I think there may be a misunderstanding – the title of this post is “Feedback Collected by CEA”, not “for” CEA.
This is fair, but I want to give some examples of why I thought this document was about feedback about CEA, with the hope of helping with communication around this in the future. Even after your clarification, the document still gives a strong impression to me of the feedback being about CEA, rather than about the community in general. Below are some quotes that make it sound that way to me, with emphasis added:
Summary of Core Feedback Collected by CEA in Spring/Summer 2019
The title doesn’t mention what the feedback is about. I think most people would assume that it refers to feedback about CEA, rather than the community overall. That’s what I assumed.
CEA collects feedback from community members in a variety of ways (see “CEA’s Feedback Process” below). In the spring and summer of 2019, we reached out to about a dozen people who work in senior positions in EA-aligned organizations to solicit their feedback. We were particularly interested to get their take on execution, communication, and branding issues in EA. Despite this focus, the interviews were open-ended and tended to cover the areas each person felt was important.
This document is a summary of their feedback. The feedback is presented “as is,” without any endorsement by CEA.
It’s not clearly stated what the feedback is about (“CEA collects feedback”, “solicit their feedback” without elaboration of what the feedback is about). The closest it gets to specifying what feedback might pertain to is when it’s mentioned that CEA was particularly interested in feedback on execution, communication, and branding issues in EA. This is still fairly vague, and “branding” to me implies that the feedback is about CEA. It does say ”...issues in EA”, but I didn’t pay that much importance.
This post is the first in a series of upcoming posts where we aim to share summaries of the feedback we have received.
In general, I assume that feedback to an organization is about the organization itself.
CEA has, historically, been much better at collecting feedback than at publishing the results of what we collect.
While unclear again about what “feedback” refers to, in general I would expect this to mean feedback about CEA.
As some examples of other sources of feedback CEA has collected this year:
We have received about 2,000 questions, comments and suggestions via Intercom (a chat widget on many of CEA’s websites) so far this year
We hosted a group leaders retreat (27 attendees), a community builders retreat (33 attendees), and had calls with organizers from 20 EA groups asking about what’s currently going on in their groups and how CEA can be helpful
Calls with 18 of our most prolific EA Forum users, to ask how the Forum can be made better.
A “medium-term events” survey, where we asked everyone who had attended an Individual Outreach retreat how the retreat impacted them 6-12 months later. (53 responses)
EA Global has an advisory board of ~25 people who are asked for opinions about content, conference size, format, etc., and we receive 200-400 responses to the EA Global survey from attendees each time.
All of these are examples of feedback about CEA or its events and activities. There are no examples of feedback about the community.
I think the confusion comes from the lack of clear elaboration in the title and/or beginning of the document of what the scope of the feedback was. Clarifying this in the future should eliminate this problem.
Summary of Core Feedback Collected by CEA in Spring/Summer 2019
I understand CEA to have ask people questions about EA broadly and CEA specifically, and this heading says to me that the OP contains a summary of both types of feedback, not just the former. If that wasn’t intended then please edit to say something closer to
Summary of Broad Feedback About EA, Collected in Spring/Summer 2019
This is fair, but I want to give some examples of why I thought this document was about feedback about CEA, with the hope of helping with communication around this in the future. Even after your clarification, the document still gives a strong impression to me of the feedback being about CEA, rather than about the community in general. Below are some quotes that make it sound that way to me, with emphasis added:
The title doesn’t mention what the feedback is about. I think most people would assume that it refers to feedback about CEA, rather than the community overall. That’s what I assumed.
It’s not clearly stated what the feedback is about (“CEA collects feedback”, “solicit their feedback” without elaboration of what the feedback is about). The closest it gets to specifying what feedback might pertain to is when it’s mentioned that CEA was particularly interested in feedback on execution, communication, and branding issues in EA. This is still fairly vague, and “branding” to me implies that the feedback is about CEA. It does say ”...issues in EA”, but I didn’t pay that much importance.
In general, I assume that feedback to an organization is about the organization itself.
While unclear again about what “feedback” refers to, in general I would expect this to mean feedback about CEA.
All of these are examples of feedback about CEA or its events and activities. There are no examples of feedback about the community.
I think the confusion comes from the lack of clear elaboration in the title and/or beginning of the document of what the scope of the feedback was. Clarifying this in the future should eliminate this problem.
Just to add to this
I understand CEA to have ask people questions about EA broadly and CEA specifically, and this heading says to me that the OP contains a summary of both types of feedback, not just the former. If that wasn’t intended then please edit to say something closer to