From August 2015 - October 2016, I ran an effective altruism group at Epic, a large medical software corporation in Wisconsin. Things have changed a lot in community-building since then, but I figured it would be good to record my memories of that time, and what I learned.
If you read this and have questions, please ask!
Launching the group
I launched with two co-organizers, both of whom stayed involved with the group while they were at Epic (but who left the company after ~6 months and ~1 year, respectively, leaving me alone).
We found members by sending emails to a few company mailing lists for employees interested in topics like philosophy or psychology. I’m not sure how common it is for big companies to have non-work-related mailing lists, but they made our job much easier. We were one of many “extracurricular” groups at Epic (the others were mostly sports clubs and other outdoorsy things).
We had 40-50 people at our initial interest meeting, and 10-20 at most meetings after that.
Running the group
Meeting topics I remember:
A discussion of the basic principles of EA and things our group might be able to do (our initial meeting)
Two Giving Games, with all charities proposed by individual members who prepared presentations (of widely varying quality — I wish I’d asked people to present to me first)
Someone from Animal Charity Evaluators (don’t know who, organized after I had left the company)
We held all meetings at Epic’s headquarters; most members lived in the nearby city of Madison, but two organizers lived within walking distance of Epic and didn’t own cars, which restricted our ability to organize things easily. (I could have set up dinners and carpooled or something, but I wasn’t a very ambitious organizer.)
Other group activities:
One of our other organizers met with Epic’s head of corporate social responsibility to discuss EA. It didn’t really go anywhere, as their current giving policy was really far from EA and the organizer came in with a fairly standard message that didn’t account for the situation,
That said, they were very open to at least asking for our input. We were invited to leave suggestions on their list of “questions to ask charities soliciting Epic’s support”, and the aforementioned meeting came together very quickly. (The organizer kicked things off by handing Epic’s CEO a copy of a Peter Singer book — don’t remember which — at an intro talk for new employees. She had mentioned in her talk that she loved getting book recommendations, and he had the book in his bag ready to go. Not sure whether “always carry a book” is a reliable strategy, but it worked well in that case.)
Successfully lobbying Epic to add a global-health charity (Seva, I think) to the list of charities for which it matched employee donations (formerly ~100% US-based charities)
This was mostly just me filling out a suggestion form, but it might have helped to be able to point to a group of people who also wanted to support that charity.
Most of the charities on the list were specifically based in Wisconsin so employees could give as locally as possible. On my form, I pointed out that Epic had a ton of foreign-born employees, including many from developing countries, who might want to support a charity close to their own “homes”. Not sure whether this mattered in Epic’s decision to add the charity.
I suggested several charities, including AMF, but Epic chose Seva as the suggestion they implemented (possibly because they had more employees from India than Africa? Their reasoning was opaque to me)
An Epic spokesperson contacted the group when some random guy was found trying to pass out flyers for his personal anti-poverty project on a road near Epic. Once I clarified that he had no connection to us, I don’t remember any other followup.
Effects of the group:
I think ~3 members wound up joining Giving What We Can, and a few more made at least one donation to AMF or another charity the group discussed.
I found a new person to run the group before leaving Epic in November 2016, but as far as I know, it petered out after a couple more meetings.
Reflections // lessons learned
This was the only time I’ve tried to share EA stuff with an audience of working professionals. They were actually really into it! Meetings weren’t always well-attended, but I got a bunch of emails related to effective giving, and lunch invitations from people who wanted to talk about it. In some ways, it felt like being on the same corporate “team” engendered a bit more natural camaraderie than being students at the same school — people thought it was neat that a few people at Epic were “charity experts”, and they wanted to hear from us.
Corporate values… actually matter? Epic’s official motto is “work hard, do good, have fun, make money” (the idea being that this is the correct ordering of priorities). A bunch of more senior employees I talked to about Epic EA took the motto quite seriously, and they were excited to see me running an explicit “do good” project. (This fact came up in a couple of my performance reviews as evidence that I was upholding corporate values.)
Getting people to stick around at the office after a day of work is not easy. I think we’d have had better turnout and more enthusiasm for the group if we’d added some meetups at Madison restaurants, or a weekend hike, or something else I’d have been able to do if I owned a car (or was willing to pay for an Uber, something which felt like a wasteful expense in that more frugal era of EA).
The group was small and didn’t accomplish much, and this was a long time ago. I don’t think the post would be interesting to many people, but I’m glad you enjoyed reading it!
Memories from running a corporate EA group
From August 2015 - October 2016, I ran an effective altruism group at Epic, a large medical software corporation in Wisconsin. Things have changed a lot in community-building since then, but I figured it would be good to record my memories of that time, and what I learned.
If you read this and have questions, please ask!
Launching the group
I launched with two co-organizers, both of whom stayed involved with the group while they were at Epic (but who left the company after ~6 months and ~1 year, respectively, leaving me alone).
We found members by sending emails to a few company mailing lists for employees interested in topics like philosophy or psychology. I’m not sure how common it is for big companies to have non-work-related mailing lists, but they made our job much easier. We were one of many “extracurricular” groups at Epic (the others were mostly sports clubs and other outdoorsy things).
We had 40-50 people at our initial interest meeting, and 10-20 at most meetings after that.
Running the group
Meeting topics I remember:
A discussion of the basic principles of EA and things our group might be able to do (our initial meeting)
Two Giving Games, with all charities proposed by individual members who prepared presentations (of widely varying quality — I wish I’d asked people to present to me first)
A movie night for Life in a Day
Talks from:
Rob Mather, head of the Against Malaria Foundation
A member’s friend who’d worked on public health projects in the Peace Corps and had a lot of experience with malaria
A member of the group who’d donated a kidney to a stranger (I think this was our best-attended event)
Unfortunately, Gleb Tsipursky
Someone from Animal Charity Evaluators (don’t know who, organized after I had left the company)
We held all meetings at Epic’s headquarters; most members lived in the nearby city of Madison, but two organizers lived within walking distance of Epic and didn’t own cars, which restricted our ability to organize things easily. (I could have set up dinners and carpooled or something, but I wasn’t a very ambitious organizer.)
Other group activities:
One of our other organizers met with Epic’s head of corporate social responsibility to discuss EA. It didn’t really go anywhere, as their current giving policy was really far from EA and the organizer came in with a fairly standard message that didn’t account for the situation,
That said, they were very open to at least asking for our input. We were invited to leave suggestions on their list of “questions to ask charities soliciting Epic’s support”, and the aforementioned meeting came together very quickly. (The organizer kicked things off by handing Epic’s CEO a copy of a Peter Singer book — don’t remember which — at an intro talk for new employees. She had mentioned in her talk that she loved getting book recommendations, and he had the book in his bag ready to go. Not sure whether “always carry a book” is a reliable strategy, but it worked well in that case.)
Successfully lobbying Epic to add a global-health charity (Seva, I think) to the list of charities for which it matched employee donations (formerly ~100% US-based charities)
This was mostly just me filling out a suggestion form, but it might have helped to be able to point to a group of people who also wanted to support that charity.
Most of the charities on the list were specifically based in Wisconsin so employees could give as locally as possible. On my form, I pointed out that Epic had a ton of foreign-born employees, including many from developing countries, who might want to support a charity close to their own “homes”. Not sure whether this mattered in Epic’s decision to add the charity.
I suggested several charities, including AMF, but Epic chose Seva as the suggestion they implemented (possibly because they had more employees from India than Africa? Their reasoning was opaque to me)
An Epic spokesperson contacted the group when some random guy was found trying to pass out flyers for his personal anti-poverty project on a road near Epic. Once I clarified that he had no connection to us, I don’t remember any other followup.
Effects of the group:
I think ~3 members wound up joining Giving What We Can, and a few more made at least one donation to AMF or another charity the group discussed.
I found a new person to run the group before leaving Epic in November 2016, but as far as I know, it petered out after a couple more meetings.
Reflections // lessons learned
This was the only time I’ve tried to share EA stuff with an audience of working professionals. They were actually really into it! Meetings weren’t always well-attended, but I got a bunch of emails related to effective giving, and lunch invitations from people who wanted to talk about it. In some ways, it felt like being on the same corporate “team” engendered a bit more natural camaraderie than being students at the same school — people thought it was neat that a few people at Epic were “charity experts”, and they wanted to hear from us.
Corporate values… actually matter? Epic’s official motto is “work hard, do good, have fun, make money” (the idea being that this is the correct ordering of priorities). A bunch of more senior employees I talked to about Epic EA took the motto quite seriously, and they were excited to see me running an explicit “do good” project. (This fact came up in a couple of my performance reviews as evidence that I was upholding corporate values.)
Getting people to stick around at the office after a day of work is not easy. I think we’d have had better turnout and more enthusiasm for the group if we’d added some meetups at Madison restaurants, or a weekend hike, or something else I’d have been able to do if I owned a car (or was willing to pay for an Uber, something which felt like a wasteful expense in that more frugal era of EA).
Thank you for writing this up! This is a kind of experience I haven’t seen expressed much on the forum, so found extra valuable to read about.
Curious, any reason it’s not a top level post?
The group was small and didn’t accomplish much, and this was a long time ago. I don’t think the post would be interesting to many people, but I’m glad you enjoyed reading it!