Congratulations on developing and launching this new strategy!
I’m Chief of Staff at CEA, and as we wrote in our own recently-published strategy post, we’re making diversifying EA funding a central part of our efforts to steward the community in the coming years, and I’m excited about us exploring more ways to collaborate on making pledges a big piece of that puzzle.
Staff costs are a relatively small proportion of our total spending, but the proportion increased in 2024 compared to 2023 (28% vs 21%).
Between 2021 and 2023, our total spending increased by 264% (from $6.9m to $25.1m), while our headcount increased only 40% (from 24 to 34), which meant we had insufficient capacity to improve the quality and cost-effectiveness of our programs. This informed our decision to make foundation-building our organizational priority in 2024, including both investing in hiring to increase our capacity and cutting non-staff costs, with the majority of savings (per Ollie’s comment) being contributed by lower spending on events, especially EAG.
If you want to know more, we (CEA) just published our stewardship strategy, focused on building sustainable momentum for the EA community
“In my role at CEA, I embrace an approach to EA that I (and others) refer to as “principles-first”. This approach doubles down on the claim that EA is bigger than any one cause area. EA is not AI safety; EA is not longtermism; EA is not effective giving; and so on. Rather than recommending a single, fixed answer to the question of how we can best help others, I think the value of EA lies in asking that question in the first place and the tools and principles EA provides to help people approach that question.”
Zach wrote this last year in his first substantive post as CEO of CEA, announcing that CEA will continue to take a “principles-first” approach to EA. (I’m Zach’s Chief of Staff.) Our approach remains the same today: we’re as motivated as ever about stewarding the EA community and ensuring that together we live up to our full potential.
Collectively living up to our full potential ultimately requires making a direct impact. Even under our principles-first approach, impact is our north star, and we exist to serve the world, not the EA community itself. But Zach and I continue to believe there is no other set of principles that has the same transformative potential to address the world’s most pressing problems as EA principles. So, in our assessment, at this moment in time, the best way for CEA to make progress towards our ultimate goal is sustainably growing the number of people putting EA principles into practice.
In reaching and implementing their decision to shift their strategic approach, Niel and others at 80k are putting those principles into practice. While we might disagree about some of the particulars, or draw different conclusions, we don’t disagree that updating in response to new information is appropriate, that AI risk reduction is a critically important cause, or that achieving progress at the scale and speed required will require making some hard trade-offs. We agree that there will be implications and opportunities for our community, including for CEA, in terms of filling some of the gaps 80k might leave behind, and this transition will be made smoother by the fact we are all still shooting for the same north star.
I want to recognize that these are big shoes to fill: 80k has built an incredibly impressive team, developed a set of remarkable products, and earned great respect from a wide audience. I’m both sad that this unique combination won’t be deployed so directly in stewardship of EA, and excited to see what it can achieve with even greater focus.
Quick followup to note that collaborative spirit is included among CEA’s Guiding Principles listed on the CEA site. Clearly it’s confusing—including to a member of CEA’s own staff like me! - that we refer to different things as ‘principles’ in different places, and that might be something we look to clarify if and when we revisit these pages as Zach Era CEA.
Thanks for reading closely, and for flagging this! While CEA is the owner of EA.org, the intro essay was drafted by a collaborative process including non-CEA staff, and the final version was written by 80k’s Ben Todd (more in the essay’s announcement here).
The discrepancy is tracking the reality that there is no consensus about how best to define EA, although I think the omission of collaborative spirit from the CEA page is an oversight and I expect we will edit it accordingly soon.
Our (CEA’s) website has a page about core EA principles.
And note that Zach has said elsewhere he intends to write more about his views in due course.
Circling back to say we recently published CEA’s 2023 budget.
Note that we project spending to be substantially under budget.
In 2021, we spent $6.9m and ended the year with 29 staff. This is not an apples-to-apples comparison, because those staff include five members of what was then the CEA ops team, and is now the EV Ops team, so the more direct comparison is with 24 staff at that time.
You can see on our dashboard some of the ways our programs have changed since 2021 (three in-person EAG events compared to one, nine EAGx events compared to zero, etc).
CEA’s spending in 2023 is substantially lower than in 2022: down by $4.8 − 5.8 million.
The graph below shows our budget as it stood early in the year, reflecting our pre-FTX plans, and compares that to how our plans and spending have evolved as we’ve adapted to the new funding environment. This has happened during an Interim period in which we’ve tried where possible not to make hard-to-reverse changes that constrain the options of a new CEO.
We currently have the same number of Core staff that we did at the end of 2022 (37), but staff costs are a relatively small proportion of our overall spending (around 20% in 2023).
For example, we spend a lot on events, and have cut a lot of event spending, but largely by reducing passthrough costs rather than by firing people from what is already a small team relative to the scale of its activities.
In contrast, the costs of the Online team responsible for the Forum are much more staff-heavy, and we don’t have plans to replace several people who left the team this year. We did recently hire one new person to work on Forum content.
It’s also worth noting that we postponed as much hiring as we could during our ongoing Interim period, so we expect our total number of staff to increase in 2024 relative to today’s benchmark. We expect that increasing staff costs as a proportion of our spending will increase the quality and cost-effectiveness of our programs.
You can read more about CEA’s relationship with Leverage Research on our mistakes page.
Healthy habits can be good for your wellbeing and productivity, in the short- and long-term
Establishing healthy habits is especially hard under conditions of scarcity: time, energy, bandwidth
It’s worth putting in effort to establish health habits during the good times
I keep daily yoga and meditation practices, one in the morning and one during the day, and I keep them during busy and stressful periods. I don’t think I would have started or maintained either (or habits related to sleep, food, phone) if I hadn’t entrenched them as fixtures of my routine when I was living an easier life.
This is not an argument for specific habits. Compiling the evidence behind and my experience of my preferred habits would require more scarce time than I currently have. And in any case, I don’t think I’ve found the Correct Combination for myself, let alone anybody else.
It is an argument for acting now, beginning to solidify whatever your preferred habits might be, before you come to really depend on them.
Thanks for raising this. I agree that the dial has shifted somewhat toward funding constraints for non-mysterious reasons, and I’d note that this is true across different cause areas. CEA is funding constrained too! Our Interim MD has framed this as the start of EA’s Third Wave.
I’ve been leading internally on how we might unconstrain CEA itself, and (in its very early stages) thinking about how we might coordinate fundraising activities between EA meta (~movement building) orgs. But I want to be explicit that there are a couple nearby things CEA is not currently doing and hasn’t been in recent history:
Fundraising for non-CEA projects
Grantmaking to non-CEA projects
Similarly, EA Funds was spun out of CEA in 2020
The bulk of our current grantmaking is to the groups and EAGx conferences we directly support and their organizers
The dashboard is accurately capturing the fact that we have not (yet) made any big strategic changes to our programs intended to address funding bottlenecks. But it does disguise the fact that we’ve done some things within existing projects, including launching an effective giving subforum (later shut down) and supporting an Effective Giving Summit. I’m confident that there are more things we could do to move the needle here, although I’m less confident that they would be more impactful than our existing programs, even in the new funding environment.
There is important work to be done figuring out the costs and benefits of a more money-oriented approach, but I’d caution that it’s unlikely CEA makes any major changes to our current strategy until we appoint a new CEO. Worth noting, though, that we’re open to pretty major changes as part of that process.
On CEA (where I’m Chief of Staff) and its website specifically:
I’m glad that you think the What is CEA page is quite good, thanks!
The site is in a slightly weird position because it appears very high in searches for “effective altruism”, so the front page needs to cater to that audience, as well as people who land there because they’re actually interested in CEA itself. We expect the interested-in-CEA crowd to be more likely to stick around, so the page is designed to prioritize the new-to-EA crowd (i.e. redirect them to EffectiveAltruism.org).
We were in the process of commissioning a redesign of the site a few months ago, but that is now on hold pending us finding a new Exec Director and potentially pursuing a new strategy.
Hi Joshua, I think you’re pointing at something important about CEA representing EA through programs like EAG and the Forum, and I want to acknowledge that that is something we do and that it’s a responsibility we take seriously. (I work in the Exec Office at CEA.)
These two posts give more detail about our approach:
My view is that our approach is consistent with not having or wanting control over the community, or being its de facto leader. Quite possibly you already agree with this based on your most recent comment above, but I wanted to share these resources in case you or other readers were not aware of them.
Addendum: we have in rare instances attempted to prevent people acting in ways antithetical to EA principles from identifying themselves with EA (example), but it remains the case that we do not generally do this among members of the community acting in good faith.
Neither CEA nor EVF own the trademark “Effective Altruism”, and we do not attempt or intend to control other people using the phrase.
We do own trademarks for “Centre for Effective Altruism”, “Effective Altruism Global” and the heartbulb logo. As owners of prominent EA products such as EA Global and EffectiveAltruism.org, CEA does consider itself among the stewards of the EA brand, but not its owner. There are many organisations and individuals whose use of the phrase “EA” (and their associated activities) contribute to the overall EA brand, and we think that’s appropriate.
I’m sorry to hear you’ve had these negative experiences.
At CEA, trial tasks (minutes or hours) and work trials (days) are key components of our typical hiring rounds because we believe them to be better predictors of performance in the role than other assessments such as resumes or interviews. We do, however, always offer to compensate candidates for their time for any longer trial tasks and work trials if it’s legally possible. (Visa rules mean this is sometimes not possible for candidates who travel, e.g. to the UK, for a trial without a work visa.)
“Chief of Staff” models from a long-time Chief of Staff
I have served in Chief of Staff or CoS-like roles to three leaders of CEA (Zach, Ben and Max), and before joining CEA I was CoS to a member of the UK House of Lords. I wrote up some quick notes on how I think about such roles for some colleagues, and one of them suggested they might be useful to other Forum readers. So here you go:
Chief of Staff means many things to different people in different contexts, but the core of it in my mind is that many executive roles are too big to be done by one person (even allowing for a wider Executive or Leadership team, delegation to department leads, etc). Having (some parts of) the role split/shared between the principal and at least one other person increases the capacity and continuity of the exec function.
Broadly, I think of there being two ways to divide up these responsibilities (using CEO and CoS as stand-ins, but the same applies to other principal/deputy duos regardless of titles):
Split the CEO’s role into component parts and assign responsibility for each part to CEO or CoS
Example: CEO does fundraising; CoS does budgets
Advantages: focus, accountability
Share the CEO’s role with both CEO and CoS actively involved in each component part
Example: CEO speaks to funders based on materials prepared by CoS; CEO assigns team budget allocations which are implemented by CoS
Advantages: flex capacity, gatekeeping
Some things to note about these approaches:
In practice, it’s inevitably some combination of the two, but I think it’s really important to be intentional and explicit about what’s being split and what’s being shared
Failure to do this causes confusion, dropped balls, and duplication of effort
Sharing is especially valuable during the early phases of your collaboration because it facilitates context-swapping and model-building
I don’t think you’d ever want to get all the way or too far towards split, because then you functionally have one more department-lead-equivalent, and you lose a lot of the benefits in terms of flex capacity and especially continuity
Both approaches depend on trust, and maximising them depends on an unusually high degree of trust
CEO trusting CoS to act on their behalf
In turn, this depends on trusting their judgement, and in particular trusting their judgement of when it’s appropriate to act unilaterally and when it’s appropriate to get input/approval from CEO
Others trusting that CoS is empowered to and capable of acting on CEO’s behalf
Doesn’t work if CEO and CoS disagree or undermine each other’s decisions in view of others, or if others expect CoS decisions to be overturned by CEO
It being easier to burn credibility than to build it is something close to an iron law, which means CoS should tread carefully while establishing the bounds of their delegated authority
It’s not a seniority thing: an Executive Assistant having responsibility for scheduling is an example of splitting the role; a Managing Director doing copyedits for the CEO’s op-ed is an example of sharing the role
I don’t think the title “CoS” matters, but I do think maximising the benefits of both models requires the deputy to have a title that conveys that they both represent and can act unilaterally on behalf of the principal to some meaningful degree
Managing Director and Chief of Staff do this; Project Manager and Exec Assistant do not