Thanks for writing this up Gleb! I’m doing an EA Global workshop on pitching EA (though with a bit more focus on university groups), so I’d be interested to know if you have any idea how many people passed by your stall and didn’t engage? Was it all of the attendees, or was it possible for attendees to bypass the stall?
ChrisCundy
Karma: 44
Thank you for the feedback!
(1) We didn’t ask people how much money they donated to individual charities, that’s right. The data is available in the github repository for the project—search for ‘github’ in the report
(2) I agree that conducting the survey at the start of the calendar year would be better. Whether we would do that depends to some extent on whether we’d want to wait six months until we start the next survey. We are tightening up the feedback loop—we’re improving the code used to analyse it every time. This year the survey was handed around quite a few people - we hope next year to have a dedicated person who can focus entirely full-time on it.
That is a very good point, and ties in to vipulnaik’s point below about starting the survey collection time just after the start of a year so that donation information can be recorded for the immediately preceding year.
I’ve quickly run the numbers and the median donation in 2014 for the 467 people who got involved in 2013 or earlier was $1,500, so significantly higher than that for EAs overall. This is not including people who didn’t say what year they got involved, so probably cuts a few people out who did get involved before 2014 but can’t remember. Also if we have constant attrition from the EA movement then you’d expect the pre-2014 EAs to be more committed as a whole
This is a very good point and is making me lean towards vipulnaik’s suggestion for future surveys, as this problem will be just as pressing if the movement continues to grow at the rate it has done.
A week ago I moved to Vancouver for the summer, interning at .impact with Tom Ash and the team.
It’s been a fun week, and I’ve started work on a few ongoing projects, such as analysing the results of this year’s EA survey, and getting in contact with local EA groups that wanted some support putting on their first event. These projects are all ongoing, and hopefully we should see some results, such as insightful statistics about the EA community, soon!
For anyone interested in learning more, I’m giving a whole workshop about how to do really well at this sort of tabling / large audience set-up at EA Global, at 9am in the Mandrone; I’ll be writing up the whole thing later.