I love this Rebecca!
The only thing I’d want to see changed is to add a pledge % cell into the FI table at the top, so you can play around with the percentage right from the start.
I’m assuming people visiting the calculator will have at least some idea of what they’re about to look at.
Thank you for writing this! I strongly agree that we should broaden the tent.
EA’s biggest weakness in my opinion is that almost nobody knows what it is. I’ve spoken to many hundreds of athletes about EA in the last 2 years and only a handful had any idea what it was (hadn’t heard the term) before I explained it. These are people with large audiences and cultural clout, who could be outsized levers in bringing the ideas to hundreds of millions.
However, EA as it presents itself right now seems quite exclusive. I don’t believe that broadening the tent would lessen the direction or determination of those who are “pure” EA, but would gather a much more powerful groundswell around it.
YES.
I love this post. I think EA has a weakness when it comes to storytelling and grabbing hearts. We’re great at appealing to the cerebral folk with careful reasoning and logic, but they’re a small minority. If we want EA ideas to percolate deeply we need to be outcompeting the other heart-grabbers, which means appealing to emotion and layering the logic on top. IMHO.
Totally. I’m being very tongue in cheek above.
The gist of the headline and the post is that community members can contribute to a potentially highly impactful project with a very trivial amount of time and energy spend.
I very much agree that good intros take time.
Did you try?
I just tried it myself: followed three accounts in 17 seconds (having lost a couple of seconds in starting my stopwatch), which gave me 1m43s to think about my network and whether it includes athletes.
Also open to alternate headlines, e.g. Two tiny requests from HIA, A Variable Amount of your Time Depending on your Click Speed, Network Size, and Desire to Spend Time on the Task.
Fair point, thanks.
Hear hear
I’m on board.
Loved this chat. Took some fun and unexpected turns! Thanks guys.
I’ve thought about getting in touch with them and seeing if they wanted to partner up somehow. From what I can see they don’t have any alignment with EA, so perhaps I could try and move the needle a bit towards that.
They’ve both been super helpful, particularly REG!
This is a fair point and one I’m not completely firm on myself.
The main reason for including Atmosfair and Burn are because in my experience pro athletes (particularly tennis players who fly almost every week) are particularly aware of their carbon footprint. Carbon offsetting is a relatively easy sell for this audience.
Dan Stein at Giving Green has done research on carbon offsetting’s impact, and specifically efficient cook stoves. https://www.givinggreen.earth/post/fuel-efficient-cookstoves
I recommend BURN, as well as Atmosfair’s cookstove program on HIA.
I’m curious, where do you get the 100x less effective figure from?
Changed! Thanks for the input
Thanks Ben, great comment.
Do you think this approach works across the board? In my personal experience athletes are quite self-centred and asking for anything for free is a shock to them. So far, bringing up a percentage pledge has scared the vast majority of the athletes I’ve spoken to, despite giving myself as an example of someone for whom it works and feels good. Most have shied away from a percentage, asking to donate a discreet amount and maybe come in at a 1% pledge next year or the year after.
Perhaps this response is only typical for tennis players who have to earn their livings through winning matches, which is never a certainty, rather than being paid a salary like in most team sports. I haven’t yet spoken to any team athletes about HIA.
Also, I see the point about ‘saintly’ and have changed it. Thanks!
Also, I would love to have a wide variety of athletes represented by HIA. As it’s still very new I’m focusing outreach on those I have personal relationships with, which means tennis, which is predominantly white in the professional space at this point in time. I’m hoping that over time I can get in touch with a more diverse range of athletes from many different sports.
This is a good point and not one I’d thought of before. Thank you.
Re ‘saintly’, it is intended as a joke. Do you think it’s more offensive than funny? Or not worth the risk?
Re diversity, I can’t help that I’m the founder and I’m white, but having a more diverse advisory board sounds good. Do you have any ideas as to who would be good advisors for this sort of thing? Important to note that all the advisors are completely pro bono.
I would argue that most people reading the website are very wealthy—living in a western country almost inevitably qualifies you as very wealthy. For the main target audience—successful professional athletes—a 10% pledge would not change quality of life one whit.
I’m sorry you went through this, and thank you for speaking up about it. I hope the bravery of speaking out results in meaningful change, not just at CEA but across the wider culture.