Thanks for this detailed write-up! I appreciate that you’re taking the initiative, especially considering that EAF has withdrawn from this area.
A few questions / inputs:
1. Have you considered trying to recruit a more demographically diverse team? To my knowledge, there are several women who would make excellent contributions and might be interested.
2. What are your plans for coordinating with the international EA community, especially CEA, and staying up to date with their inputs for community building strategy? My experience has been that important strategic update are often only propagated slowly to national/local groups, so having a very deliberate plan for doing that seems desirable (edit: you also write this in your post – sorry for the initial oversight). (As far as I know, there hasn’t been an attempt to coordinate with EAF yet, which IMO could also be useful. Feel free to reach out if you haven’t yet! – Edit: I stand corrected – there has actually been some coordination in the early stages, so thanks!)
3. I appreciate that you listed concrete metrics to evaluate your impact. Some of the metrics seem much more suitable to me than others – career changes, for example, seem really valuable and impactful, pledges taken seems useful, but money donated by students is unlikely to be significant and can be used as a way of getting people involved and engaged rather than as an outcome metric. Similarly, I’d recommend a stronger effort to track the quality of local groups and local group members rather than the quantities/numbers. These things have been elaborated on in several local group guides.
thank you for your comment and inputs :) I am responding from my personal perspective and may not represent the full team.
That’s a great point! We would love to have a more diverse team and if you have interested people in mind, please direct them to the survey or our current email address: info@eakoeln.de. We are actively looking for new members and generally don’t plan to have any limit on members if they fulfill some EA and CB related criteria. Thus, hopefully we will be more diverse soon :)
As you mention there has been some coordination with the big players (CEA, EAF, LEAN) but it could obviously always be more and is generally limited by the time that we get from them. We also tried to coordinate with some community builders in Germany but have to say that we are rooted in a mostly regional phenomenon of cooperating local groups that has been slowly spreading from NRW. At the moment, we are trying to onboard and integrate the (interested) rest of Germany.
The list is just a short list of some concrete things that we can measure. We are very much engaged with the question of how to track and improve quality in community building and over time this will hopefully become one of our key value propositions – that we are able to assess and advise what is likely to work in a given context. This is why we have added a special role for quality management.
I hope this answers the most relevant parts of your question. I am happy to elaborate in more detail if necessary :)
Thanks for this detailed write-up! I appreciate that you’re taking the initiative, especially considering that EAF has withdrawn from this area.
A few questions / inputs:
1. Have you considered trying to recruit a more demographically diverse team? To my knowledge, there are several women who would make excellent contributions and might be interested.
2. What are your plans for coordinating with the international EA community, especially CEA, and staying up to date with their inputs for community building strategy? My experience has been that important strategic update are often only propagated slowly to national/local groups, so having a very deliberate plan for doing that seems desirable (edit: you also write this in your post – sorry for the initial oversight). (As far as I know, there hasn’t been an attempt to coordinate with EAF yet, which IMO could also be useful. Feel free to reach out if you haven’t yet! – Edit: I stand corrected – there has actually been some coordination in the early stages, so thanks!)
3. I appreciate that you listed concrete metrics to evaluate your impact. Some of the metrics seem much more suitable to me than others – career changes, for example, seem really valuable and impactful, pledges taken seems useful, but money donated by students is unlikely to be significant and can be used as a way of getting people involved and engaged rather than as an outcome metric. Similarly, I’d recommend a stronger effort to track the quality of local groups and local group members rather than the quantities/numbers. These things have been elaborated on in several local group guides.
Dear Jonas,
thank you for your comment and inputs :) I am responding from my personal perspective and may not represent the full team.
That’s a great point! We would love to have a more diverse team and if you have interested people in mind, please direct them to the survey or our current email address: info@eakoeln.de. We are actively looking for new members and generally don’t plan to have any limit on members if they fulfill some EA and CB related criteria. Thus, hopefully we will be more diverse soon :)
As you mention there has been some coordination with the big players (CEA, EAF, LEAN) but it could obviously always be more and is generally limited by the time that we get from them. We also tried to coordinate with some community builders in Germany but have to say that we are rooted in a mostly regional phenomenon of cooperating local groups that has been slowly spreading from NRW. At the moment, we are trying to onboard and integrate the (interested) rest of Germany.
The list is just a short list of some concrete things that we can measure. We are very much engaged with the question of how to track and improve quality in community building and over time this will hopefully become one of our key value propositions – that we are able to assess and advise what is likely to work in a given context. This is why we have added a special role for quality management.
I hope this answers the most relevant parts of your question. I am happy to elaborate in more detail if necessary :)
I’ve sent you a PM with some suggestions! I haven’t been in touch with them lately, so please reach out to them directly.