I don’t know if EA demographics fit smoking much—my sense is that we tend to be young and highly educated.
jayd
A neutral look at the graph doesn’t suggest that—it shows membership growth staying flat for a long time before and after Giving What We Can started taking money, which is at least equally compatible with the hypothesis that that money didn’t increase membership. You couldn’t say that any increase in membership at any point after this showed otherwise.
What were the new initiatives undertaken halfway through 2012 which plausibly led to more members over a year later?
Thanks that’s interesting. What’s the current package of ways of getting people to join and how long does it normally take?
Having some downvoting is good, and part of the raison d’etre of this forum as opposed to the Facebook group. I agree that people downvote slightly too often, but that’s a matter of changing the norms.
What are some good introductions to Effective Altruism?
Excellent questions and points.
2.) What, if anything, has EA Outreach learned from those who have already done outreach, such as CEA’s own orgs, or others? Didn’t, for example, GWWC already try VIP outreach?
It’d be valuable to write this up for others to learn on.
4.) Why is EA Ventures included in this? It doesn’t even seem thematically related.
I guess it’s because it doesn’t fit anywhere else, and it has to fit under some CEA branch.
5.) Is there any danger in CEA increasing how central it is to the movement? We certainly do want more resources and CEA seems to be in a very good place to execute these projects in a way that no one else can. But it would be bad for CEA to become a single point of failure for the movement. Has there been any spot in spinning off more orgs out of the CEA umbrella? Any thought in putting some of these projects on hold and use EA Ventures to try to get some of them out instead?
This is a very good point, and I agree there’s a danger in this. It sounds as if CEA is taking over the EA Summit from another EA organisation (Leverage Research) which could be an example, although if the Summit/EA Global would not have happened otherwise it makes sense. The idea of using EA Ventures to fund projects we want to see is a very good one.
Can people donate specifically to provide EA Ventures seed funding and if so how?
The only issue is that its room for more funding situation still seems complicated.
Does anyone have a summary of this which they can share? GiveWell’s leave me confused, and I switched to SCI from AMF this year based on GiveWell’s de-recommendation of AMF, and am unsure whether room for more funding provides some reason to stick with SCI.
Thanks. Is there a more detailed project plan than the one on page 9 here? Can you give examples of the sorts of projects that it might fund?
The GWWC pledge isn’t really an ‘ask’ - people may make particular donations because they’re asked to, but no one commits to donating 10% of their income every year until they retire because someone asked them to. Instead they make this commitment because they want to do it anyway, and the pledge provides a way for them to declare this publicly to influence others. So it would be interesting to find examples of more typical big asks working—eg. fundraising teams which highball potential donors. Does anyone know of these?
I’d be interested to hear your reasons if you would be happy to share them.
Ah sure, but I’m saying that no one gives this sort of money just because they’ve been asked to—it’s too large and long-lasting a commitment, and being asked is not a powerful enough reason or prompt. Asking them to sign the GWWC pledge may prompt them to make this public declaration, but only if they were already happy to give that sort of money.
In most cases I don’t see a compelling reason to fund an individual rather than an organization.
I don’t see the difference between funding individuals and organisations, since you can treat individuals as one-person organisations with a narrower range of projects, and by funding organisations you’re ultimately funding individuals. Some of the things produced by .impact members, which I believe are mostly done by individuals or small groups, compare quite well with those produced by organisations.
Roughly how many applications have you had, and have you heard from anyone who might be interested in funding this?
A strong majority thought that all matches were fully counterfactually valid, so if this isn’t true of your match, you should say so.
To be crystal clear for people who haven’t read the survey, people didn’t express an explicit opinion on whether they thought the matches were “counterfactually valid” (using those explicit terms). What they were saying was that they thought more money would go to the charities in the matching cases. (When I first saw the survey it looked like I was being asked a maths problem and I answered it as such.)
Whether they explicitly thought about counterfactuals probably depended on whether they were EAs who were familiar with these—I’d guess that many/most were, since it was posted on Facebook by EAs and would have been of most interest to them. I imagine a typical matching fundraiser audience are merely generally motivated by the matching without explicitly thinking about counterfactuals. I don’t think they take there to be even an implication about counterfactuals, which I imagine is why charities are comfortable with matches (which GiveWell apparently think are typically non-counterfactual). So talking about dishonesty is too strong—not being actively transparent about this element is more on the mark.
Interesting, any updates on the numbers of either?
After the appearances, SCI contacted us to report that they had received several £1000s of donations as a result of our media. The exact amount SCI received as a result of this media attention was difficult for them to estimate relative to the variable background rate, but they suggested it may have been as much as £10,000.
I’ve heard that SCI are consistently over-generous in attributing donations to particular organisations’ influence, because they want their support and recommendations—e.g. attributing all donations in one of Australia and the UK to GWWC.
Doesn’t GiveWell already run a lot of Google Adwords? How well do those do?
Valuable to find out. Does anyone here know them well enough to ask? Or is it on their site?
Makes sense, but points to meta being an unusually broad and unspecific description.
I’ve just used the guide to write my own will via WillAid—I left everything except a few gifts to family to charity.