Suggestions for 80,000K
You are an amazing organization with an ever-improving website. My understanding (based mostly on resources from you, tbh) is that you have a huge role in guiding people through their early days of EA and beyond.
Maybe you’re working on some of this already, but if not:
(1) It would have important ramifications for the whole EA community if you did more research/follow-up on how your website & coaching impacts people in the long term (and the EA-type work they end up doing). We need to figure out what is convincing whom. And what it exactly is convincing them to do. As a site/org with so much reach, you’re optimally positioned to do this.
Clarification: I know you do the voluntary email surveys—by research I mean like rigorously designed academic-type research.
(2) My non-EA[1] friends still freak out when I send them to your site. (Mostly: Despite what one might guess given their general intelligence, they get overwhelmed by how quickly the website expands to overwhelming options for where they might next click for further information). Maybe additional user testing would help?
(3) More importantly, they’re not convinced by most of your problem profiles (and many of the ones they want to read are out of date). They want both more rigor (since the ask is for them to change their career trajectory) and more frequent updates. The only idea I have for how to fix this is to hire more staff.
(4) I love nuance as much as the next EA, and I really appreciate the summaries in your podcasts. If you have extra space though, maybe consider doing the thing Krista Tippet of On Being does where there’s an essential/edited version of the podcast and also the extended one? I’m not sure if this makes sense for your target listener, but if it does, maybe it would help grow your audience further.
Thank you again for all the info over the years.
- ^
Though I like to think of them as “pre-EA” ;)
Hi—thanks for taking the time to think through these, write them out and share them! We really appreciate getting feedback from people who use our services and who have a sense of how others do.
I work on 80k’s internal systems, including our impact evaluation (which seems relevant to your ideas).
I’ve made sure that the four points will be seen by the relevant people at 80k for each of these.
Re. #1, I’m confused about whether you’re more referring to ‘message testing’ (i.e. what ideas/framings make our ideas appealing to which audiences) or ‘long term follow up with users to see how their careers/lives have change’. (I can imagine various combinations of these.)
Could you elaborate?
Thank you for reading! It was awesome to see your response.
I was referring to the ‘long term follow up with users to see how their careers/lives have changed.’
And super happy to elaborate. I’ve found myself wondering things like:
Is the coaching vs. the website (vs. certain aspects of the website) more likely to lead to people making changes to their careers? Or to be more engaged in EA? Does one lead to a certain kind of change more than the other?
Is anything at 80K (to borrow something I read first at your website) is having a ‘Scared Straight’ effect?
Many of the first people to use 80K coaching/services have presumably been in their careers for a while now. What did they end up doing? It’s hard to trace things like this, but what within it might be traceable to 80K?
Sometimes my friends who say they’re most convinced by my EA type arguments act on EA ideas least (i.e., less than my friends who didn’t initially seem as convinced/excited). Basically, immediate excitement hasn’t always correlated to longterm action. Do we know if anything like this is happening and if it’s impacting design at 80K? (i.e., 80K does more of thing X because it gets a response, but it doesn’t translate to longterm action).
What could we (the larger EA community) learn from who/how 80K has convinced people to make longterm changes? (So that we could be better at convincing people to make changes too).
Thanks again!
Ah nice, understood!
I don’t think you’ll find anything from us which is directly focused on most of these questions. (It’s also not especially obvious that this is our comparative advantage within the community.)
But we do have some relevant public content. Much of it is in our annual review, including its appendices.
You also might find these results of the OP EA/LT survey interesting.