I’m currently a co-director at EA Netherlands (with Marieke de Visscher). We’re working to build and strengthen the EA community here.
Before this, I worked as a consultant on urban socioeconomic development projects and programmes funded by the EU. Before that, I studied liberal arts (in the UK) and then philosophy (in the Netherlands).
Hit me up if you wanna find out about the Dutch EA community! :)
Nice post, and I’m happy you’re posting on the forum again!
As others have pointed out, Power for Democracies is an org with roots in the EA community that is working on this. Also, I would argue that 80k’s current second top issue, extreme power concentration, has a lot of overlap with what you’re talking about here. Furthermore, much of the longtermist inspired work that focuses not just on surviving but flourishing addresses this issue, but mostly in a very theoretical sense.
But to answer your question directly, and putting to one side CEA’s concerns about 501c3 stuff, I think it’s not currently more of a concern because 1) maybe it’s not the most neglected thing 2) maybe it doesn’t feel very tractable and 3) perhaps most importantly, EA isn’t doing much cause prioritisation work these days.
However, I would note that it feels like there’s a bit of a vibe shift on this issue, and more and more EAs are prioritising work in this area.
Power for Democracies identifies giving opportunities to support democracy. Co-founded by a senior advisor at Effektiv Spenden, it’s basically trying to be the GiveWell or GivingGreen of democracy.
Their recently concluded first project, Effectively Countering Authoritarian Playbooks, ran two parallel workstreams: prioritising countries and prioritising tactics.
For country selection, they built a framework around four dimensions — Importance, Threat, Tractability, and Opportunity — combining quantitative data from sources like V-Dem and Civicus with qualitative country profiles and expert consensus processes.
They were looking for places where democracy is genuinely under pressure but where civil society intervention is still tractable.
From a global pool, they selected seven priority countries: Hungary, Turkey, Italy, Indonesia, Poland, Argentina, and the US.
On the tactics side, they scanned roughly 35 common civil society approaches — strategic litigation, voter mobilisation, investigative journalism, anti-corruption lobbying, and so on — scoring each for quality of evidence and theoretical grounding.
They then matched threats to tactics for each country, wrote deep-dive reports informed by expert interviews, and evaluated specific organisations using structured rubrics, independent researcher scoring, and funder reference checks.
They have three initial recommendations:
Freedom2Vote — voter mobilisation targeting underrepresented voters in the US
Media and Law Studies Association — legal defence for journalists facing prosecution in Turkey (~150 cases/year)
CELS — human rights and democracy advocacy through legal action in Argentina, operating since 1979
You can read an in-depth write-up of their research process here. You can donate to their recommended orgs here.
If you want to know more about antifa, I recommend this lecture given by the author of the recent book ‘Antifa: Portrait einer linksradikalen Bewegung’ (unfortunately, it hasn’t been translated). It’s apparently one of the more rigorous academic histories of the movement.
At 1:14:22 I asked him about the effectiveness of the movement and its different tactics, and the evidence for claims of effectiveness.
His answer had two components. First, his general thesis on the effectiveness of the movement is that, through its actions, it has sensitised German society and the German state to the growing fascist movement. Second, he highlighted the success of recent efforts within the German antifa movement to gather intel and build archives concerning fascist individuals and groups. This has been used to prevent right-wing attacks or to very rapidly inform the authorities when apparent ‘lone wolf’ attackers have actually had fascist backgrounds. Apparently, they often do a better job of this than the German security services, and now receive funding from the Berlin city government. If you’re an EA and are looking to do something about fascism beyond what Power for Democracies recommends, this feels like a good fit!
Unfortunately, he didn’t provide much detail on the evidence for the claims of effectiveness.
Great work! I’ve been eagerly anticipating your recommendations for some time
Thanks for collating and sharing!
If you haven’t already seen it, you might find the post ‘Doing Prioritisation Better’ an interesting read
Hey! I’m a co-director at EA Netherlands. According to various indicators, we’re the fourth largest national EA community in the world, we target mid-career professionals, and I think what you’re proposing is very interesting! But I’m not sure I understand—why build a new tool? Why not just build in some EA thinking into your existing service? Similar to what Charity Navigator has done.
Have you already spoken with Nina at HIP? Maybe check out the School for Moral Ambition as well.
Great stuff! Good luck Gergő!!
Great work and great post! Thanks for sharing.
Re the ‘Changes in our spending’ appendix and the challenge of separating ‘performance’ marketing from ‘awareness’ or ‘brand’ marketing, we’ve also been thinking about this at EA Netherlands. My tentative solution is to split CAC into an ‘activation CAC’ (only direct conversion costs) and a ‘blended CAC’ (total spend including brand/awareness). Apparently this is quite standard in the commercial world.
If blended CAC holds steady or falls even as we scale up awareness activities, that’s evidence the broader work is expanding the top of the funnel and making our conversion efforts more efficient downstream. If blended CAC rises while activation CAC stays flat, it could be an early signal that our awareness spending is not translating into engagement.
So for EA Netherlands, using intro programme completions (87) as the denominator:
Activation CAC: ~€149 (intro programme delivery + performance ads)
Blended CAC: ~€471 (adding brand agency + staff time on awareness)
For context, Claude tells me the average B2B SaaS blended CAC is ~€500
The low EA awareness findings from Pulse prompted us to commission Dutch-specific research to test whether we face a similar situation here. In the meantime, we’ve already shifted some resources toward targeted awareness-raising—the data suggested our funnel may be constrained at the top rather than further down, so we’re testing whether reaching new audiences is higher leverage than deeper engagement with existing ones.
You guys are too modest—may I suggest a title change?
”How our EA workplace group raised $850k”
Great work!!
This is a good take. 80k are good at it, bluedot too, and GWWC have started doing good things as well.
I think national orgs like EA Netherlands are well-positioned to do more, but we’re only just waking up to this and are learning how best to allocate a portion of the EUR 30-40k in unrestricted funding we get from CEA. At EAN we’ve started working with Amplify and a marketing agency and have had great results (3x’d our intro programme completions and increased our EAGx attendance by 35%). Would like to do more of this in the future if we can find the money/re-allocate more of our funds.
Great job organising this and posting your lessons learnt on the forum, guys!
A couple of effective giving orgs, e.g., Doneer Effectief, have people who specialise in advising HNW individuals. There are also a few international initiatives I know of that keep a very low profile.
Thank you very much! Ricardo van Mildert isn’t on the forum but he was responsible for the programme :)
Thanks!! It was a little goal of mine to get it out there before applications closed
Thank you! Ricardo isn’t on the forum but he worked his socks off to put this together
Thanks for taking the time to provide this context!
I don’t have a super strong view on which set of guiding principles is better—I just thought it was odd for them to be changed in this way.
If pushed, I prefer the old set, and a significant part of that preference stems from the amount of jargon in the new set. My ideal would perhaps be a combination of the old set and the 2017 set.
We work to overcome our natural tendency to care most about those closest to us. This means taking seriously the interests of distant strangers, future generations, and nonhuman animals—anyone whose wellbeing we can affect through our choices. We continuously question the boundaries we place around moral consideration, and we’re willing to help wherever we can do the most good, not just where helping feels most natural or comfortable.
We do the hard work of choosing where to focus our limited time, money, and attention. This means being willing to say “this is good, but not the best use of marginal resources”—and actually following through, even when it means disappointing people or turning down appealing opportunities. We resist scope creep and don’t let personal preferences override our considered judgments about where we can have the most impact.
We treat our beliefs as hypotheses to be tested rather than conclusions to be defended. This means actively seeking disconfirming evidence, updating based on data, and maintaining genuine uncertainty about what we don’t yet know. We acknowledge the limits of our evidence, don’t oversell our findings, and follow arguments wherever they lead—even when the conclusions are uncomfortable or threaten projects we care about.
We take unusual ideas seriously and are willing to consider approaches that seem weird or unconventional if the reasoning is sound. We default to transparency about our reasoning, funding, mistakes, and internal debates. We make our work easy to scrutinise and critique, remain accessible to people from different backgrounds, and share knowledge rather than hoarding it. We normalise admitting when we get things wrong and create cultures where people can acknowledge mistakes without fear, while still maintaining accountability.
We align our behaviour with our stated values. This means being honest even when it’s costly, keeping our commitments, and treating people ethically regardless of their status or usefulness to our goals. How we conduct ourselves—especially toward those with less power—reflects our actual values more than our stated principles. We hold ourselves and our institutions to high standards of personal and professional conduct, recognising that being trustworthy is foundational to everything else.
Quick tip: just run your draft through Claude and ask it to either give feedback in the style of an EA Forum user or, if you’re short on time, ask it to rewrite it in the style that EA Forum readers prefer (and make sure you have plenty of reasoning transparency).