I think we would have had the capacity to do difference-in-difference analyses (or even simpler analyses of pre-post differences in groups with or without community building grants, full-time organisers etc.) if the outcome measures tracked in the EA Groups Survey were not changed across iterations and, especially, if we had run the EA Groups Survey more frequently (data has only been collected 3 times since 2017 and was not collected before we ran the first such survey in that year).
I also agree this would be extremely valuable.
I think we would have had the capacity to do difference-in-difference analyses (or even simpler analyses of pre-post differences in groups with or without community building grants, full-time organisers etc.) if the outcome measures tracked in the EA Groups Survey were not changed across iterations and, especially, if we had run the EA Groups Survey more frequently (data has only been collected 3 times since 2017 and was not collected before we ran the first such survey in that year).