My personal messy thoughts on some of the things EA Netherlands (and maybe other community building orgs?) should be doing in the near future (building on our recent post). Sharing to get input. Please tell me what you think I’m getting wrong.
Some Tenets
Community building, not talent placement. EAN is primarily a community-building organisation. Our theory of change is to grow community capital — the community’s capacity for future impact, which we take to be roughly (sum of individual career capital) × coordination ability. This is the stock we’re building. Members deploy it over time through three medium-term outcomes: career switches into impact-relevant roles, significant donations to effective organisations, and community organising or advocacy for EA-aligned causes, solutions, and tools. (Organising and advocacy are partly deployments and partly investments back into coordination ability — meta-work, worth flagging as such.)
Over a longer horizon, those flows aggregate into population-level outcomes: shifts in awareness and perception of EA and EA-style thinking, and eventually norm and institutional change.
Career switches and donations in any given year are how we tell whether the stock is being built well; they’re not what we should be optimising for.
This is the difference from talent placement. Placement orgs — BlueDot for AI safety upskilling, AIM for entrepreneurship, MATS for AI safety research — convert specific kinds of career capital into specific roles on roughly annual cycles. That’s a different job, and it’s done well elsewhere. EAN’s contribution is to grow the underlying stock: more members, more career capital per member, more coordination ability across them. What makes this worthwhile is what the approach produces over long horizons: engagement spread across many roles rather than concentrated in one bet, ecosystem infrastructure that no single placement focus would build, values that persist when people switch careers, and the candidate pipeline that placement orgs themselves depend on. Maybe the Dutch ecosystem does need a placement org, but that should probably be an EAN spinout (as was the case with Doneer Effectief).
Who we target with our outreach. EA-curious people with skillsets identified as being particularly valuable by sources such as the meta coordination forum survey.
Product-Market-Impact Fit (PMIF). Standard PMF asks “do people love and use it?” EAN’s job is harder. PMIF resolves into three fits at once: people engage (PMF); the people engaging could plausibly drive the outcomes above (market-impact); and engagement actually causes the outcomes rather than merely correlating (product-impact). (h/t to people like Peter McIntyre and Jamie Harris, who have been pushing for more of this in EA community building).
What we need to do next
Supplement our QuIP research with surveys and interviews of people from the Dutch EA community who have gone on to do cool things. Our recent QuIP research interviewed a selection of programme participants. However, it didn’t select based on impact achieved, just engagement with our work. This would complement it by surveying and interviewing Dutch EAs who have done genuinely impactful things post-engagement. The question we’d be asking: what helped, what hindered? Builds on Open Philanthropy’s 2020 “What helped and hindered our respondents” and CEA/RP’s 2024 “What helps people have an impact and connect”. The distinctive contribution is Dutch-specific signal. Mix surveys for breadth and interviews for depth.
Run generative interviews with our target group. For each priority segment, conduct a series of interviews with people who fit the profile: in the skill bucket, at the right career stage, Dutch-based or Dutch-relevant, currently unknown to EAN, EA-curious, and looking for community and learning. We’re looking to learn about their needs, blockers, jobs-to-be-done, and unmet desires — what they’re looking for, what they’ve tried, what would resonate, what almost made them give up trying.
Combine both, generate solution ideas, test cheaply. The cool-people analysis gives us info on what has tended to help people who succeed in the Dutch context. The generative interviews give us within-segment specificity (what this particular cohort needs). Combine them to generate 3-5 distinct candidate solutions. Then test cheaply before building anything: landing-page tests (a one-pager describing the imagined programme — do they apply?), concierge MVPs (deliver the service entirely by hand to the first five users), interview the solution (“would you use this? what would make you not? what would you give up for it?”). Validate against Cagan’s four risks before scaling: value, usability, feasibility, viability. Pre-commit kill criteria for every programme — including the intro course, which is our current on-ramp because it’s been the on-ramp, not because it’s been proven against alternatives.
Will not comment on the content of your vision of EAN, I’m sure you see and know more than I do about the specifics of EA community building, what works and what does not. My thoughts are rather structural, mainly because it seems like much of the next actions in the new future are exploration (generation solution ideas, interviews, etc.).
1. Is the dutch context so different that we have to ‘reinvent the wheel’ for solutions that work? Why can we not learn from and copy the strategies and programmes that we have the most solid evidence of working from other national EA orgs?
2. Is there a specific reason why we are now questioning the effectiveness of programmes and our understanding of community needs? Asking specifically since it seems like it would help in focussing your priorities to decide what level of evidence you need to see before you are willing to commit to a specific approach for a pre-defined amount of time before re-evaluating. Not that you should be blind to feedback or doubts during such a commitment phase, but rather would respond by improving the quality of the programme in the areas of doubt (instead of questioning whether it is even worth it).
Thanks Jari, great questions! Also congrats on your first comment!!
1. National orgs haven’t done much experimentation with programme development, so there isn’t much to copy. EA Switzerland recently bolted on an impact cohort to their trad intro programme, which looks promising, and EA UK are going to try and replicate it, so one option would be to just copy that, and I’m considering that. In the past 6 months or so, EA Israel has been trying to build an intro programme from the ground up, but that’s more focused on students and young professionals. CEA’s virtual programme hasn’t been updated significantly in years. CEA’s bootcamp or HIP’s IAP are interesting candidates for copying BUT they’re online and are mostly about helping people switch careers, rather than generally helping people increase their impact/onboarding people to the community.[1]
2. We think we might be able to do more. Last year, we experimented with various GTM strats, and got some decent results (140% increase in completions). But our CAC was a bit high, and this might be an indicator we don’t have PMF. We’re also worried that, as our target audience has changed, the intro course is less likely to produce the outcomes we’re looking for.
It might be the case that we end up doing something similar regardless because, when we interview our target audience, we discover they just really want career programmes. If that’s the case, then we should probably just copy what HIP and CEA are doing (with some adaptations).
My personal messy thoughts on some of the things EA Netherlands (and maybe other community building orgs?) should be doing in the near future (building on our recent post). Sharing to get input. Please tell me what you think I’m getting wrong.
Some Tenets
Community building, not talent placement. EAN is primarily a community-building organisation. Our theory of change is to grow community capital — the community’s capacity for future impact, which we take to be roughly (sum of individual career capital) × coordination ability. This is the stock we’re building. Members deploy it over time through three medium-term outcomes: career switches into impact-relevant roles, significant donations to effective organisations, and community organising or advocacy for EA-aligned causes, solutions, and tools. (Organising and advocacy are partly deployments and partly investments back into coordination ability — meta-work, worth flagging as such.)
Over a longer horizon, those flows aggregate into population-level outcomes: shifts in awareness and perception of EA and EA-style thinking, and eventually norm and institutional change.
Career switches and donations in any given year are how we tell whether the stock is being built well; they’re not what we should be optimising for.
This is the difference from talent placement. Placement orgs — BlueDot for AI safety upskilling, AIM for entrepreneurship, MATS for AI safety research — convert specific kinds of career capital into specific roles on roughly annual cycles. That’s a different job, and it’s done well elsewhere. EAN’s contribution is to grow the underlying stock: more members, more career capital per member, more coordination ability across them. What makes this worthwhile is what the approach produces over long horizons: engagement spread across many roles rather than concentrated in one bet, ecosystem infrastructure that no single placement focus would build, values that persist when people switch careers, and the candidate pipeline that placement orgs themselves depend on. Maybe the Dutch ecosystem does need a placement org, but that should probably be an EAN spinout (as was the case with Doneer Effectief).
Who we target with our outreach. EA-curious people with skillsets identified as being particularly valuable by sources such as the meta coordination forum survey.
Product-Market-Impact Fit (PMIF). Standard PMF asks “do people love and use it?” EAN’s job is harder. PMIF resolves into three fits at once: people engage (PMF); the people engaging could plausibly drive the outcomes above (market-impact); and engagement actually causes the outcomes rather than merely correlating (product-impact). (h/t to people like Peter McIntyre and Jamie Harris, who have been pushing for more of this in EA community building).
What we need to do next
Supplement our QuIP research with surveys and interviews of people from the Dutch EA community who have gone on to do cool things. Our recent QuIP research interviewed a selection of programme participants. However, it didn’t select based on impact achieved, just engagement with our work. This would complement it by surveying and interviewing Dutch EAs who have done genuinely impactful things post-engagement. The question we’d be asking: what helped, what hindered? Builds on Open Philanthropy’s 2020 “What helped and hindered our respondents” and CEA/RP’s 2024 “What helps people have an impact and connect”. The distinctive contribution is Dutch-specific signal. Mix surveys for breadth and interviews for depth.
Run generative interviews with our target group. For each priority segment, conduct a series of interviews with people who fit the profile: in the skill bucket, at the right career stage, Dutch-based or Dutch-relevant, currently unknown to EAN, EA-curious, and looking for community and learning. We’re looking to learn about their needs, blockers, jobs-to-be-done, and unmet desires — what they’re looking for, what they’ve tried, what would resonate, what almost made them give up trying.
Combine both, generate solution ideas, test cheaply. The cool-people analysis gives us info on what has tended to help people who succeed in the Dutch context. The generative interviews give us within-segment specificity (what this particular cohort needs). Combine them to generate 3-5 distinct candidate solutions. Then test cheaply before building anything: landing-page tests (a one-pager describing the imagined programme — do they apply?), concierge MVPs (deliver the service entirely by hand to the first five users), interview the solution (“would you use this? what would make you not? what would you give up for it?”). Validate against Cagan’s four risks before scaling: value, usability, feasibility, viability. Pre-commit kill criteria for every programme — including the intro course, which is our current on-ramp because it’s been the on-ramp, not because it’s been proven against alternatives.
Will not comment on the content of your vision of EAN, I’m sure you see and know more than I do about the specifics of EA community building, what works and what does not. My thoughts are rather structural, mainly because it seems like much of the next actions in the new future are exploration (generation solution ideas, interviews, etc.).
1. Is the dutch context so different that we have to ‘reinvent the wheel’ for solutions that work? Why can we not learn from and copy the strategies and programmes that we have the most solid evidence of working from other national EA orgs?
2. Is there a specific reason why we are now questioning the effectiveness of programmes and our understanding of community needs? Asking specifically since it seems like it would help in focussing your priorities to decide what level of evidence you need to see before you are willing to commit to a specific approach for a pre-defined amount of time before re-evaluating. Not that you should be blind to feedback or doubts during such a commitment phase, but rather would respond by improving the quality of the programme in the areas of doubt (instead of questioning whether it is even worth it).
Keep up the good work!
Thanks Jari, great questions! Also congrats on your first comment!!
1. National orgs haven’t done much experimentation with programme development, so there isn’t much to copy. EA Switzerland recently bolted on an impact cohort to their trad intro programme, which looks promising, and EA UK are going to try and replicate it, so one option would be to just copy that, and I’m considering that. In the past 6 months or so, EA Israel has been trying to build an intro programme from the ground up, but that’s more focused on students and young professionals. CEA’s virtual programme hasn’t been updated significantly in years. CEA’s bootcamp or HIP’s IAP are interesting candidates for copying BUT they’re online and are mostly about helping people switch careers, rather than generally helping people increase their impact/onboarding people to the community.[1]
2. We think we might be able to do more. Last year, we experimented with various GTM strats, and got some decent results (140% increase in completions). But our CAC was a bit high, and this might be an indicator we don’t have PMF. We’re also worried that, as our target audience has changed, the intro course is less likely to produce the outcomes we’re looking for.
It might be the case that we end up doing something similar regardless because, when we interview our target audience, we discover they just really want career programmes. If that’s the case, then we should probably just copy what HIP and CEA are doing (with some adaptations).