Thanks for the writeup! Really interesting to get a better picture of this.
Just to add some extra info about the effects of EA Global and ‘Doing Good Better’ and Singer’s TED talk on GWWC member growth. It’s true EA Global last year didn’t lead to new members straight away, but 2 people joined later in the year citing EA Global as a way they first heard about Giving What We Can. In addition, after following up with participants individually, 7 took the pledge.
‘Doing Good Better’ has had a much bigger effect. 72 of the members who have signed up since July 2015 (11%) mentioned ‘Doing Good Better’ in response to the pledge form question of ‘How did you first heard about Giving What We Can?’, making up 6.5% of the overall responses to the question (people can select multiple options). The distribution of join dates for these members is fairly even, with higher numbers in January and February.
In total Peter Singer’s TED talk accounts for 10% of the responses to the ‘How did you first hear..?’ question. Again the proportion of members influenced by this seems pretty steady over time.
(In case unclear, I work at Giving What We Can :) )
Eyeballing the dashboard, GWWC has 50-60 members/month outside the pledge drives in 2015 and 2016, or about 11-14 members/week, and about 30ish/month in 2014, or about 7/week.
Just to add: The monthly signups for the EA newsletter at effectivealtruism.org look roughly constant at 250/month since October 2015. There’s a slight spike of 320 in December.
Before October there was no newsletter but you could subscribe anyway. The rate was ~180/month from April to July and jumped up to 300 in August where EAG and DGB happened. Then it settled around 250/month. There’s enough variation for there to be an slight trend though that we can’t spot though.
Re: Limited increase following EA Global—I would guess that EAG is most useful for consolidating people who already know about EA and linking them to each other in ways that increase productivity.
Re: different trends being caused by very specific things—I would guess EA as a movement only has a very small group of people who are fully aware of EA, interested in the various domains and ways of thinking. It has many more people who are involved in one sense or another—giving to effective charities, giving a large sum of their income, choosing to work based on effective cause selection, etc. These trends seem to suggest that EA is largely not sold as a bundle.
Is there a way to track web traffic outside of Google Searches? For example, how often “effective altruism” or “giving what we can”, etc. is mentioned in the media, blog posts, etc.
Thanks for the writeup! Really interesting to get a better picture of this.
Just to add some extra info about the effects of EA Global and ‘Doing Good Better’ and Singer’s TED talk on GWWC member growth. It’s true EA Global last year didn’t lead to new members straight away, but 2 people joined later in the year citing EA Global as a way they first heard about Giving What We Can. In addition, after following up with participants individually, 7 took the pledge.
‘Doing Good Better’ has had a much bigger effect. 72 of the members who have signed up since July 2015 (11%) mentioned ‘Doing Good Better’ in response to the pledge form question of ‘How did you first heard about Giving What We Can?’, making up 6.5% of the overall responses to the question (people can select multiple options). The distribution of join dates for these members is fairly even, with higher numbers in January and February.
In total Peter Singer’s TED talk accounts for 10% of the responses to the ‘How did you first hear..?’ question. Again the proportion of members influenced by this seems pretty steady over time.
(In case unclear, I work at Giving What We Can :) )
Excellent, thank you a lot for doing this analysis!
Would it be possible to extract the concrete average growth rates and post them in this post?
E.g.: 5 members/month for GWWC, 3 Signups/day, etc.
This is relatively easy to do with GWWC:
https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/dashboard
Eyeballing the dashboard, GWWC has 50-60 members/month outside the pledge drives in 2015 and 2016, or about 11-14 members/week, and about 30ish/month in 2014, or about 7/week.
Just to add: The monthly signups for the EA newsletter at effectivealtruism.org look roughly constant at 250/month since October 2015. There’s a slight spike of 320 in December.
Before October there was no newsletter but you could subscribe anyway. The rate was ~180/month from April to July and jumped up to 300 in August where EAG and DGB happened. Then it settled around 250/month. There’s enough variation for there to be an slight trend though that we can’t spot though.
Re: Limited increase following EA Global—I would guess that EAG is most useful for consolidating people who already know about EA and linking them to each other in ways that increase productivity.
Re: different trends being caused by very specific things—I would guess EA as a movement only has a very small group of people who are fully aware of EA, interested in the various domains and ways of thinking. It has many more people who are involved in one sense or another—giving to effective charities, giving a large sum of their income, choosing to work based on effective cause selection, etc. These trends seem to suggest that EA is largely not sold as a bundle.
Great post Eric!
Is there a way to track web traffic outside of Google Searches? For example, how often “effective altruism” or “giving what we can”, etc. is mentioned in the media, blog posts, etc.