Thanks for the update! It would be interesting to get more statistics on CEA. Like
by how many people CEA has grown with. (I guess it’s something between 15 and 35 but there’s quite a big difference)
how big a budget do you have?
how do you allocate employees/budget/hours between the projects/areas and how has this changed?
(Maybe these exist elsewhere?)
Thank you for writing this post! I recently had a discussion with some EA intro fellowship participants who experienced that EA is very demanding with expectations on changing your career etc and that it gives a very cultish or religious impression. Some said they are interested in EA and implementing some tools and mindsets in their life but that’s it. I think we should embrace that too
I’ve been thinking along the same lines but wouldn’t have verbalised it as well as you. Thank you for writing this up!
I assume that especially in countries with less EA presence of direct impact orgs, the local EA communities can play an vital role in supporting people to get more engaged with EA ideas and potentially become leaders of their own high-impact projects.
I thought having many different forms of engagement at each stage was implicit to the funnel model as well, but having it explicit as “action, ideas, and diverse connections” seems like a useful framework. I’ll think more about what this could mean in practice for us in my group
The last four paragraphs are well said👌
As a community builder, I’ve lately thought about how much you can or should push and support other volunteers and new participants to engage more with EA. That could be offering 1-1 calls, sending private and group messages about specific opportunities and asking for help in organizing events among else. For context, this is mostly a reflection on what I think we (the other organizers and I) should maybe do in EA Finland.
Arguments for more pushing:
I obviously believe what we’re doing as a community is important and want more people to engage more in EA. My group is competing for the participants’ time with other student groups and free-time activities. If we put effort into it, I think we could ask for more of the community members’ time, by creating more pleasant activities and clear projects and actively encouraging people to join conferences, programmes and more. I can come up with many less impact-driven student or hobby groups that are successful at that. If you together create motivation and momentum and get people to prioritize EA activities I’m pretty sure they will find the needed time. I might sometimes err to the side of being “too respectful” of people’s time when people might be happy to help out and want to be reminded of an upcoming event or need to be encouraged to pursue something difficult.
Against pushing people:
I want people to feel they can engage with EA ideas on their own terms without feeling they are more or less valued based on their commitment. Some people are also genuinely busy and too kind to say no to volunteering even when they should. I think the post also had many great examples of failed attempts to engage people.
I’m eager to get results, and HEA is a relatively easy metric, but it should not come at the expense of the participants’ well-being or rule over their interests. When you’re in the mode of growing your group, you might forget to treat people as individuals and adapt to the circumstances of the discussion.
We discussed this post in one of our article reading club meetings and I thought I would share some of the discussions we had around the topic in bullet points. As a disclaimer, I am writing this comment 6 weeks after the meeting so I have probably misinterpreted some of my notes.
- How are these kinds of models built? Operalization was a new concept for a few participants.
- What do we think is the most important for well-being looking at the answers the different models provided? We mostly talked about meaningfulness, mental health and relationships.
- What is the definition of self-respect? Do we need other people’s respect if we already respect ourselves?
- Are the indicators relative to the standard of each of our experiences or something else? Does the scale (e.g. 1-5) vary a lot across indicators? E.g. going from 1 to 2 in one indicator might be a larger increase in wellbeing than in another.
- Are these theories too western-focused? Most theories seemed to stem from USA/Europe. Talked a bit about Buddhism.
- We also discussed stoicism, saving lives playfully and doing everything we have in our power (to improve the world or reach our goals) without taking it too seriously. How big a role does one’s own attitudes and personality play in increasing well-being independently of the circumstances?
- Sometimes individual wellbeing can conflict with societal wellbeing
- How can we increase wellbeing the most using the resources we have and the theories in this post? It is easier to think about one’s own life but how about e.g. trying to maximize the quality of relationships for as many as possible? We didn’t have any ideas about this yet.
Thank you for writing this post David!
External controlling factors such as rewards, salary, grades, controlling praise, and punishment almost always undermine autonomous motivation (Deci et al., 2001)
What do you think about the this? Does it mean we shouldn’t thank volunteers for the work they are doing and at the same time suggest another project we think would be a good fit for them? Or that the writing competitions with financial incentives can actively harm autonomous motivation unless people have already internalised the values. But in that case do we need the financial reward? I also wonder if this suggests rewarding organisers with gift cards or job certificates undermines autonomous motivation.
Thank you Gergő for initiating this! On EA Finland’s part we are just happy if we can save other group organisers’ time.
I found this a bit hard to read maybe because my biology literacy isn’t strong enough. I also skipped the details...
I didn’t quite understand why iron deficiencies are “very bad”. Here’s how I understood it. Is this what op refers to as very bad? 1)
Successful iron supplementation led to improvements averaging >0.5 standard deviations in attention, learning, and memory Iron supplementation
Iron supplementation increases endurance.
Do you mean bad on a society scale or is it pointed at the reader?
Impressive work you have done and clearly written report! Looking forward to follow how you scale it up/duplicate your effort to other countries :)
Thank you for your kind words!
It would indeed be interesting to see impact assessments across groups and projects to get a rough idea of the expected value of different projects and improve intuitions on community building.
Here is now EA Finland’s Start a Mini EA Group in Finland document. Tried to make it as detailed as possible to make it easy to do and added some more bonus activities like setting up posters at your campus.
Great idea! Somehow I hadn’t thought about the value of inactive groups vs no group.
I know a few university cities in Finland with only 1-2 EAs who don’t have time to commit to running a group many hours a week. I will ask them if they’d be interested in this and do a ~10-step manual on how to set up a mini group and how EA Finland can support them. (Maybe calling it a contact group 🤔) Maybe an incentive to start the group (in addition to having a bigger impact) could be that they automatically get invited to EA Finland’s organizers only-events and retreats.
Adding to Yonatan Cales comment, I think I would add just a few bullet points in the manual on what to do (or not do) to avoid having a negative impact. There are lots of good posts and EA community building resources about what could go wrong and how to avoid that but I think most of them are relevant only later, when a group is committing >1 hour a month to community building.
How would technological change make current biodiversity efforts irrelevant? And by irrelevant, do you mean that the technologies reduce environmental burden and degregation e.g. by being more resource efficienct or that they would be actual new solutions aimed at reducing biodiversity loss?
I’m wondering why so few of the theories involve physiological needs
Thank you for sharing your outreach strategy at ET with such detail! I bookmarked this post earlier and finally found a good moment to read it :)
For EA Finland my main takeaways from the post are:
- We should take some time to develop/unify the branding of EA Finland further and especially our tone of voice.
- Identify more broadly which our most promising target audiences could be and organise discussions/ 1-1s with people from the reference groups to get insights to qhat kind of communication appeals to them and if they are interested in EA in the first place. Now founder effect and existing networks are impacting our community building efforts quite a lot.
- Create Google Analytics for altruismi.fi so we can develop our website based on more detailed data.
- I believe your results from the messaging strategy are interesting and we could try to emphasise the inspirational part as well in our communications. (I acknowledge you also had a section on diversifying outreach strategies between EA groups but this is quite a general approach)
- I had some initial ideas about creating an influencer-focused effective giving campaign. It was good to get some more information on how time consuming it can be and your experience updated me against its cost-effectiveness.
Could you tell more about the engagement metric? What was the questions asked to the respondents? Wondering if it about engagement with other EAs or local groups or generally with EA ideas and how the different levels are defined
My blockers for donating more:
1) Not being confident that I give to the very best program(s). I feel dissatisfied about my current donation behavior. I’d like to have a stronger personal hierarchy of the charity recommendations by GWWC. Now I give roughly 1⁄3 of my pot to GiveWell (because of their strong evidence base), 1⁄3 to either ACE’s recommended charities fund or Humane League (because of neglectedness in animal welfare funding), and 1⁄3 to Founders Pledge Climate change fund (as a relatively safe longtermist bet). These also seem highly cost effective to me, but the true reason I’m dividing my donations equally between them is not because I think all charities could have an equally big impact on the margin, but because I haven’t put enough effort into thinking what my values are, how I’d prioritize across cause areas, and how strongly I believe the recommended charities within the fields can effectively solve the problems they are focusing on. If I was more confident that the expected value of my donations is as I high as it could be with the information I have available, I would likely feel motivated to donate even more. I’d be happy to hear how other people who might have put more thought into it donate and why—so any resources are welcome!
2) Uncertainties about the trade-offs of donating. Should I increase my donations or are there potential self-development or volunteer opportunities that increase my impact long-term?
Example: I’m currently in Tanzania for 2 months volunteering for an EA-minded company. I’ve only been here for 2 weeks, so I don’t know if it is an effectively altruistic use of my money, and it is hard to quantify in advance. When deciding to go on this trip months ago, I was quite sure that donating the cost of the plane ticket would’ve been more virtuous, but my curiosity drove me to go anyway. Now I’m not as sure anymore what would’ve been more virtuous, but in general I would bet more on donating to evidence-based charities than investing in myself.
I believe answering to 2 is easier if I get clarity to 1