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Thanks so much for posting about your experience, I anticipate your tips will help me improve my strategy for incorporating EA concepts at the large corporation I work in. I’ll chime in with my own experiences in case they are also helpful to others.

I work in a Canadian company with 50k employees. In early 2019, I reached out to our company’s charitable giving team, expressing an interest in helping run events to increase charitable giving engagement within my part of the business. This invitation was met with enthusiasm and support, over 2 conference calls and several emails. I didn’t explicitly mention EA, just that I was well connected and had a fun systematic way for looking at charitable giving.

As we approached the giving campaign period in the fall, I reached out again with an exciting proposal to run a Giving Game, and asked if it could be included as an official charitable giving campaign event. This didn’t end up working out (reasons are opaque to me, a few emails went by without response), but I’m hopeful for 2020. Instead, I invited folks from my network to attend, and we had a really good 10 person Giving Game.

This was the first one that I’ve run, and it seemed to land really well with the attendees. One key aspect was to show employees how they could donate to effective charities through RC Forward, directly from their paycheck. I hope to leverage their testimonials to support whatever proposal I come up with this year.

I think there is a lot of potential to incorporate EA concepts into a greater conversation at my company, and see two paths forward:

1. Grow a grass-roots conversation by finding people who are enthusiastic enough about EA to actually form a core team. Currently it’s just me by myself, and this seems like a work-intensive long-term goal.

2. Shortcut the process by building a stronger relationship with our charitable giving team. Changes made by this team could be very high leverage—anything from changing the company matching program to include high impact charities (we don’t), to tweaking default donation options and search functionality, to a paradigm shift in how folks view doing good.

I’m also playing with system-wide influence through a new role that I’ve taken on, which could transform the company culture. It’s still early days, but I’m making meta-moves to create a community that increases empathy, connection, and systematic (rational) thinking.

Hoping my story is helpful for folks here. I’m interested in hearing more anecdotes from anyone else who’s looking at EA from the context of a corporation.

This is awesome—thanks for writing up!

For people working in the UK and keen to do something like this, I’d love to chat: ben@tyve.org

We launched an employee giving tool (Tyve.org) which promotes recommended charities from GiveWell and Founders Pledge’s research.

This is really cool! Thank you for doing this!

Also, I’m curious—to what extent is AI safety is discussed in your group?

I noticed the cover of Superintelligence has a quote of Bill Gates saying “I highly recommend this book” and I’m curious if AI safety is something Microsoft employees discuss often.

Hi Parth, thank you so much for this post, and for the great work you and your fellow EA organizers are doing at Microsoft!

I live in SF, and have been brainstorming with a few EAs re mobilizing EAs in tech companies (in addition to general EA movement building in the city). Will definitely try to learn from your experience and reach out for more questions if that’s ok.

I also wonder if you guys have a broader strategy for EA community building at Microsoft, and/​or other EA meetups there (or directing people to EA Seattle)? Also, do you have a way to track your (estimated) impact?

(Also, this is Microsoft specific, but does Bill Gates do any speaking events on global health or effective giving there? Perhaps he stays away to avoid being seen as meddling in the company… If he’s willing to do it I can see it attracting a huge crowd.)

This is fantastic—great to see someone do this, and the branding you came up with is super nice (especially around “do orders of magnitude more good”). In my experience people tend to keep quiet about EA while at work; good to see that trend being bucked as this seems like an obviously underutilised way to get folks interested the movement.

This work sounds great! Thanks for writing it up in such a clear way for others to learn from.

I have a friend who works at Apple. He is somewhat familiar with effective altruism (I’ve mentioned it to him before) but doesn’t seem too charity-driven. What ways would you recommend approaching him with this issue? Perhaps he could spread the word there.

Thanks for sharing. I just started at Microsoft and will be reaching out to the mailing list to see how I can get involved.

One question /​ note:

Putting up posters across our large campus and dozens of building was both a lot of work and didn’t seem to get people to look into EA more.

Did you actually measure how many people took some action based on the posters?
For example, by putting a URL that went to a web page with analytics?

If not, you might try that.

Sometimes it’s a bit counter-intuitive what things work. For example, from Rationally Speaking, I learned

that yard signs are probably an order of magnitude or two more cost- effective—honestly, between two to three is my 25 to 75 interval—more effective than the canvassing.

Prior to hearing that I’d assumed they were a big waste of money. So the same might be true of posters in Microsoft buildings.