Executive summary: This reflective memo reviews a year and a half of EA Forum event experiments—including Draft Amnesty Weeks, Debate Weeks, and Giving Seasons—finding that lightweight initiatives like Draft Amnesty are cost-effective for surfacing new content, while higher-effort events like Debate Weeks can successfully stimulate discourse but require careful framing and coordination; future iterations will likely double down on these learnings while adjusting based on engagement and quality tradeoffs.
Key points:
Draft Amnesty Weeks are low-cost and effective at generating Forum posts, encouraging new authors, and increasing engagement modestly; the 2025 event outperformed 2024, and the author plans to experiment with running them twice yearly.
Debate Weeks successfully foster deep discussion, especially when well-framed and accompanied by features like homepage slider polls and symposiums; however, selecting and wording debate topics remains challenging and time-intensive.
Animal Welfare vs Global Health Debate Week was the most successful across metrics—posts, karma, comments, and engagement—highlighting the potential of controversial but well-chosen topics, though some feedback flagged the framing as too combative.
Giving Season 2024 increased content volume significantly over 2023 (111 vs. 63 posts), but had lower total engagement and raised less in direct donations ($15K vs. $30K); however, the new ranked-choice Donation Election and public comment thread did increase discourse.
Marginal Funding Week saw strong growth, with 46 participating organizations in 2024 (up from 19), likely driven by requiring posts/comments for donation election eligibility.
The memo underscores tradeoffs between cost, content volume, and quality, advocating for iterating on successful formats (e.g. Draft Amnesty, Symposiums) while refining goals and expectations for each event type.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.
Executive summary: This reflective memo reviews a year and a half of EA Forum event experiments—including Draft Amnesty Weeks, Debate Weeks, and Giving Seasons—finding that lightweight initiatives like Draft Amnesty are cost-effective for surfacing new content, while higher-effort events like Debate Weeks can successfully stimulate discourse but require careful framing and coordination; future iterations will likely double down on these learnings while adjusting based on engagement and quality tradeoffs.
Key points:
Draft Amnesty Weeks are low-cost and effective at generating Forum posts, encouraging new authors, and increasing engagement modestly; the 2025 event outperformed 2024, and the author plans to experiment with running them twice yearly.
Debate Weeks successfully foster deep discussion, especially when well-framed and accompanied by features like homepage slider polls and symposiums; however, selecting and wording debate topics remains challenging and time-intensive.
Animal Welfare vs Global Health Debate Week was the most successful across metrics—posts, karma, comments, and engagement—highlighting the potential of controversial but well-chosen topics, though some feedback flagged the framing as too combative.
Giving Season 2024 increased content volume significantly over 2023 (111 vs. 63 posts), but had lower total engagement and raised less in direct donations ($15K vs. $30K); however, the new ranked-choice Donation Election and public comment thread did increase discourse.
Marginal Funding Week saw strong growth, with 46 participating organizations in 2024 (up from 19), likely driven by requiring posts/comments for donation election eligibility.
The memo underscores tradeoffs between cost, content volume, and quality, advocating for iterating on successful formats (e.g. Draft Amnesty, Symposiums) while refining goals and expectations for each event type.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.