Do you have any insight into what type of efforts these funds are allocated towards?

I think you're quite right - and if we're going to port it over to the analogy, I would venture to say that if you know you're I'm going to need to run a high resource task at some point, you need to conserce capacity to be able to extend the limits as needed. I don't normally need to process and analyze gigabytes of data, but I need the ability to be able to on my device.

Not yet, no. That comes next, once we have the articles of incorporation.

I very often encourage people to do exactly that - find out what their unique personal strengths and talents are optimize for a job that uses their strengths. It's better to find a job that uses your talents in a cause area that you only like than to find a job that doesn't utilize your skills in a cause area that you love. The latter tends to lead to burnout, failure and frustration, while the former helps you be happy, productive, successful and impactful. I personally use the Gallup Strengthsfinder to assess talent.

It's not a necessity to have these within EA. It is a necessity to have good resources. There are also some cases, such as with finances and legal matters, that having a specialized service provider will allow more people to be helped effectively since they'll have a greater degree of familiarity and expertise with common EA org problems. And if we do have an EA that does a good job providing those services, I'd rather prioritize using those folks and if we don't know of them I'd like to.
In general, I'm finding that there are many similar patterns to what most EA orgs need, and the objective needs to be finding them quality resource providers and making them easily accessible.

I totally agree with you.
The other problem with outside experts is the same that anyone faces - who do I use? Which company is good? Pre-covid, I had been working on a problem in the small business community that created something very similar because of the hesitancy of humans to trust, especially when a lot of providers aren't as good as they claim to be. So I do think there's a trust factor that's important regardless, and if we don't have the talent in EA, I would consider bringing people out of EA into the community to fill those gaps.

Please submit an application to be added here.

There are lots of software needs and types of service providers that are needed. Anti Entropy also provides great support in addition to Altruistic Agency. But right now, if I need Salesforce or Smartsheets or Dynamics setup, those usually have specific consultants. Or sometimes we need larger-system research and implementation plans, and that's not something we currently have a resource for in EA. I do have good resources out of EA.

It's your second point that we're addressing-

• EA orgs are making a mistake by not wanting to pay for these things even though they would be worth paying for.

Although your first point is also true. I don't think that's a problem, though. Most businesses have diverse audiences and I don't think EA is large enough to support most business models independently.

It's based on our collective experiences working with EA orgs. We all interact with a large volume of EA orgs, and we keep getting similar questions for providers in certain areas.

And to your point, I personally refer in non-EA specialists as needed, but I would prefer to use EA folks (if they exist) to strengthen the business support services in the community. And some services are better provided when the provider is at least familiar with EA. All the people I bring in get a short introduction of what to expect before they start with EAs. Believe it or not, EA orgs have a VERY different mentality than most other organizations out there and it can be challenging for providers to understand and navigate if they don't have prior exposure.

Another reason why we are focusing on EAs now is that we're building a directory of EA service providers, so we're just noting the gaps that exist within EA. Part of the goal is that anyone who needs help with something has an easily accessible resource to find access to trusted advisors and partners. So it's not that someone outside of EA provides "worse" software implementation than someone within EA - it's just noticing that our community doesn't have that resource available now. And potentially, it might be that none of us are aware of a provider that does that, in which case, we'd like to know about it.