Realising that attendance and events are just part of a community, and potentially not the most important part
Agreed. Research and study groups, for example, seem to be a lot more useful than events. First and foremost, participants commit to longer term attendance in advance so you don’t need to try to persuade them to participate every time. I dislike having to personally invite people to come to events. I assume that they don’t care about EA enough if they don’t come at a mere FB invitation.
Regarding attendance, we just recently organized a public AI safety event which was attended by roughly 80 people. When an ex community-builder heard that, he congratulated us on that as it sounded big success to him. Of course, it was nice to have that many people come to the event but compared to some more in-depth projects we had going on I didn’t feel as accomplished.
That said, how do you get feedback from your community with respect to online-based content? Your newsletter, for example, could easily be much more valuable than events and even other in-person activities, but as far as I’m aware very few people actually communicate how much value they receive to authors and content creators. For instance, you probably didn’t know this but I find useful content for EA Estonia’s newsletter every month from EA London’s newsletter.
Online content is generally the amount of people that open or click on an email (but baring in mind that long term, getting more clicks relies on your community trusting you to have content they want to click on rather than clickbait).
Occasionally people also send replies saying they value newsletters and when I ask people in person what they value, that sometimes gets mentioned.
Agreed. Research and study groups, for example, seem to be a lot more useful than events. First and foremost, participants commit to longer term attendance in advance so you don’t need to try to persuade them to participate every time. I dislike having to personally invite people to come to events. I assume that they don’t care about EA enough if they don’t come at a mere FB invitation.
Regarding attendance, we just recently organized a public AI safety event which was attended by roughly 80 people. When an ex community-builder heard that, he congratulated us on that as it sounded big success to him. Of course, it was nice to have that many people come to the event but compared to some more in-depth projects we had going on I didn’t feel as accomplished.
That said, how do you get feedback from your community with respect to online-based content? Your newsletter, for example, could easily be much more valuable than events and even other in-person activities, but as far as I’m aware very few people actually communicate how much value they receive to authors and content creators. For instance, you probably didn’t know this but I find useful content for EA Estonia’s newsletter every month from EA London’s newsletter.
Online content is generally the amount of people that open or click on an email (but baring in mind that long term, getting more clicks relies on your community trusting you to have content they want to click on rather than clickbait).
Occasionally people also send replies saying they value newsletters and when I ask people in person what they value, that sometimes gets mentioned.