Effective Altruism Forum
EA Forum

Comment Permalink
aliwoodman5
0
0

Hi Rohin, great question! Since Giving What We Can outreach is now managed by the wider Community and Outreach team at CEA it might make sense to speak in terms of our team as a whole.

Based on the figures we have, it seems reasonable that CEA activities were at least partially responsible for something like 70% of new pledges in September. We experimented with a number of new strategies to get additional pledges in September, including optimising our email and social media campaigns and running a Facebook retargeting campaign. We also tried to reduce the amount of time between following up with people who had expressed some interest in the pledge, either at 80,000 Hours workshops, EA Global or through engagement with websites we run (effectivealtruism.org etc).

More specifically, we looked at our Google Analytics to see how members are reaching the join page on the GWWC site. Out of the 106 who joined in September, 15 came from Facebook, both through our posts and through ads we ran. 12 came from the new effectivealtruism.org site, 3 of whom arrived after viewing the cause prioritisation flowchart (originally created by GPP). 11 were directed from emails; these were mostly people we followed up with who had previously started filling out signup forms but hadn’t completed them. 6 were directed from an article on giving and happiness which was written several years ago by a former staff member, Andreas Mogensen, for the GWWC blog. In terms of the wider CEA, 17 came from 80000hours.org, 9 from www.effectivealtruism.com (which is currently the Doing Good Better book website), and 4 from Sam Harris’s podcast where he interviewed Will MacAskill.

Reply
Rohin Shah0
0
0

Thanks!

Side note, is there an easy way to get push notifications, perhaps through email, when there's a reply to a comment or post you wrote?

Reply
See in context
by William_MacAskill
2 min read 14

7

Announcements and updatesCentre for Effective AltruismOrganization updates
Frontpage

Here's our update for September 2016. It was a great month for growth at CEA. In September, we got 106 new Giving What We Can members and 1,748 new EA Newsletter signups; in both cases that’s nearly double the previous three month average. 

If anyone has questions, comment below and I'll check in in a couple of days to respond.

 

Metrics

 

New members per month over the last year.

The final spike on the right is the 106 new members in September. This is the highest number of pledges in any month outside of giving season (the highest ever is 129 in December 2014).

 

 

(The dip after September 2016 is because we’ve yet to have the full month of October).




New newsletter subscribers by month

Growth in number of newsletter subscribers has also been strong; it’s been the best month ever.


Inline images 1



Community and Outreach Division



Online Marketing

This month we’ve been experimenting with multiple strategies designed to get Giving What We Can Pledges and signups for the EA Newsletter. This has been very successful and as a result we’re considering focusing more on Facebook promotion, email follow up to people considering the pledge, and Twitter promotion. The top three last click conversion sources for pledges were 80,000 Hours, Facebook and effectivealtruism.org.

 

Community, Chapters and Events

We’ve begun planning EA Global 2017 and we’ll be opening applications for EAGx 2017 shortly. We’ve also launched a new high-touch chapters program, providing more in-depth support to a pilot group of student chapters. Chapter leaders interested in knowing more should contact chapters@centreforeffectivealtruism.org. Julia has been working on developing strategies designed to foster cooperative and friendly behaviour in the EA community.

 

Networking and Media

We met with several major philanthropists to advise them on their giving, including Sir Tom Hunter, Scotland’s first billionaire, who is donating almost all his wealth to projects in Rwanda and Scotland.

 

Will discussed effective altruism on Sam Harris’s podcast, which so far as been listened to over 350,000 times. He also appeared in Swedish national media.

 

Y Combinator

We applied to Y Combinator, the leading startup incubator, based in Silicon Valley, which has produced the likes of AirBnB, Dropbox and Reddit. 80,000 Hours went through the program in summer of 2015 and found it exceptionally useful in improving the focus of the organisation and helping the organisation grow, and we’re hoping it will help us in the same way. On the 28th October we’ll hear about whether we’ve got an interview, which would take place in early November. We think that our chances are about 50/50.



Special Projects Division

 

Philanthropic Advising

The philanthropic advising team has focused on exploring new funding opportunities, including in mental health, tobacco regulation, and research funding.

 

Policy

Sebastian Farquhar has put the finishing touches on a forthcoming report on the international community’s possible responses to existential risk in Helsinki for the Finnish Government, and with Toby Ord, has been advising UK government officials on a variety of areas.

 

Research

The research team have begun working through the list of high-priority projects they had compiled and are working on a new research webpage, which we hope to unveil by the end of the year.

 

EA Institute

We submitted our first grant proposal, to the John Templeton Foundation, in collaboration with the University of York and the Centre for Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs at St Andrews.

 

7

0
0

Reactions

0
0

More posts like this

Comments14


Sorted by
New & upvoted
Click to highlight new comments since:
Rohin Shah4
0
0

What does Giving What We Can spend its time on? I realized that I am unable to answer this question even loosely, which is unusual. The Our Team page (https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/about-us/team/) helps, but parts are still unclear. More generally, I'm not sure what activities GWWC does that cause more GWWC pledges, which is what it bases its impact on.

What percentage of GWWC pledges do you think were caused by GWWC (or CEA as a whole)? I'm particularly interested in measurements that don't rely on self-reports. So far, I've only seen statistics about self-reports by people who took the pledge, which were used to get a 60:1 multiplier.

Reply
aliwoodman5
0
0

Hi Rohin, great question! Since Giving What We Can outreach is now managed by the wider Community and Outreach team at CEA it might make sense to speak in terms of our team as a whole.

Based on the figures we have, it seems reasonable that CEA activities were at least partially responsible for something like 70% of new pledges in September. We experimented with a number of new strategies to get additional pledges in September, including optimising our email and social media campaigns and running a Facebook retargeting campaign. We also tried to reduce the amount of time between following up with people who had expressed some interest in the pledge, either at 80,000 Hours workshops, EA Global or through engagement with websites we run (effectivealtruism.org etc).

More specifically, we looked at our Google Analytics to see how members are reaching the join page on the GWWC site. Out of the 106 who joined in September, 15 came from Facebook, both through our posts and through ads we ran. 12 came from the new effectivealtruism.org site, 3 of whom arrived after viewing the cause prioritisation flowchart (originally created by GPP). 11 were directed from emails; these were mostly people we followed up with who had previously started filling out signup forms but hadn’t completed them. 6 were directed from an article on giving and happiness which was written several years ago by a former staff member, Andreas Mogensen, for the GWWC blog. In terms of the wider CEA, 17 came from 80000hours.org, 9 from www.effectivealtruism.com (which is currently the Doing Good Better book website), and 4 from Sam Harris’s podcast where he interviewed Will MacAskill.

Reply
Rohin Shah0
0
0

Thanks!

Side note, is there an easy way to get push notifications, perhaps through email, when there's a reply to a comment or post you wrote?

Reply
Peter Wildeford1
0
0

We have adding this as a potential future project for EA forum development. See https://github.com/tog22/eaforum/issues/65

Reply
Jeff Kaufman 🔸0
0
0

is there an easy way to get push notifications, perhaps through email, when there's a reply to a comment or post you wrote?

There's an rss feed [1] and there are rss-to-email services [2]

[1] http://effective-altruism.com/message/inbox.rss

[2] a quick search turns up https://blogtrottr.com/

Reply
Jeff Kaufman 🔸0
0
0

I just realized: there's no way that rss feed can work, because it needs to be authenticated with your cookies. Sorry!

Reply
Rohin Shah0
0
0

Okay, that makes sense. I ran into that issue fairly quickly and thought there might be a workaround but tabled that to look at later.

Reply
[anonymous]2
0
0

Congratulations to all concerned. As a member of the EA community in West Yorkshire I am really pleased to see the collaboration with the University of York. I hope the bid to the John Templeton Foundation is successful.

Reply
Evan_Gaensbauer1
0
0

If GWWC will continue on as an internal brand within the Community & Outreach Division, how open is CEA in taking donations earmarked for GWWC instead of general operations funding? I ask because some donors may evaluate GWWC as substantially more impactful than CEA's other activities.

Reply
William_MacAskill4
0
0

My current plan is that to a first approximation we won't accept restricted donations, including to GWWC. (It's a fiction that truly restricted donations are possible, anyway). But we will give donors the chance to express their preferences about how the money is to be used, which we'll consider in the aggregate when making strategic decisions. If donors think we're making major mistakes in allocation of resources between different activities, I'd love to see that written up, it would be very helpful to us.

Reply
Evan_Gaensbauer1
0
0

I'm confused about the ongoing status of GPP. Has GPP been fully folded under the "Special Projects Division", or is that happening in the near future? Also, my impression was Special Projects would fill the role of GPP and GWWC's original research. Is that the case? Also, will Owen and Seb be continuing on with Special Projects and its work, or focusing on FHI's research priorities?

Reply
William_MacAskill4
0
0

GPP has fully folded under Special Projects. GPP had two tracks: policy research and outreach, and fundamental EA theory. These now have their own distinct teams under the special project division. The third team is philanthropic advising, which was previously under GWWC. Owen and Seb are continuing with Special Projects.

Reply
[anonymous]0
0
0

I think this is wise given the complexity of GPP's core research agenda, but I really like the branding and identity of the project and the prominence it gives to research effectiveness as a critically important idea. I see it as being potentially analogous to what the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft does for innovation in Germany in that it could turn a vague concept into a strategic process.

Reply
More from William_MacAskill
170
Forethought: A new AI macrostrategy group
5 authors
· · 4m read
6
6
120
Preparing for the Intelligence Explosion
3 authors
· · 1m read
15
15
92
Moral error as an existential risk
William_MacAskill
· · 13m read
3
3
View more
Curated and popular this week
 ·  · 5m read
 · 
[Cross-posted from my Substack here] If you spend time with people trying to change the world, you’ll come to an interesting conundrum: Various advocacy groups reference previous successful social movements as to why their chosen strategy is the most important one. Yet, these groups often follow wildly different strategies from each other to achieve social change. So, which one of them is right? The answer is all of them and none of them. This is because many people use research and historical movements to justify their pre-existing beliefs about how social change happens. Simply, you can find a case study to fit most plausible theories of how social change happens. For example, the groups might say: * Repeated nonviolent disruption is the key to social change, citing the Freedom Riders from the civil rights Movement or Act Up! from the gay rights movement. * Technological progress is what drives improvements in the human condition if you consider the development of the contraceptive pill funded by Katharine McCormick. * Organising and base-building is how change happens, as inspired by Ella Baker, the NAACP or Cesar Chavez from the United Workers Movement. * Insider advocacy is the real secret of social movements – look no further than how influential the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights was in passing the Civil Rights Acts of 1960 & 1964. * Democratic participation is the backbone of social change – just look at how Ireland lifted a ban on abortion via a Citizen’s Assembly. * And so on… To paint this picture, we can see this in action below: Source: Just Stop Oil which focuses on…civil resistance and disruption Source: The Civic Power Fund which focuses on… local organising What do we take away from all this? In my mind, a few key things: 1. Many different approaches have worked in changing the world so we should be humble and not assume we are doing The Most Important Thing 2. The case studies we focus on are likely confirmation bias, where
 ·  · 2m read
 · 
I speak to many entrepreneurial people trying to do a large amount of good by starting a nonprofit organisation. I think this is often an error for four main reasons. 1. Scalability 2. Capital counterfactuals 3. Standards 4. Learning potential 5. Earning to give potential These arguments are most applicable to starting high-growth organisations, such as startups.[1] Scalability There is a lot of capital available for startups, and established mechanisms exist to continue raising funds if the ROI appears high. It seems extremely difficult to operate a nonprofit with a budget of more than $30M per year (e.g., with approximately 150 people), but this is not particularly unusual for for-profit organisations. Capital Counterfactuals I generally believe that value-aligned funders are spending their money reasonably well, while for-profit investors are spending theirs extremely poorly (on altruistic grounds). If you can redirect that funding towards high-altruism value work, you could potentially create a much larger delta between your use of funding and the counterfactual of someone else receiving those funds. You also won’t be reliant on constantly convincing donors to give you money, once you’re generating revenue. Standards Nonprofits have significantly weaker feedback mechanisms compared to for-profits. They are often difficult to evaluate and lack a natural kill function. Few people are going to complain that you provided bad service when it didn’t cost them anything. Most nonprofits are not very ambitious, despite having large moral ambitions. It’s challenging to find talented people willing to accept a substantial pay cut to work with you. For-profits are considerably more likely to create something that people actually want. Learning Potential Most people should be trying to put themselves in a better position to do useful work later on. People often report learning a great deal from working at high-growth companies, building interesting connection
 ·  · 31m read
 · 
James Özden and Sam Glover at Social Change Lab wrote a literature review on protest outcomes[1] as part of a broader investigation[2] on protest effectiveness. The report covers multiple lines of evidence and addresses many relevant questions, but does not say much about the methodological quality of the research. So that's what I'm going to do today. I reviewed the evidence on protest outcomes, focusing only on the highest-quality research, to answer two questions: 1. Do protests work? 2. Are Social Change Lab's conclusions consistent with the highest-quality evidence? Here's what I found: Do protests work? Highly likely (credence: 90%) in certain contexts, although it's unclear how well the results generalize. [More] Are Social Change Lab's conclusions consistent with the highest-quality evidence? Yes—the report's core claims are well-supported, although it overstates the strength of some of the evidence. [More] Cross-posted from my website. Introduction This article serves two purposes: First, it analyzes the evidence on protest outcomes. Second, it critically reviews the Social Change Lab literature review. Social Change Lab is not the only group that has reviewed protest effectiveness. I was able to find four literature reviews: 1. Animal Charity Evaluators (2018), Protest Intervention Report. 2. Orazani et al. (2021), Social movement strategy (nonviolent vs. violent) and the garnering of third-party support: A meta-analysis. 3. Social Change Lab – Ozden & Glover (2022), Literature Review: Protest Outcomes. 4. Shuman et al. (2024), When Are Social Protests Effective? The Animal Charity Evaluators review did not include many studies, and did not cite any natural experiments (only one had been published as of 2018). Orazani et al. (2021)[3] is a nice meta-analysis—it finds that when you show people news articles about nonviolent protests, they are more likely to express support for the protesters' cause. But what people say in a lab setting mig
Relevant opportunities
44
World Malaria Day 2025: what's new, what's not
Toby Tremlett🔹
· · 2m read
0
0
7
80,000 Hours is hiring for an Engagement Specialist
2 authors
· · 7m read
3
3
36
Two jobs at The Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience, LSE
J. Birch
· · 1m read
0
0
View more