EA movement building needs more measurement. I’m not privy to all the details of how EA movement building works but it comes across to me as more of a “spray and pray” strategy than I’d like. While we have done some work I think we’ve still really underinvested in market research to test how our movement appeals to the public before running the movement out into the wild big-time. I also think we should do more to track how our current outreach efforts are working, measuring conversion rates, etc. It’s weird that EA has a reputation of being so evidence-based but doesn’t really take much of an evidence-based orientation to its own growth as far as I can tell.
Also worth noting: Peter is a manager of the EAIF, the main funding option for national/city based groups. Max has mentioned that one of the reasons why he thinks public and/or (quasi) experimental evaluation of group work is relatively low priority is because CEA is already sharing information with other funders and key stakeholders (including, I assume, EAIF). Peter’s comment suggests that he doesn’t view whatever information he’s received as constituting a firm base of evidence to guide future decision making.
Max’s comments from our private correspondence (which he’s given me permission to share):
I think that we’ve shared this [i.e. learnings re: group support] with people who are actively trying to do similar things, and we’re happy to continue to do this. I’m not sure I see doing a full public writeup being competitive with other things we could focus on… it’s not that we have a great writeup that we could share but are hoarding: it would take a lot of staff time to communicate it all publicly, and we also couldn’t say some of the most important things. It’s easier to have conversations with people who are interested (where you can focus on the most relevant bits, say things that are hard to say publicly).”
This comment from Peter Wildeford’s recently published criticisms of EA seems relevant to this topic:
Also worth noting: Peter is a manager of the EAIF, the main funding option for national/city based groups. Max has mentioned that one of the reasons why he thinks public and/or (quasi) experimental evaluation of group work is relatively low priority is because CEA is already sharing information with other funders and key stakeholders (including, I assume, EAIF). Peter’s comment suggests that he doesn’t view whatever information he’s received as constituting a firm base of evidence to guide future decision making.
Max’s comments from our private correspondence (which he’s given me permission to share):