1.) What will EA Outreach do, if anything, to coordinate with other people working on marketing EA? Will EA Outreach be transparent, or aim to produce research that is of value to typical EAs? Will there be any attempt to bring forward some “lessons learned”? While I know the Global Priorities Project has done a lot, I feel like there has been incredibly little that an EA can personally use and learn from (though I understand that may not have been the point).
2.) What, if anything, has EA Outreach learned from those who have already done outreach, such as CEA’s own orgs, or others? Didn’t, for example, GWWC already try VIP outreach?
3.) I like the program plan and a lot of individual projects, but it feels a bit like throwing everything but the kitchen sink, very loosely fit together by theme. There doesn’t seem to be that much rationale for why some projects are taking place and others aren’t. While it’s good to try many things to learn lots fast, it’s also good to focus on a few things to do them well. What thought has CEA given to this tradeoff?
4.) Why is EA Ventures included in this? It doesn’t even seem thematically related.
5.) Is there any danger in CEA increasing how central it is to the movement? We certainly do want more resources and CEA seems to be in a very good place to execute these projects in a way that no one else can. But it would be bad for CEA to become a single point of failure for the movement. Has there been any spot in spinning off more orgs out of the CEA umbrella? Any thought in putting some of these projects on hold and use EA Ventures to try to get some of them out instead?
6.) How does CEA know that Will’s viral Ice Bucket articles generated £10K for SCI? What is being done, if anything, to track the impact of these outreach projects? Even if we can’t understand well the impact of outreach overall, it would be nice to be able to compare projects against each other.
Great questions, thanks for asking them. I’m going to respond to your different questions in different comments as my response is too long to be accepted as a single comment.
1.) What will EA Outreach do, if anything, to coordinate with other people working on marketing EA? Will EA Outreach be transparent, or aim to produce research that is of value to typical EAs? Will there be any attempt to bring forward some “lessons learned”? While I know the Global Priorities Project has done a lot, I feel like there has been incredibly little that an EA can personally use and learn from (though I understand that may not have been the point).
1a. We would like to co-ordinate and collaborate with anyone who is working on marketing EA. Currently the only person we know who is working on this full time is Tyler Alterman from Leverage, and we work so closely with him that he practically feels like part of the team! We will be collaborating closely with LYCS, not least on Peter Singer’s book, and we talk with Giving What We Can on a daily basis. We are teaming up with 80,000 Hours on the EA Fellow’s Programme, and we have been working with CEA to create its own branding that will make it more relevant to the movement as an incubator. We’ve been talking with Tom Ash and looking for ways that we can best collaborate with effectivealtruismhub.org, which hosts many .impact projects. As I mentioned in the plan we have been helping advise FHI on their efforts to make the discussion on AI in the media more accurate. We have also been advising the Norwegian EAs on media strategy, and they’ve been helping us think through movement branding. We’ve been talking with some of the German EAs about their plans to create “superteams” to work on new EA projects. We’ve also been collaborating with the Australian EAs on the EA Forum, and we are currently in conversation with them about their hosting of EA Global. If there are other groups that would like to collaborate with us, I’d love to hear from them!
1b. I won’t speak for the Global Priorities Project (GPP) as I haven’t been working on that project since August and so I’m not so up to date on their current plans. It is worth noting though that Seb Farquhar has been hired from McKinsey to join GPP as its director and project manager, so their plans and outputs may change substantially from January when he starts.
On EA Outreach though, we do indeed plan to write up some of our lessons learned. We have a draft post ready on our learnings from engaging with the media in 2014 that we hope to post soon. You have probably seen my post on what I learned from engaging in policy work earlier this year: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/7e/good_policy_ideas_that_wont_happen_yet/ Writing up these learnings takes quite a lot of time and so we probably won’t be able to share everything we learn, but we try to pass on any particularly useful information to teams that might benefit from it. We love getting questions from different projects and people on their outreach strategies, and I really enjoy talking with all of these projects and helping them think through their work, so if there are people reading this who would be interested in talking through some questions about their EA project then please do get in touch.
Currently the only person we know who is working on this full time is Tyler Alterman from Leverage, and we work so closely with him that he practically feels like part of the team!
Interesting—is what Tyler or Leverage are doing written up anywhere?
We’ve been talking with Tom Ash and looking for ways that we can best collaborate with effectivealtruismhub.org, which hosts many .impact projects.
Likewise interesting—what are the options for this?
We’ve been talking with some of the German EAs about their plans to create “superteams” to work on new EA projects.
Would this be the sort of thing that EA Ventures might fund, or are you imagining slightly different sorts of projects?
Interesting—is what Tyler or Leverage are doing written up anywhere?
Not as of yet. I’ll let Tyler decide when is a good time to write some things up.
Likewise interesting—what are the options for this?
I’m talking to Tom later today. One obvious plan include linking to more .impact projects from effectivealtruism.org .
Would this be the sort of thing that EA Ventures might fund, or are you imagining slightly different sorts of projects?
This could be the sort of thing EA Ventures might fund. I think EA Ventures will be in a position to fund a diverse range of projects including for-profits, nonprofits and projects that are valuable, but too small to be considered a full-fledged startup.
Hi Peter. I’ll be joining GPP in January. Niel and Rob have both said exactly what I’d say on the point of GPP. I’d perhaps add that GPP has been experimenting with a number of avenues towards impact using the outcome of its research. We’ll be deciding exactly what approach seems most promising early in the new year, and that will be really important for shaping the organisation. My current hypothesis is that out biggest comparative advantage as an EA org is in tools for policy rather than for EAs, though obviously many things useful for one can be made useful for the other. From your comment it sounds like you had some specific ideas for things you thought GPP could be bringing to EAs, PM me and I’d love to chat about it.
From your comment it sounds like you had some specific ideas for things you thought GPP could be bringing to EAs, PM me and I’d love to chat about it.
Yeah, that sounds like fun. I’d be happy to expand on this some, but it’s not relevant to the discussion here. It would be good to chat regardless. Feel free to reach me at peter@peterhurford.com.
I think that a lot of what GPP could do is also well covered by GiveWell Labs.
I think a lot of what GPP could do is also well covered by GiveWell Labs.
I absolutely agree with this (and am delighted by it). GPP is likely to look for things which are either very distinct from or complementary to the kind of work OPP does.
Regarding GPP, your expectations from this year have to be calibrated to the fact that GPP only has one dedicated staff member working 0.75 full time equivalents. It has also not had effective altruists as its target demographic, instead focussing on people working on government policy, and academics.
5.) Is there any danger in CEA increasing how central it is to the movement? We certainly do want more resources and CEA seems to be in a very good place to execute these projects in a way that no one else can. But it would be bad for CEA to become a single point of failure for the movement. Has there been any spot in spinning off more orgs out of the CEA umbrella? Any thought in putting some of these projects on hold and use EA Ventures to try to get some of them out instead?
I agree with you that CEA is becoming an increasingly key node in the EA movement, and that this is a potential failure mode, and it is one that we have been taking steps to address.
We are currently in the process of finalising a governance reform package within CEA that would turn CEA into more of an incubator, which will make it easier for CEA to start and end projects. We have already successfully spun two projects out of CEA (Animal Charity Evaluators and Life You Can Save), and these reforms would also potentially make it easier for projects to spin out of CEA should they wish to. I won’t go into the details of these reforms publicly until we are able to finalise the package and discuss it with the trustees, but we are certainly taking steps to make CEA more resilient, adaptable, and ultimately less likely to be a failure mode within the movement.
As for whether EA Ventures should try to start up some of these initiatives instead, I see CEA and EA Ventures as occupying two different roles. EA Ventures is a project to make it easier for projects to get financing, whereas CEA is an incubator of new projects. EA Ventures primarily provides funding, whereas CEA provides: office space, book-keeping, hr and logistics support, fundraising support, legal support, charity status, and mentoring and strategy advice. It would take a considerable amount of setup time for EA Ventures to be able to provide all of these services, and I don’t think this would be the best use of resources. Similarly, projects at CEA are always welcome to spin-off from CEA and source these services independently, but they find it beneficial enough that they choose not to do this as it allows them to focus purely on their project and not on non-profit administration which is largely handled by CEA. For this reason I would like to continue using CEA’s incubation services for the projects that I am starting and working on, at least until they reach sufficient scale, because it allows me to focus my attention directly on the project itself.
I would actually push back on CEA being a bigger failure node than in the past. I think a smaller share of people identifying as working on ‘effective altruism’ are in CEA than ever before. GiveWell has grown faster than us, and we now have other groups like CS too.
Also, CEA is an incubator for many different projects, so it would be surprising for them all to collapse simultaneously.
I agree with you that CEA is becoming an increasingly key node in the EA movement, and that this is a potential failure mode, and it is one that we have been taking steps to address. We are currently in the process of finalising a governance reform package within CEA that would turn CEA into more of an incubator, which will make it easier for CEA to start and end projects.
That sounds good to me. I look forward to seeing how this develops.
On question three (the forum keeps renumbering my answers to I’m writing the numbers in text):
3.) I like the program plan and a lot of individual projects, but it feels a bit like throwing everything but the kitchen sink, very loosely fit together by theme. There doesn’t seem to be that much rationale for why some projects are taking place and others aren’t. While it’s good to try many things to learn lots fast, it’s also good to focus on a few things to do them well. What thought has CEA given to this tradeoff?
I agree with you that there are a lot of different projects here (and the list used to be much much longer before we had to cut it down to what was more realistic to achieve!) The strategy that we tend to use at CEA is to experiment on a number of different things when we move into a new area and then scale up the things that work well. For example when we created 80,000 Hours we experimented with making it a campaigning movement, an online app, a community, and a lecture series, before settling on the current model of it being a service to help people choose their careers. Without this experimentation it is easy to commit too many resources to sub-optimal projects that we end up pivoting away from. This is why this list does look long, and why we expect it will narrow at the end of this year, and possibly even during the year if one or more of the projects seem particularly bad on closer inspection.
It is also notable that we have also taken one bigger bet, in the books that we are publishing. In including writing time, William MacAskill’s book and marketing campaign will have at least one person-year of time put into it. This is because we were presented with a particularly good publishing deal—pretty much the best deal that it is possible to get as a non-celebrity first-time author.
Another factor that I notice is that because Niel and I are, as far as I know, the first EAs to focus exclusively on EA outreach, the space of possible projects is vast, and there’s lots of low-hanging fruit.
EA Ventures is a great example. I think I’ve talked to around a dozen people who independently had an idea similar to EAV, but didn’t have the time to get it off the ground. Given a vast space of high-impact projects, I think it makes sense to try many different things and then double down on the projects that show the most promise.
That said, if there are good arguments for not doing some projects or for doing others instead, I think Niel and I would be very keen to update our views.
Given a vast space of high-impact projects, I think it makes sense to try many different things and then double down on the projects that show the most promise.
What sort of goals are you setting to tell whether a project has promise or not?
I wouldn’t view this as throwing in ‘everything and the kitchen sink’. A large majority of the funding will go to four things:
1) Promotion for Singer’s book
2) Promotion for MacAskill’s book, including websites for people to land on before/after reading it
3) Getting EA Global to happen
4) Getting EA Ventures off the ground.
Much of the first three will be outsourced, which is why two people can handle this many projects at once, with the funding necessary to pay professionals.
2.) What, if anything, has EA Outreach learned from those who have already done outreach, such as CEA’s own orgs, or others? Didn’t, for example, GWWC already try VIP outreach?
2a. We’ve tried to talk with everyone who we think might have useful insights or learnings we might be able to use on EA Outreach. Kerry Vaughan in particular has been doing a lot of this (as he is coordinating the movement-facing side of our work) and he is regularly Skyping and talking with half a dozen people a day to ask for advice and feedback on things that he is working on. I won’t bore you with a long list of everyone we are currently getting advice from, but I can assure you that it is extensive!
2b. On your questions about learning within CEA, I am fortunate enough to have led on outreach for Giving What We Can, VIP engagement for CEA, and outreach for 80,000 Hours in previous roles I’ve had at CEA, so much of the project plan (http://bit.ly/EAO2015) is built off the back of things I felt I learned while in those roles, and I regularly discuss strategy and learnings with the current teams working on those projects. Finally, at CEA we have ‘training lunches’ which all the teams are invited to, in which someone presents on a topic that they have experience with, or a topic that they have recently been studying, and the group gets to discuss and give feedback. We regularly have these on outreach-related topics, and in fact on Wednesday Steph Crampin from GWWC will be giving one on what she has learned from the marketing diploma that she is in the final stages of getting.
That makes sense. I hope someone from GWWC or CEA would be willing to write up some of these lessons learned for the benefits of the wider audience trying to spread EA ideas.
Unfortunately I think that much of our learning in areas like marketing is not generally applicable enough to be useful to more than a dozen or so people in the world right now. We are talking with these people already and generally I find those conversations to be more useful than spending an equivalent amount of time writing up learnings because we can tailor the conversation to specific circumstances.
For example, writing up my policy learnings ( http://effective-altruism.com/ea/7e/good_policy_ideas_that_wont_happen_yet/ ) took me at least 1.5 days, and it is unclear to me whether this was better than having 15 one-hour conversations with interested people. This was a case where I had particularly well-organised thoughts and potentially novel insights, so I find it likely that in cases where I have less-insightful and worse-organised thoughts it would be better for me just to have the conversations instead, which is the route I am currently going down with a lot of this stuff.
I would be interested in your thoughts on this as someone who does take the time to write up substantial amounts of your thinking. How do you compare the trade-off against spending the same amount of time simply having conversations with people? I’m pretty open to the idea that I’m not spending enough time writing up my learnings, but at the moment I’m trying to focus my effort on conversations instead as I think that’s where more value lies.
4.) Why is EA Ventures included in this? It doesn’t even seem thematically related.
There are a number of ways of interpreting your question on EA Ventures. The benefits of the project (increased coordination, less matching costs for donors and projects, incentives for and ease of creating new EA projects, etc.) are outlined here: http://bit.ly/EAVentures (note that the intended audience of this document is donors, and so it doesn’t stress the benefits to entrepreneurs as much as it could)
I agree that EA Ventures is less thematically relevant to the rest of the programme than many of the other projects, but I think it is unfair to say that it is not thematically related: this project is about making it easier for EAs to get the funding they need to start new projects, and it is in the plan in the context of getting EAs access to the skills and resources they need to have impact.
The idea was suggested by a number of different EAs in a number of different forums, and multiple people asked whether we were interested in leading on the project as no-one else seemed to want to take the lead on it. We mentioned it to a couple of donors, who seemed pretty interested in the idea, and after writing it up in more detail and discussing its merits relative to the other things we would have been spending the time on, we decided to take it on.
Another practical reason is that Kerry Vaughan is very keen to push EA Ventures forward, and is on the Outreach team. In the longer run I could see EA Ventures being coordinated by central CEA, but at least in the short run funding to EA Outreach will in part go to help getting EA Ventures set up (assuming we get enough funding to include that).
Just to add to this, I do think EA Ventures is an outreach project.
The medium-term plan is to change the name of the project to something other than EA Ventures and to pitch the project to impact-oriented donors who do not self-identify as EA. Tyler has already had some success in doing this. I think we can also reach entrepreneurs who are looking for funding for high-impact projects but who do not self identify as EA.
To be sure, the primary benefit is likely to be connecting EAs with funding from other EAs, but there’s no reason that needs to be the only benefit of the project.
6.) How does CEA know that Will’s viral Ice Bucket articles generated £10K for SCI? What is being done, if anything, to track the impact of these outreach projects? Even if we can’t understand well the impact of outreach overall, it would be nice to be able to compare projects against each other.
We got our money moved to SCI data from SCI. They ask where the donations came from and they saw a large spike in donations citing online media at the time when I did a national radio segment with Elie from GiveWell on why to donate to SCI rather than ALS in the ice bucket challenge, which was the reproduced on BBC online and in the Financial Times. They also asked a few of the donors and they said that our articles were the cause.
I agree with you that it would be nice to be able to compare the impact of the different projects. The impact metrics we are tracking for each of the projects are different in places, but we try and measure similar metrics across the projects such as direct money moved wherever we can. We have also been attempting to monitor whenever one of the projects leads to a new Giving What We Can member, and GiveWell have been giving us numbers on new traffic to GiveWell as a result of our media (we will set this up for other projects as well once they reach scale). For example multiple articles we have placed in the media have driven 1000s of new visitors to GiveWell (Approximately 1 in every 200 new visitors donates to GiveWell and the average donations size is $1000, though I imagine the visitors we sent over were substantially less likely than average to donate large amounts). We hope to use direct money moved as one indicator of the impact of each project, though this is quite an imprecise metric that doesn’t capture many of the other benefits of the projects, so we will be monitoring others as well such as the number of people who sign up to an EA org as a result of these projects, the number of people who become actively involved in the movement because of these projects, etc.
I hope this answers some of your questions, and feel free to get in touch if you have further questions.
2.) What, if anything, has EA Outreach learned from those who have already done outreach, such as CEA’s own orgs, or others? Didn’t, for example, GWWC already try VIP outreach?
It’d be valuable to write this up for others to learn on.
4.) Why is EA Ventures included in this? It doesn’t even seem thematically related.
I guess it’s because it doesn’t fit anywhere else, and it has to fit under some CEA branch.
5.) Is there any danger in CEA increasing how central it is to the movement? We certainly do want more resources and CEA seems to be in a very good place to execute these projects in a way that no one else can. But it would be bad for CEA to become a single point of failure for the movement. Has there been any spot in spinning off more orgs out of the CEA umbrella? Any thought in putting some of these projects on hold and use EA Ventures to try to get some of them out instead?
This is a very good point, and I agree there’s a danger in this. It sounds as if CEA is taking over the EA Summit from another EA organisation (Leverage Research) which could be an example, although if the Summit/EA Global would not have happened otherwise it makes sense. The idea of using EA Ventures to fund projects we want to see is a very good one.
Six questions:
1.) What will EA Outreach do, if anything, to coordinate with other people working on marketing EA? Will EA Outreach be transparent, or aim to produce research that is of value to typical EAs? Will there be any attempt to bring forward some “lessons learned”? While I know the Global Priorities Project has done a lot, I feel like there has been incredibly little that an EA can personally use and learn from (though I understand that may not have been the point).
2.) What, if anything, has EA Outreach learned from those who have already done outreach, such as CEA’s own orgs, or others? Didn’t, for example, GWWC already try VIP outreach?
3.) I like the program plan and a lot of individual projects, but it feels a bit like throwing everything but the kitchen sink, very loosely fit together by theme. There doesn’t seem to be that much rationale for why some projects are taking place and others aren’t. While it’s good to try many things to learn lots fast, it’s also good to focus on a few things to do them well. What thought has CEA given to this tradeoff?
4.) Why is EA Ventures included in this? It doesn’t even seem thematically related.
5.) Is there any danger in CEA increasing how central it is to the movement? We certainly do want more resources and CEA seems to be in a very good place to execute these projects in a way that no one else can. But it would be bad for CEA to become a single point of failure for the movement. Has there been any spot in spinning off more orgs out of the CEA umbrella? Any thought in putting some of these projects on hold and use EA Ventures to try to get some of them out instead?
6.) How does CEA know that Will’s viral Ice Bucket articles generated £10K for SCI? What is being done, if anything, to track the impact of these outreach projects? Even if we can’t understand well the impact of outreach overall, it would be nice to be able to compare projects against each other.
Hi Peter,
Great questions, thanks for asking them. I’m going to respond to your different questions in different comments as my response is too long to be accepted as a single comment.
On question one:
1a. We would like to co-ordinate and collaborate with anyone who is working on marketing EA. Currently the only person we know who is working on this full time is Tyler Alterman from Leverage, and we work so closely with him that he practically feels like part of the team! We will be collaborating closely with LYCS, not least on Peter Singer’s book, and we talk with Giving What We Can on a daily basis. We are teaming up with 80,000 Hours on the EA Fellow’s Programme, and we have been working with CEA to create its own branding that will make it more relevant to the movement as an incubator. We’ve been talking with Tom Ash and looking for ways that we can best collaborate with effectivealtruismhub.org, which hosts many .impact projects. As I mentioned in the plan we have been helping advise FHI on their efforts to make the discussion on AI in the media more accurate. We have also been advising the Norwegian EAs on media strategy, and they’ve been helping us think through movement branding. We’ve been talking with some of the German EAs about their plans to create “superteams” to work on new EA projects. We’ve also been collaborating with the Australian EAs on the EA Forum, and we are currently in conversation with them about their hosting of EA Global. If there are other groups that would like to collaborate with us, I’d love to hear from them!
1b. I won’t speak for the Global Priorities Project (GPP) as I haven’t been working on that project since August and so I’m not so up to date on their current plans. It is worth noting though that Seb Farquhar has been hired from McKinsey to join GPP as its director and project manager, so their plans and outputs may change substantially from January when he starts.
On EA Outreach though, we do indeed plan to write up some of our lessons learned. We have a draft post ready on our learnings from engaging with the media in 2014 that we hope to post soon. You have probably seen my post on what I learned from engaging in policy work earlier this year: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/7e/good_policy_ideas_that_wont_happen_yet/ Writing up these learnings takes quite a lot of time and so we probably won’t be able to share everything we learn, but we try to pass on any particularly useful information to teams that might benefit from it. We love getting questions from different projects and people on their outreach strategies, and I really enjoy talking with all of these projects and helping them think through their work, so if there are people reading this who would be interested in talking through some questions about their EA project then please do get in touch.
Interesting—is what Tyler or Leverage are doing written up anywhere?
Likewise interesting—what are the options for this?
Would this be the sort of thing that EA Ventures might fund, or are you imagining slightly different sorts of projects?
Not as of yet. I’ll let Tyler decide when is a good time to write some things up.
I’m talking to Tom later today. One obvious plan include linking to more .impact projects from effectivealtruism.org .
This could be the sort of thing EA Ventures might fund. I think EA Ventures will be in a position to fund a diverse range of projects including for-profits, nonprofits and projects that are valuable, but too small to be considered a full-fledged startup.
Hi Peter. I’ll be joining GPP in January. Niel and Rob have both said exactly what I’d say on the point of GPP. I’d perhaps add that GPP has been experimenting with a number of avenues towards impact using the outcome of its research. We’ll be deciding exactly what approach seems most promising early in the new year, and that will be really important for shaping the organisation. My current hypothesis is that out biggest comparative advantage as an EA org is in tools for policy rather than for EAs, though obviously many things useful for one can be made useful for the other. From your comment it sounds like you had some specific ideas for things you thought GPP could be bringing to EAs, PM me and I’d love to chat about it.
Yeah, that sounds like fun. I’d be happy to expand on this some, but it’s not relevant to the discussion here. It would be good to chat regardless. Feel free to reach me at peter@peterhurford.com.
I think that a lot of what GPP could do is also well covered by GiveWell Labs.
I absolutely agree with this (and am delighted by it). GPP is likely to look for things which are either very distinct from or complementary to the kind of work OPP does.
Regarding GPP, your expectations from this year have to be calibrated to the fact that GPP only has one dedicated staff member working 0.75 full time equivalents. It has also not had effective altruists as its target demographic, instead focussing on people working on government policy, and academics.
Despite that, we have written up our experience with public policy work as mentioned by Niel. I also expect this line of research to be fruitful for effective altruists trying to choose what cause areas to work on: http://www.effective-altruism.com/ea/c4/make_your_own_costeffectiveness_fermi_estimates/. Owen is currently working on publishing a paper on this topic.
Thanks. I feel like this concern of mine is as addressed as well as it can be.
On question five:
I agree with you that CEA is becoming an increasingly key node in the EA movement, and that this is a potential failure mode, and it is one that we have been taking steps to address. We are currently in the process of finalising a governance reform package within CEA that would turn CEA into more of an incubator, which will make it easier for CEA to start and end projects. We have already successfully spun two projects out of CEA (Animal Charity Evaluators and Life You Can Save), and these reforms would also potentially make it easier for projects to spin out of CEA should they wish to. I won’t go into the details of these reforms publicly until we are able to finalise the package and discuss it with the trustees, but we are certainly taking steps to make CEA more resilient, adaptable, and ultimately less likely to be a failure mode within the movement.
As for whether EA Ventures should try to start up some of these initiatives instead, I see CEA and EA Ventures as occupying two different roles. EA Ventures is a project to make it easier for projects to get financing, whereas CEA is an incubator of new projects. EA Ventures primarily provides funding, whereas CEA provides: office space, book-keeping, hr and logistics support, fundraising support, legal support, charity status, and mentoring and strategy advice. It would take a considerable amount of setup time for EA Ventures to be able to provide all of these services, and I don’t think this would be the best use of resources. Similarly, projects at CEA are always welcome to spin-off from CEA and source these services independently, but they find it beneficial enough that they choose not to do this as it allows them to focus purely on their project and not on non-profit administration which is largely handled by CEA. For this reason I would like to continue using CEA’s incubation services for the projects that I am starting and working on, at least until they reach sufficient scale, because it allows me to focus my attention directly on the project itself.
I would actually push back on CEA being a bigger failure node than in the past. I think a smaller share of people identifying as working on ‘effective altruism’ are in CEA than ever before. GiveWell has grown faster than us, and we now have other groups like CS too.
Also, CEA is an incubator for many different projects, so it would be surprising for them all to collapse simultaneously.
That sounds good to me. I look forward to seeing how this develops.
On question three (the forum keeps renumbering my answers to I’m writing the numbers in text):
I agree with you that there are a lot of different projects here (and the list used to be much much longer before we had to cut it down to what was more realistic to achieve!) The strategy that we tend to use at CEA is to experiment on a number of different things when we move into a new area and then scale up the things that work well. For example when we created 80,000 Hours we experimented with making it a campaigning movement, an online app, a community, and a lecture series, before settling on the current model of it being a service to help people choose their careers. Without this experimentation it is easy to commit too many resources to sub-optimal projects that we end up pivoting away from. This is why this list does look long, and why we expect it will narrow at the end of this year, and possibly even during the year if one or more of the projects seem particularly bad on closer inspection.
It is also notable that we have also taken one bigger bet, in the books that we are publishing. In including writing time, William MacAskill’s book and marketing campaign will have at least one person-year of time put into it. This is because we were presented with a particularly good publishing deal—pretty much the best deal that it is possible to get as a non-celebrity first-time author.
Another factor that I notice is that because Niel and I are, as far as I know, the first EAs to focus exclusively on EA outreach, the space of possible projects is vast, and there’s lots of low-hanging fruit.
EA Ventures is a great example. I think I’ve talked to around a dozen people who independently had an idea similar to EAV, but didn’t have the time to get it off the ground. Given a vast space of high-impact projects, I think it makes sense to try many different things and then double down on the projects that show the most promise.
That said, if there are good arguments for not doing some projects or for doing others instead, I think Niel and I would be very keen to update our views.
What sort of goals are you setting to tell whether a project has promise or not?
I wouldn’t view this as throwing in ‘everything and the kitchen sink’. A large majority of the funding will go to four things:
1) Promotion for Singer’s book
2) Promotion for MacAskill’s book, including websites for people to land on before/after reading it
3) Getting EA Global to happen
4) Getting EA Ventures off the ground.
Much of the first three will be outsourced, which is why two people can handle this many projects at once, with the funding necessary to pay professionals.
It may also be worth mentioning that if anyone would like to track what EA Outreach are doing in more detail, we send out monthly updates on our activities which you can sign up for here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ea-outreach-updates
Applied! Thanks.
On question two:
2a. We’ve tried to talk with everyone who we think might have useful insights or learnings we might be able to use on EA Outreach. Kerry Vaughan in particular has been doing a lot of this (as he is coordinating the movement-facing side of our work) and he is regularly Skyping and talking with half a dozen people a day to ask for advice and feedback on things that he is working on. I won’t bore you with a long list of everyone we are currently getting advice from, but I can assure you that it is extensive!
2b. On your questions about learning within CEA, I am fortunate enough to have led on outreach for Giving What We Can, VIP engagement for CEA, and outreach for 80,000 Hours in previous roles I’ve had at CEA, so much of the project plan (http://bit.ly/EAO2015) is built off the back of things I felt I learned while in those roles, and I regularly discuss strategy and learnings with the current teams working on those projects. Finally, at CEA we have ‘training lunches’ which all the teams are invited to, in which someone presents on a topic that they have experience with, or a topic that they have recently been studying, and the group gets to discuss and give feedback. We regularly have these on outreach-related topics, and in fact on Wednesday Steph Crampin from GWWC will be giving one on what she has learned from the marketing diploma that she is in the final stages of getting.
That makes sense. I hope someone from GWWC or CEA would be willing to write up some of these lessons learned for the benefits of the wider audience trying to spread EA ideas.
A lot of these learnings are written up in the various organisations’ annual and six-monthly reviews such as https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/sites/givingwhatwecan.org/files/Jacob%20Hilton/giving_what_we_can_six_month_review.pdf and https://80000hours.org/2014/05/summary-of-the-annual-review-may-2014/
Unfortunately I think that much of our learning in areas like marketing is not generally applicable enough to be useful to more than a dozen or so people in the world right now. We are talking with these people already and generally I find those conversations to be more useful than spending an equivalent amount of time writing up learnings because we can tailor the conversation to specific circumstances.
For example, writing up my policy learnings ( http://effective-altruism.com/ea/7e/good_policy_ideas_that_wont_happen_yet/ ) took me at least 1.5 days, and it is unclear to me whether this was better than having 15 one-hour conversations with interested people. This was a case where I had particularly well-organised thoughts and potentially novel insights, so I find it likely that in cases where I have less-insightful and worse-organised thoughts it would be better for me just to have the conversations instead, which is the route I am currently going down with a lot of this stuff.
I would be interested in your thoughts on this as someone who does take the time to write up substantial amounts of your thinking. How do you compare the trade-off against spending the same amount of time simply having conversations with people? I’m pretty open to the idea that I’m not spending enough time writing up my learnings, but at the moment I’m trying to focus my effort on conversations instead as I think that’s where more value lies.
On question four:
There are a number of ways of interpreting your question on EA Ventures. The benefits of the project (increased coordination, less matching costs for donors and projects, incentives for and ease of creating new EA projects, etc.) are outlined here: http://bit.ly/EAVentures (note that the intended audience of this document is donors, and so it doesn’t stress the benefits to entrepreneurs as much as it could)
I agree that EA Ventures is less thematically relevant to the rest of the programme than many of the other projects, but I think it is unfair to say that it is not thematically related: this project is about making it easier for EAs to get the funding they need to start new projects, and it is in the plan in the context of getting EAs access to the skills and resources they need to have impact.
The idea was suggested by a number of different EAs in a number of different forums, and multiple people asked whether we were interested in leading on the project as no-one else seemed to want to take the lead on it. We mentioned it to a couple of donors, who seemed pretty interested in the idea, and after writing it up in more detail and discussing its merits relative to the other things we would have been spending the time on, we decided to take it on.
Another practical reason is that Kerry Vaughan is very keen to push EA Ventures forward, and is on the Outreach team. In the longer run I could see EA Ventures being coordinated by central CEA, but at least in the short run funding to EA Outreach will in part go to help getting EA Ventures set up (assuming we get enough funding to include that).
Just to add to this, I do think EA Ventures is an outreach project.
The medium-term plan is to change the name of the project to something other than EA Ventures and to pitch the project to impact-oriented donors who do not self-identify as EA. Tyler has already had some success in doing this. I think we can also reach entrepreneurs who are looking for funding for high-impact projects but who do not self identify as EA.
To be sure, the primary benefit is likely to be connecting EAs with funding from other EAs, but there’s no reason that needs to be the only benefit of the project.
On question six:
We got our money moved to SCI data from SCI. They ask where the donations came from and they saw a large spike in donations citing online media at the time when I did a national radio segment with Elie from GiveWell on why to donate to SCI rather than ALS in the ice bucket challenge, which was the reproduced on BBC online and in the Financial Times. They also asked a few of the donors and they said that our articles were the cause.
I agree with you that it would be nice to be able to compare the impact of the different projects. The impact metrics we are tracking for each of the projects are different in places, but we try and measure similar metrics across the projects such as direct money moved wherever we can. We have also been attempting to monitor whenever one of the projects leads to a new Giving What We Can member, and GiveWell have been giving us numbers on new traffic to GiveWell as a result of our media (we will set this up for other projects as well once they reach scale). For example multiple articles we have placed in the media have driven 1000s of new visitors to GiveWell (Approximately 1 in every 200 new visitors donates to GiveWell and the average donations size is $1000, though I imagine the visitors we sent over were substantially less likely than average to donate large amounts). We hope to use direct money moved as one indicator of the impact of each project, though this is quite an imprecise metric that doesn’t capture many of the other benefits of the projects, so we will be monitoring others as well such as the number of people who sign up to an EA org as a result of these projects, the number of people who become actively involved in the movement because of these projects, etc.
I hope this answers some of your questions, and feel free to get in touch if you have further questions.
Sure thing. Thanks for the care and attention to these questions.
Excellent questions and points.
It’d be valuable to write this up for others to learn on.
I guess it’s because it doesn’t fit anywhere else, and it has to fit under some CEA branch.
This is a very good point, and I agree there’s a danger in this. It sounds as if CEA is taking over the EA Summit from another EA organisation (Leverage Research) which could be an example, although if the Summit/EA Global would not have happened otherwise it makes sense. The idea of using EA Ventures to fund projects we want to see is a very good one.