Great post, thanks for sharing! Pretty much exactly the type of post I had been hoping for for a while. Just hearing that one success story of a local group that was in a more or less similar state as mine (albeit arguably in a higher potential environment), but made it into something so impressive, is very inspiring.
Given I only have ~10h per week available to spend on EA things (and not all of them go into community building), I was particularly happy to hear your 80⁄20 remark. I do wonder if it’s possible to move a local group onto a kind of growth trajectory at only, say, 6h per week, or if that’s just a lost cause. Maybe I should just spend the majority of these 6h looking for a person with more time and motivation to take over the role. :)
Currently we’re definitely leaving a lot of low hanging fruit on the table (or tree) though. And a lot of that may be due to relatively trivial issues and inconveniences. Some examples of such limiting factors (and I do wonder if similar things are true for other small local groups):
I’ve heard fellowships mentioned & recommended a lot in the last 1-2 years, but have a fairly limited understanding of the concrete details. Should we run our own one? Should we redirect people to other online fellowships? What would I even tell people in order to motivate them to do so? Timing also needs to be taken into account.
Fear of organizing things and (almost) nobody (new) showing up. We had quite a few talks and such that ended up only being heard by our core team, although we were hoping to attract some new faces. That being said, our marketing was often pretty shy rather than aggressive.
Lack of detailed knowledge about the European data protection regulation and its implications prevents us/me from systemizing our “funnel” (which hardly exists). I have no idea if it’s even legal to have a database of names / email addresses / other personal information of people, whether we’d need to inform them beforehand, etc.
Most of our small number of members are busy with their own things / studies / careers and have hardly any capacity to engage with the group beyond one weekly social/discussion, so there’s little room for organizing bigger things or spending more time on community building, and I find that situation somewhat demoralizing
We have a whatsapp group and a Slack workspace. Whatsapp is great to get new people on board quickly, but it’s surprisingly difficult to get them to sign up on Slack, and if they do we can never rely on them seeing new messages, or looking in there at all. Right now our Slack workspace is almost exclusively used by our few core members, and others hardly ever engage.
I feel very aversive to “push” people to do things, and wonder if that’s a necessary skill to have for a community builder, or ideally people should be motivated enough that they only need to be “enabled”/supported instead.
Hey Markus, I’m only getting started with organizing an EA group, but here are my thoughts:
I think 6 hours per week is enough time to sustain a reasonable amount of growth for a group though, but I don’t have enough personal experience to know. If you think funding would enable you to spend more time on community building, you can apply for an EA Infrastructure Fund. And you can always get Group Support Funding to cover expenses for things you think would help, such as snacks, flyers, books etc.
I think the Intro EA Program is a surprisingly effective way for newcomers to learn about EA to a reasonably deep level, so I would prioritize running a fellowship. You can broadly advertise for the fellowship across various mailing lists, Facebook groups, and group chats. You can see some more templates as well as advertising templates on the EA Hub’s “Advertising Your EA Programs” page. You can see Yale EA’s fellowship page for some of the benefits for participants. If you have the time to facilitate discussions, it would be better for engagement to run a fellowship on campus instead of referring everyone to the EA Virtual Programs, if students are on campus. Facilitating takes about 1 hour per week per cohort if you have already done the readings in the Intro EA Program, and an extra 1.5 hours per week if you have not done the readings.
Marketing widely is probably quite helpful. Stanford EA and Brown EA have docs on marketing advice which I can also send you. I think the Intro EA Program is better for outreach than regular weekly discussions. I’m currently thinking of using weekly discussions for people who have already completed the Intro EA Program but aren’t planning on committing to another fellowship like the In-Depth EA Program.
I believe GDPR only applies to businesses collecting data, not private individuals like you.
I think you shouldn’t be hesitant about inviting people to do things, highlighting the benefits so they can feel motivated, etc. but you can’t push people to do things.
Let me know if you’d like to set up a call and I can message you on the EA Forum.
I personally am definitely more time- than funding constrained. Or maybe evem “energy constrained”? But maybe applying for funding would be something to consider when/if we find a different person to run the local group, maybe a student who could do this for 10h a week or so.
regarding a fellowship: my bottlenecks here are probably “lack of detailed picture of how to run such a thing (or what it even is exactly)” and “what would be the necessary concrete steps to get it off the ground”. Advertising is surely very relevant, but secondary to these other questions for now.
on a slightly more meta level, I think one of the issues is that I don’t have a good overview of the “action space” (or “moves”) in front of me as an organizer of an EA local group. Running a fellowship appears to be a very promising move, but I don’t really know how to make it. Other actions may be intro talks, intro workshops, concepts workshops, discussions, watching EAG talks together, game nights, talks in general, creating a website, setting up a proper newsletter instead of having a manually maintained list of email addresses, looking for a more capable group organizer, facebook ads, flyers, posters, running giving games, icebreaker sessions, running a career club, coworking, 1on1s, meeting other local groups, reaching out to formerly-but-not-anymore-active members, and probably much more I’m not even thinking about. Maybe I’m suffering a bit from decision paralysis here and just doing any of these options would be better than my current state of “unproductive wondering what I should be doing”… :)
will message you regarding a call, thanks for the offer!
Great post, thanks for sharing! Pretty much exactly the type of post I had been hoping for for a while. Just hearing that one success story of a local group that was in a more or less similar state as mine (albeit arguably in a higher potential environment), but made it into something so impressive, is very inspiring.
Given I only have ~10h per week available to spend on EA things (and not all of them go into community building), I was particularly happy to hear your 80⁄20 remark. I do wonder if it’s possible to move a local group onto a kind of growth trajectory at only, say, 6h per week, or if that’s just a lost cause. Maybe I should just spend the majority of these 6h looking for a person with more time and motivation to take over the role. :)
Currently we’re definitely leaving a lot of low hanging fruit on the table (or tree) though. And a lot of that may be due to relatively trivial issues and inconveniences. Some examples of such limiting factors (and I do wonder if similar things are true for other small local groups):
I’ve heard fellowships mentioned & recommended a lot in the last 1-2 years, but have a fairly limited understanding of the concrete details. Should we run our own one? Should we redirect people to other online fellowships? What would I even tell people in order to motivate them to do so? Timing also needs to be taken into account.
Fear of organizing things and (almost) nobody (new) showing up. We had quite a few talks and such that ended up only being heard by our core team, although we were hoping to attract some new faces. That being said, our marketing was often pretty shy rather than aggressive.
Lack of detailed knowledge about the European data protection regulation and its implications prevents us/me from systemizing our “funnel” (which hardly exists). I have no idea if it’s even legal to have a database of names / email addresses / other personal information of people, whether we’d need to inform them beforehand, etc.
Most of our small number of members are busy with their own things / studies / careers and have hardly any capacity to engage with the group beyond one weekly social/discussion, so there’s little room for organizing bigger things or spending more time on community building, and I find that situation somewhat demoralizing
We have a whatsapp group and a Slack workspace. Whatsapp is great to get new people on board quickly, but it’s surprisingly difficult to get them to sign up on Slack, and if they do we can never rely on them seeing new messages, or looking in there at all. Right now our Slack workspace is almost exclusively used by our few core members, and others hardly ever engage.
I feel very aversive to “push” people to do things, and wonder if that’s a necessary skill to have for a community builder, or ideally people should be motivated enough that they only need to be “enabled”/supported instead.
Hey Markus, I’m only getting started with organizing an EA group, but here are my thoughts:
I think 6 hours per week is enough time to sustain a reasonable amount of growth for a group though, but I don’t have enough personal experience to know. If you think funding would enable you to spend more time on community building, you can apply for an EA Infrastructure Fund. And you can always get Group Support Funding to cover expenses for things you think would help, such as snacks, flyers, books etc.
I think the Intro EA Program is a surprisingly effective way for newcomers to learn about EA to a reasonably deep level, so I would prioritize running a fellowship. You can broadly advertise for the fellowship across various mailing lists, Facebook groups, and group chats. You can see some more templates as well as advertising templates on the EA Hub’s “Advertising Your EA Programs” page. You can see Yale EA’s fellowship page for some of the benefits for participants. If you have the time to facilitate discussions, it would be better for engagement to run a fellowship on campus instead of referring everyone to the EA Virtual Programs, if students are on campus. Facilitating takes about 1 hour per week per cohort if you have already done the readings in the Intro EA Program, and an extra 1.5 hours per week if you have not done the readings.
Marketing widely is probably quite helpful. Stanford EA and Brown EA have docs on marketing advice which I can also send you. I think the Intro EA Program is better for outreach than regular weekly discussions. I’m currently thinking of using weekly discussions for people who have already completed the Intro EA Program but aren’t planning on committing to another fellowship like the In-Depth EA Program.
I believe GDPR only applies to businesses collecting data, not private individuals like you.
I think you shouldn’t be hesitant about inviting people to do things, highlighting the benefits so they can feel motivated, etc. but you can’t push people to do things.
Let me know if you’d like to set up a call and I can message you on the EA Forum.
Thank you Michael!
I personally am definitely more time- than funding constrained. Or maybe evem “energy constrained”? But maybe applying for funding would be something to consider when/if we find a different person to run the local group, maybe a student who could do this for 10h a week or so.
regarding a fellowship: my bottlenecks here are probably “lack of detailed picture of how to run such a thing (or what it even is exactly)” and “what would be the necessary concrete steps to get it off the ground”. Advertising is surely very relevant, but secondary to these other questions for now.
on a slightly more meta level, I think one of the issues is that I don’t have a good overview of the “action space” (or “moves”) in front of me as an organizer of an EA local group. Running a fellowship appears to be a very promising move, but I don’t really know how to make it. Other actions may be intro talks, intro workshops, concepts workshops, discussions, watching EAG talks together, game nights, talks in general, creating a website, setting up a proper newsletter instead of having a manually maintained list of email addresses, looking for a more capable group organizer, facebook ads, flyers, posters, running giving games, icebreaker sessions, running a career club, coworking, 1on1s, meeting other local groups, reaching out to formerly-but-not-anymore-active members, and probably much more I’m not even thinking about. Maybe I’m suffering a bit from decision paralysis here and just doing any of these options would be better than my current state of “unproductive wondering what I should be doing”… :)
will message you regarding a call, thanks for the offer!