Work to make sure community builders, especially those who are working alone, have easy access to someone more experienced to talk to on a regular basis. Again this will depend on context, but suggestions include:

In my experience talking to and working with community builders (on and off CB grants) over the past 3 years, it seems the mentorship part is really important. Some ideas:

• Create a culture /​ expectation that senior CB’s have formal mentorship with junior CB’s (with the extra work comepnsated—it a part of their paid role /​ paying in addition to their hours). I think it helps for really specific nitty-gritty stuff to have someone who’s been in your shoes. (Whereas, other mentors could be useful for more high level things)

  • Creating small peer groups with 1 mentor could offload some of this work. I think it’s also valuable for junior CB’s to learn from their peers experience.

  • In my experience it was pretty easy to find senior CB’s who were willing to be career 1-1 mentors on a few months basis when i ran a career 1-1 training workshop for group organizers in 2020 (happy to share the results from that if it would be valuable)

• It could be the senior CB or CEA staff I think it can be valuable to check in even when there aren’t specific questions—to keep the junior CB accountable to their goals and plans, and let them be reflective. This is more of a general management need. If CEA staff were to do this meeting, it might be worth specifying how this would or would not affect the CB’s future evaluations.

Thank you for posting this, this seems really interesting and valuable. I’d love to see (and fund) more analyses like this.

One quick point – you say:

Sent to all current participants in CEAs CBG-program (note that this does not include university groups)

Does that mean that ‘community builder’ does not include people running university groups throughout your entire post/​report? Or did, e.g., the exit interviews and previous surveys you looked at include people from university groups?

Especially if all of your report is only based on non-uni community building, this might be worth highlighting more clearly and earlier since my sense is that a significant of the total community building that is happening is happening within university groups [?], and so this is the context many people will be most familiar with. (And the name ‘community building grants’ doesn’t make it obvious to readers that it excludes uni groups.)

Thanks for this work!

The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) wants to explore how to make Community Building a more attractive career path to pursue long term, especially with regards to the role of CEA community building grantee (CBG).

I am very excited by this! I think that community building has historically been massively promoted as important by EA communicators and key institutions, but then implicitly undervalued by the actual prestige, funding and support offered to existing or aspiring community builders.

I have done a lot of movement building, and I sometimes think about reconsidering it as a career, or at least making it a major part of my time allocation.

Happy to share some of my experiences in private, if you’d like, so feel free to message if you would to chat!

Quick thoughts now

• It might be worth exploring if titles (e.g., community builder and strategy/​research/​analytics) make a difference. For instance, they may make some candidates feel like they will get more transferrable career capital from having the title.

• Getting testimonials from former participants was helpful for me in terms of reducing uncertainty and fear of any bad experiences, so getting and sharing more of those would help.

• What about increasing motivation to apply with advance market commitments for movement builders in certain areas (e.g., people with x will be likely to be funded to x value), or awareness with talent scouting (e.g., reaching out to someone doing a good job to request they apply and will be in with a reasonable chance of x outcomes if they do) would probably bring more people into the funnel which might lead to more long term participants.

• Maybe support part-time roles better? These may be easier to sell, I think, and they can often have synergies that seem underappreciated. Much of the output value from movement building comes from the networks that the movement builder has access to. An EA might therefore be a much better movement builder if they it part-time alongside academia than if they go full-time because they can reach more smart people in their work and connect them to new collaborators or get them to come for talks and so on.

My thoughts

Target people passionate about it?

Another approach to making community building a more attractive career path—is to find people who are intrinsically very passionate about community building. I have a specific friend in mind who set up and managed our “group house” for years, it’s the biggest one I know of in Israel. Perhaps you’d like to interview him. (I got him to apply to the EA Israel community building position, he was rejected, I don’t know why though, and I think it’s unfortunate)

Career capital problem

If I’d hear that one of my friends is going to be a community builder for 10 years, I would worry what they’d work at after that.

I’d expect that EA is one of the orgs that would pay the most in the world to community builders (EA really thinks it’s important + EA has money). So if even EA doesn’t pay “well” (however the person defines it), this is discouraging.

Community building as an exercise in founding a startup

I am guessing (not that I know) that community building involves a lot of “talking to users and understanding their needs” --> “getting product market fit” --> “scaling”

I think it wouldn’t be crazy to let potential founders do this for sometime, practice these skills that nobody learns from books (even though all the books mention them), and aim for these potential founders to talk to enough EAs to learn about real pain points and as a result open some “startup” that will solve the pain point.

As a real example from EA Israel: Developers keep asking us what they should work at, and we don’t have good answers. So I opened something like a local tech job board (this is overly simplified but you get the idea). I think this is much healthier than sitting at home and trying to come up with an idea

Exiting to have more impact?

Most people left because they thought they were better suited to do something else allowing them to have even more impact

This sounds like a too-nice story to me, I’d suspect that they weren’t being honest with you. This is just a speculation of course.

Providing mentorship /​ support (by someone senior)

I would assume that like most jobs, weekly 1-on-1s would be good? (I don’t actually know)

Peer support

I am surprised your findings didn’t contain anything about “friends”. But there are hints that community builders, the people who are trying to help us feel together, feel alone. :(

I’d totally do EA Community Building for EA Community Building!

I mean—the community builders have got to have the best most amazing meetups!

Organized each time by a different community builder maybe? Managed by a meta community builder? I don’t know, but this alone seems to me like it could be so crazy fun that everyone would want to join and nobody will want to leave.

Ok this seems like a good place to end my Meta Meta Community Building comment, I hope something here was useful!

Hello. Ex-community builder here sharing my two cents. Some ideas you might want to consider are:

• Supporting people leaving the filed to stay on as mentors/​advisers/​trustees. I stopped full time community building in London in 2017 but have stayed on in an advisory/​Trustee capacity for EA London ever since. Boosting the status of this and making it easy and fun for people to do or expecting this of people would then help future community builders have someone to talk to on a regular basis who knows their region/​community and can offer support.

• Try hiring people mid-career. I have noticed a trend of mid-career-ites who have got board of their jobs or made their money/​prestige points who want to move onto something else. They are often keen for very interesting work and/​or more impact, and I think might be willing to stick around for longer – there is less pressure to try out other things at that stage, you’ve already done it. The one mid-career community builder I know (David at EA London) has stayed in the role for about 5 years now and is still going strong (♥).

• Support with the boring tasks. Each person will have different boring tasks but whether it is fixing a website or doing taxes support would be nice.

Good luck with this. Looks like you have many things to try!!

Thank you for writing this up! Some thoughts:

• The biggest differences between the impact of CBs might also depend on :

  • the area they are in and the potential of their member base (Bay Area vs regular city group vs small city group)

  • How quickly CBs learn what worked for other CBs (I would double down on peer support)
    

• Community builder roles might not be perceived to be as prestigious as other roles as they might not get as many applications as other roles. The national/​city/​university context might lead to local citizens being more interested/​qualified.

Work to give community builders more job security. How to do this would obviously depend on the situation at hand, but in cases where community builders are on grants one could consider longer grant periods, longer exit grants and/​or support and incentives for people to start legal entities which then employ them as community builders.

I wonder if this could be, more or less, a single organisation with the main purpose of providing stability for every single community builder at once. A rather small operations team could probably streamline things like contracts, payroll etc. As you mention, for things like mortgages, having what banks consider “normal employment” can be quite important. But the mental relief of not having to think about a bunch of things is a nice perk too, that employees at “normal” organisations take for granted.

This is an excellent writeup Vilhelm, and it’s very evident you’ve put a lot of time and thought into this analysis. I’ve built communities and studied community building for a long time now, and community building is a very difficult thing to get right (and people that are good at it are extremely valuable). I have way too many thoughts to express here, but I’ve listed a few highlights below. I am new to EA so I apologize in advance if anything I’m saying is off-base because of my ignorance.

• Are you committed to the program as is? - Much of the feedback and suggestions for improvement are related to the fact that community builders seem to be engaged in solitary work. Training and mentorship are extremely valuable, but what’s more valuable is other people that are on the journey with you and can support you day to day. If the program itself was changeable at all, the first thing that I would look at is how to make community building a less solitary pursuit.

• Are your goals ultimately about community builders or about the communities they’re building? - You’re asking a lot of excellent questions, but the questions are centered around community builders and the community building program. If the goal is to create a thriving and growing EA community, then it really might not be a problem that community building is a relatively low-status and transient role. I don’t necessarily think this is the case, and in fact I think that community builders should have much higher status, but I would just make sure to focus on the actual goal I wanted to achieve and work backwards from there. (if you can, I don’t know what your constraints are).

• If you want to attract people with the talent to lead, provide them an opportunity to grow into - Some community builders will have the talent and drive to build something special. In order to get the most out of these leaders, you want to provide them with a path (like additional funding and support) to reach their potential and realize their vision. Otherwise they’ll simply outgrow the role and move on. However, if there was a pathway for high-potential community builders, you would likely be able to attract much higher caliber talent to the role.

Again, I’m brand new to EA and am more an observer right now. However, I’m extremely interested in community building and would love to chat with you if you’re interested. I think your writeup and analysis is excellent.

Thanks for the update and the concise summary. I enjoyed the bullet point format and sharing the insights of this survey publicly. Great job!

For context, CEA used to pay $70,000 annually to community builders in San Francisco, with lower salaries in areas with lower costs of living.

During which period was this the practice?

Also, now the update is:

Now CEA have updated their payment policy, with salaries baselined to $90,000 in San Francisco, with a cost of living adjustment for other locations, …

That’s starting when?

Broadly speaking, I am sceptical that this is tractable or desirable.

Whilst I A) belive city and national groups will be absolutely vitally important B) impact from community building can be significantly reduced by an early departure. I also believe i) this is unlikely to change, increasing salaries won’t help ii) long term employees may stagnate and prevent future growth.

One reason to think ii) is because “churn” in economics is seen as largely healthy (IIRC) - this may be something to do with stagnation, which can occur both to employees and organisations. We should expect a competitive and dynamic labour market, just like a competitive and dynamic industry, to have lots of movement, as different people flourish, stagnate and decline at different times.

Second reason for ii) if groups will gain funding or impact, then personal fit for employees (and talent pool that could work at the organisation) will change. A good example for this would be myself, its plausible that I was the best person for my CB job, because nobody else wanted the role (to my knowledge). But if the organisation gains significant funding and multiple employees, this could change. Having me seat-sitting, demanding a larger salary whilst having a poor grasp of the native language seems suboptimal. It’s also possible that my competive advantages involve running or founding smaller organisations.

Some reasons I believe i) demographic EAs are academic, and likely to have families who value academic roles. I think there is tremendous pressure to get a job that your personal network will respect. I see this a lot with why people study to become medical doctors or PhDs . If your a CB, you’ll mostly be doing: communications and event planning, 1-1 career guidance, ops, ect., And none of this seems likely to hit the “academic” spot that a lot of people are after. Put shortly, money won’t help because it’s more important that people think your earning a lot of money, rather than actually earning a lot of money.

Some notes on how to improve the role: 1) more secure funding would certainly make me happier 2) having a representative from the CBG grant, or the “wider ea world” to make themselves present to my team (as you do Ville) can be extremely helpful, because its possible for less experienced voices to be (relatively) overrepresented when it comes to key strategy decisions. 3) job titles matter, as suggested by Peter. We should probably immediately stop using the “community builder” job title.