The section on 2021 plans is intended to be a summary of these criteria, sorry that wasn’t clear.
One target is focused on recruitment: building a system for onboarding people to EA (to the level where they are taking significant action based on a good understanding of EA principles). Specifically, we aim to help onboard 125 people to this level.
The second target is focused around retention: for people who are already highly engaged EAs, growing the amount of time they spend engaging with high-quality content via our work (e.g. Forum view time or watching a talk from one of our events on YouTube) by 30%, and also growing the number of new connections (e.g. at events) they make by 30%.
The third target is focused on risk-reduction: this is covered in the community health targets above (which are slightly more tightly specified and fleshed out internally).
Internally we obviously have more details about how we plan to measure/assess these things, but we wanted to just give a summary here. We expect that most of these org-wide goals will be achieved as a collaboration between teams, but we have a single person responsible for each of the org-wide goals. (Operations and executive goals are a bit more complex, and are covered above.)
This is super helpful- thank you! I feel like I’ve got a much better understanding of your goals now. It really cleared things up to learn which of your multiple goals you’re prioritizing most, as well as the precise targets you have for them (since you have a specific recruitment goal it might be worth editing the OP to add that).
I have two followup questions about the recruitment goal.
How did you set your target of recruiting 125 people? That’s much lower than I would have guessed based on other recruitment efforts (GWWC has run a two-month pledge drive that produced three times as many pledges, plus a bunch of people signing up for Try Giving). And with $2.5 million budgeted for recruitment, the implied $20,000 per recruit seems quite high. I feel like I might be misunderstanding what you mean about “following a cohort of students who attended an introductory fellowship, our introductory event, or the EA Student Summit in 2020” (discussed in the second bullet point).
The recruitment section discusses a “plan to put additional effort into providing mentorship and opportunities for 1:1 connections for group members from demographic groups underrepresented in EA.” Do you have any specific goals for these efforts? For example, I could imagine having a goal that the cohort you recruit be more diverse than the current EA population along certain dimensions. If you don’t have specific goals, what do you plan to look at to know whether your efforts are having the desired effect?
Re: target of 125 people. This is a relatively high bar: it’s focused on people who have taken significant action based on a good understanding of EA principles. So the bar is somewhat higher than the GWWC pledge, because we interview people and get a sense of why they chose the path they’re in and what would change their mind. We think that for most people this means >100 hours of engagement with quality content, plus carefully thinking through their career plans and taking action toward those plans (which might include significant donations).
I actually think that $20,000 per person in this position would still be a good deal: the expected lifetime value of a GWWC pledge might be around $73,000, and some people might be doing things significantly more promising than the average GWWC pledge. I don’t think that will be the full cost—e.g. these people will probably also benefit some from e.g. the Forum or 80k resources. However, I also think that these 125 people only represent some of the value that groups work creates (e.g. groups also help persuade people to take less intensive action, and to retain and empower people who are already engaged). I also think there’s a fair chance that we beat this target.
We arrived at 125 by estimating the number of individuals we think met this definition in 2019, applying a ~30% growth rate in the community, and then increasing this number further within key populations. One of our internal benchmarks is that the cohort of engaged EAs recruited in 2021 is more demographically diverse than the cohort of engaged EAs recruited in 2020.
Hi, thanks for your question!
The section on 2021 plans is intended to be a summary of these criteria, sorry that wasn’t clear.
One target is focused on recruitment: building a system for onboarding people to EA (to the level where they are taking significant action based on a good understanding of EA principles). Specifically, we aim to help onboard 125 people to this level.
The second target is focused around retention: for people who are already highly engaged EAs, growing the amount of time they spend engaging with high-quality content via our work (e.g. Forum view time or watching a talk from one of our events on YouTube) by 30%, and also growing the number of new connections (e.g. at events) they make by 30%.
The third target is focused on risk-reduction: this is covered in the community health targets above (which are slightly more tightly specified and fleshed out internally).
Internally we obviously have more details about how we plan to measure/assess these things, but we wanted to just give a summary here. We expect that most of these org-wide goals will be achieved as a collaboration between teams, but we have a single person responsible for each of the org-wide goals. (Operations and executive goals are a bit more complex, and are covered above.)
This is super helpful- thank you! I feel like I’ve got a much better understanding of your goals now. It really cleared things up to learn which of your multiple goals you’re prioritizing most, as well as the precise targets you have for them (since you have a specific recruitment goal it might be worth editing the OP to add that).
I have two followup questions about the recruitment goal.
How did you set your target of recruiting 125 people? That’s much lower than I would have guessed based on other recruitment efforts (GWWC has run a two-month pledge drive that produced three times as many pledges, plus a bunch of people signing up for Try Giving). And with $2.5 million budgeted for recruitment, the implied $20,000 per recruit seems quite high. I feel like I might be misunderstanding what you mean about “following a cohort of students who attended an introductory fellowship, our introductory event, or the EA Student Summit in 2020” (discussed in the second bullet point).
The recruitment section discusses a “plan to put additional effort into providing mentorship and opportunities for 1:1 connections for group members from demographic groups underrepresented in EA.” Do you have any specific goals for these efforts? For example, I could imagine having a goal that the cohort you recruit be more diverse than the current EA population along certain dimensions. If you don’t have specific goals, what do you plan to look at to know whether your efforts are having the desired effect?
Thanks for your questions.
Re: target of 125 people. This is a relatively high bar: it’s focused on people who have taken significant action based on a good understanding of EA principles. So the bar is somewhat higher than the GWWC pledge, because we interview people and get a sense of why they chose the path they’re in and what would change their mind. We think that for most people this means >100 hours of engagement with quality content, plus carefully thinking through their career plans and taking action toward those plans (which might include significant donations).
I actually think that $20,000 per person in this position would still be a good deal: the expected lifetime value of a GWWC pledge might be around $73,000, and some people might be doing things significantly more promising than the average GWWC pledge. I don’t think that will be the full cost—e.g. these people will probably also benefit some from e.g. the Forum or 80k resources. However, I also think that these 125 people only represent some of the value that groups work creates (e.g. groups also help persuade people to take less intensive action, and to retain and empower people who are already engaged). I also think there’s a fair chance that we beat this target.
We arrived at 125 by estimating the number of individuals we think met this definition in 2019, applying a ~30% growth rate in the community, and then increasing this number further within key populations. One of our internal benchmarks is that the cohort of engaged EAs recruited in 2021 is more demographically diverse than the cohort of engaged EAs recruited in 2020.
Thanks for the explanations Max!