Since CEA can’t constantly give personal support or feedback to all groups, I think CEA can instead help newer groups get connected with older groups to get feedback and advice from them. Or, newer groups can proactively seek out advice from more established groups.
I agree that this kind of scheme could be useful. Indeed, in this survey a number of organizers (8) noted that they’d like to see more communication between fellow organizers in the “other services or kinds of support that you would like to see” open comment question. Formal peer mentoring and group calls (of organisers from the same region or whose groups share other attributes) have been tried several times with varying results. I expect that direct support from CEA still has an important role to play for a variety of reasons: these calls may be especially reassuring to (some) organisers relative compared to those from other organisers, a central coordinator is often going to be better placed to connect people with different resources, it’s probably easier to ensure that direct calls actually continue happening than with a dispersed mentorship scheme etc.
Here are questions I’d love to know the answers to—maybe some of these could be included in future surveys:
Incidentally we included both of these questions in the 2017 LGS, but they were cut due to space. We can certainly bear them in mind for the next LGS.
It would be great to see if there’s a correlation between the EA outcome metrics with the number of hours per week spent community building.
In 2017 data there were moderate significant positive correlations between hours per week spent “organising EA activities” and how many members became “actively committed” to EA as a result of the group’s activities, counterfactual pledges and EA influenced career choices (all log transformed). It is difficult to infer much from this though, since it seems quite plausible that there could be reverse causation (people spending more time on larger, more active groups) or some more complex causal story, rather than more hours spent simply causing stronger outcomes.
What problems did you experience while organizing for your local group over the past year?
We explored this somewhat in the qualitative report from the Local Group Survey in 2017, which discussed organisers’ insecurities, difficulties with productivity and accountability and lack of impactful activities for members to do among various other problems.
We also asked people “What are the main challenges your group faces?” and coded these responses.
As the graph below shows, the most commonly cited challenge was difficulty with recruitment, closely followed by lack of time. Lack of funding, members leaving, lack of dedicated members and difficulty getting members actively engaged in high impact activities were also commonly mentioned.
This year’s survey found a similar pattern in responses to the question about reasons why organizers expected their group might end when the current organizers left: difficulties recruiting, members leaving and lack of time.
Thanks so much for this! This is really insightful, especially the graph on main problems faced by other groups. Seems like some problems are really common.
I agree that this kind of scheme could be useful. Indeed, in this survey a number of organizers (8) noted that they’d like to see more communication between fellow organizers in the “other services or kinds of support that you would like to see” open comment question. Formal peer mentoring and group calls (of organisers from the same region or whose groups share other attributes) have been tried several times with varying results. I expect that direct support from CEA still has an important role to play for a variety of reasons: these calls may be especially reassuring to (some) organisers relative compared to those from other organisers, a central coordinator is often going to be better placed to connect people with different resources, it’s probably easier to ensure that direct calls actually continue happening than with a dispersed mentorship scheme etc.
Incidentally we included both of these questions in the 2017 LGS, but they were cut due to space. We can certainly bear them in mind for the next LGS.
In 2017 data there were moderate significant positive correlations between hours per week spent “organising EA activities” and how many members became “actively committed” to EA as a result of the group’s activities, counterfactual pledges and EA influenced career choices (all log transformed). It is difficult to infer much from this though, since it seems quite plausible that there could be reverse causation (people spending more time on larger, more active groups) or some more complex causal story, rather than more hours spent simply causing stronger outcomes.
We explored this somewhat in the qualitative report from the Local Group Survey in 2017, which discussed organisers’ insecurities, difficulties with productivity and accountability and lack of impactful activities for members to do among various other problems.
We also asked people “What are the main challenges your group faces?” and coded these responses.
As the graph below shows, the most commonly cited challenge was difficulty with recruitment, closely followed by lack of time. Lack of funding, members leaving, lack of dedicated members and difficulty getting members actively engaged in high impact activities were also commonly mentioned.
This year’s survey found a similar pattern in responses to the question about reasons why organizers expected their group might end when the current organizers left: difficulties recruiting, members leaving and lack of time.
Thanks so much for this! This is really insightful, especially the graph on main problems faced by other groups. Seems like some problems are really common.