“What is the best way to get more people to act upon the principles of effective altruism?”—I’d suggest looking at what the bottleneck is. Are you getting lots of people coming to your meetups and then not coming back or is it mostly just the regular with very few new members? Importantly, if a group has a low retention rate, they probably don’t want to scale reach as they’d just burning through people who might have become members if they’d been better placed to capture them. Anyway, from what I’ve heard mass media outreach doesn’t really seem to have been effective for EA groups and that matches what I’ve seen in Australia too where I haven’t heard of a single person who first heard of Effective Altruism through mass media, while in contrast, I’ve met several who heard of us through more niche channels like podcasts.
Anyway, I’m hugely in favour of EA Sweden exploring politics as it really does seem to be a comparative advantage for the reasons given. EA is much more likely to be able to influence politics in smaller countries where you have more chance of getting a meeting with important people and there are a lot of advantages of exploring working in politics when any fallout might be contained.
Yeah, looking at where the drop-off is seems like a very good idea. Unfortunately, we haven’t had data on this historically and can only go off anecdotal data. Given those anecdotes we’ve reached the conclusion that more effort should be put on the latter parts of the sales funnel.
Regarding mass media my impression is the same. However, I think that it is likely useful to put some effort into it, e.g. since it adds credibility to the organisation.
Going forward, we’ll have data on who comes to what events, data from membership forms and will hopefully be able to connect that to end-line results, e.g. career changes and donations.
“What is the best way to get more people to act upon the principles of effective altruism?”—I’d suggest looking at what the bottleneck is. Are you getting lots of people coming to your meetups and then not coming back or is it mostly just the regular with very few new members? Importantly, if a group has a low retention rate, they probably don’t want to scale reach as they’d just burning through people who might have become members if they’d been better placed to capture them. Anyway, from what I’ve heard mass media outreach doesn’t really seem to have been effective for EA groups and that matches what I’ve seen in Australia too where I haven’t heard of a single person who first heard of Effective Altruism through mass media, while in contrast, I’ve met several who heard of us through more niche channels like podcasts.
Anyway, I’m hugely in favour of EA Sweden exploring politics as it really does seem to be a comparative advantage for the reasons given. EA is much more likely to be able to influence politics in smaller countries where you have more chance of getting a meeting with important people and there are a lot of advantages of exploring working in politics when any fallout might be contained.
Thanks for the input!
Yeah, looking at where the drop-off is seems like a very good idea. Unfortunately, we haven’t had data on this historically and can only go off anecdotal data. Given those anecdotes we’ve reached the conclusion that more effort should be put on the latter parts of the sales funnel.
Regarding mass media my impression is the same. However, I think that it is likely useful to put some effort into it, e.g. since it adds credibility to the organisation.
Going forward, we’ll have data on who comes to what events, data from membership forms and will hopefully be able to connect that to end-line results, e.g. career changes and donations.