, UNICEF, etc). They had a huge impact, but it’s also fair to say that the scale-up challenge is far from simple, and ORS+zinc usage remains tragically low among populations of 100s of millions (resulting in ~500K preventable child deaths every year). There remains plenty of work (for us and others) to do, but the exact approach and our precise niche, needs a nuanced understanding. And I’ll give our August 2023 selves a break – we had a lot going on, and this particular consideration, though important, was one of many.
That all said, for the purposes of our proposal, the Uganda RCT (Wagner et al, 2019) provided a blueprint of an intervention that has solid evidence and was not already being done at scale. We proceeded on that basis, planning to build our understanding of the wider landscape over time.
There was much to do beyond the head-scratchers above, not least packaging the whole proposal in a professional looking “brochure”. We used Canva as a graphic design tool, which definitely enables a much fancier-looking documents (and a bunch of other graphic types) than we could have produced in GDocs, but was a bit of a time-sink. I’d join the cause for time-efficient ugly documents if there was one. But as novices in the space, we felt it unwise to appear “unprofessional” to the people we were hoping to fund our first year of existence (the Seed Funding network).
Anyway, as you can already infer, we ended up with something sufficiently compelling and proceeded to the next stage…
The Funders circle
Charity Entrepreneurship, as well as providing the ideas, training and community support to setup a charity, helpfully also have a Seed Funding Circle. The Incubation Program concludes, for those who have successfully paired and produced written proposals, with submission to the funding circle, who then have 1 week to decide how much if any funding they wish to donate to charities’ budget requests each of $100-200K.
The majority of the funders act based on just the written proposal, the original research report and perhaps a chat with Joey, the Charity Entrepreneurship co-founder. A few do, naturally, want to talk to the potential recipients of their donation though, so during mid-September “funding week”, we had several calls with potential funders to represent ourselves and the cause. The fact that Charlie was living out of an AirBnB in Berlin and I was on a family camping trip in Wales was a mild inconvenience, but with the wonders of modern mobile connectivity, I was able to join video calls from the back of our beachside campervan – blurred background enabled – and look somewhat professional.
Not unlike a series of job interviews, we were asked about ourselves, our compatibility as a team, our plan, and why other non-profits were not already doing what we proposed (“Why shouldn’t I just give the money to UNICEF instead?”). The last one is the hardest to answer when new to the space, but some combination of an evidence-based yet relatively distinct intervention, the agility of being small and adaptable, and a focus upon measurable cost-effectiveness, won out, while acknowledging previous efforts by the big players. Now, with a few weeks more knowledge, part of the answer is simply that the problem space is highly fragmented – there is no perfect intervention, and certainly not one that can be readily rolled out in 1000s of different contexts. So the huge scale and funding of other NGOs does not negate the benefit of an adaptable upstart to bring energy and innovation to the problem, and at the very least pick-off a few more of those distinct contexts.
To bring it back to where I started this post, we (or the idea) were evidently compelling enough to fundraise our Year 1 budget, having this confirmed the week of our return from camping/Berlin. If you are a seed funder reading this, thank you! (And if you’d like to be a funder – we should have a Donate button on our website soon.) Celebrations were short – there’s so much to do! More on that in the next post.
G2CE 