A week ago I moved to Vancouver for the summer, interning at .impact with Tom Ash and the team.
It's been a fun week, and I've started work on a few ongoing projects, such as analysing the results of this year's EA survey, and getting in contact with local EA groups that wanted some support putting on their first event. These projects are all ongoing, and hopefully we should see some results, such as insightful statistics about the EA community, soon!
Thanks Chris, I just read through the survey. Very interesting stats and inferences. It is certainly making me think about striking a balance between making sure people don't have the "I don't feel EA enough" feeling, but also developing a culture where people are normalising high impact giving.
The Life You Can Save took a big step forward when we recently started processing donations on our own site rather than sending visitors to our recommended charities to donate. This will improve our user experience and our ability to track the money we move, but the biggest impact will be on our ability to market effectively. We can now use google analytics to track where donations come from at a very granular level, meaning we can scale things that are working and fix things that aren't. And we're also getting more granular personal information about donors, allowing us to segment our donor base more effectively (e.g. Communicating differently with large vs. small donors). I expect these developments to pay huge long term dividends.
Gleb's already covered a lot of exciting things going on with using giving games and other outreach efforts with secular audiences. In other giving game news, I'm nearing completion on an annual report for the project. Keep an eye out on the forum :)
The last month was quite busy for me with EA activities!
One notable event was holding a videotaped Google Hangout with EA Netherlands about how to market EA-themed ideas broadly.
Besides this videotaped call, we held a number of non-videotaped personal calls and did other forms of support for folks in the EA movement to advance the capacity of EA members in marketing EA-themed ideas broadly, for instance connecting EA folks with publishers, etc.
I published a piece for a prominent outlet, Lifehack, entitled "How To Show Your Love For Animals Effectively!" This is part of a broader collaboration with Animal Charity Evaluators, on whose behalf I wrote the post, and who will also publish it on their blog soon. I hope to get it published in a couple of other venues that allow republication, to get the message out as broadly as possible. And on that note, The Huffington Post republished my earlier blog for The Life You Can Save, entitled "The Panama Papers Reveal The Solution To Global Suffering."
I held a couple more "Everyday Heroes of Effective Giving" interviews, which will be ready soon.
We at Intentional Insights tabled at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly, holding Speed Giving Games and distributing UU-themed Giving Games packets. By the end, we actually ran out of materials (we printed 50), so there was lots of interest in taking the Giving Games back to churches around the world. I think over 70 people participated in total. The two charities we played for were GiveDirectly and the the local food bank, and about 2/3rds of the people chose GiveDirectly, which is a good sign for engaging with the UU movement.
We advanced the EA Marketing Resources Bank project by founding the Effective Altruism Marketing FB group, in coordination with the Local Effective Altruism Network.
We also founded the Effective Altruism Secular Outreach FB group.
On a more personal and non-InIn note, I co-founded the EA Accomplishments group. This is not an explicitly InIn project, just like this thread is not. It's something I'm personally passionate about and do as my personal contribution to the movement, not in my capacity as InIn President.
You're welcome to join all these groups :-)
That's all for the last month!
I've had a really exciting EA month too.
I finished running through the pilot of the Students For High-Impact Charity program with a group of students in my school. Some students found some aspects of the program confronting, but they all found it interesting, and raised a bunch of money for CoolEarth (the charity they chose for the main fundraiser), and ran an "Animal Friendly Lunch" - with vegan sausages and bake sale, to spread awareness and raise money for Animal Equality International.
I also helped out planning and running the EAGxAustralia conference, which was really well received (and I had a fantastic time). So I am feeling really positive about being a useful part of the EA movement right now.
Great to hear about everything you did!
I'm curious, what parts of the SHIC program did students found confronting? How did you handle it?
One part was when talking about whether or not we have a moral obligation to help people when we can - and how far we have to go to "be a good person" in the utilitarian framework - some students were understandably exasperated by the demandingness of that framework.
Another part was when looking at the harms the student are causing through greenhouse gas emissions and animal consumption. I did a lot of "this is what thinks might be correct", rather than saying it was my belief - although they asked me about my beliefs and actions, which I answered honestly, so I think I failed to appear non-judgemental because of that. We try to finish the discussion of each problem, with a potential solution they could contribute to, in order to make these discussions more constructive, which helped a bit.
arranged a Giving Game (31 people) and EA veganism workshop (~30 people) combined with vegan lunch at the European Humanist Youth Days
got a confirmation of a big speaker for an Effective Giving conference next year in Amsterdam and started pursuing funding possibilities.
started preparing a project for an 80,000 Hours career quiz in the form of an 8 track marble run at a student introduction week (6,000 new students at KEI-week Groningen): https://www.keiweek.nl/en/program/wednesday-the-12th-of-august/more-to-explore
starting up the blog for EA Netherlands: http://effectiefaltruisme.nl/home/blog/
researching how to optimise EA Facebook page likes/follows using Effective Altruism Groups Directory (I can use your help) & creating an .impact overview: https://impact.hackpad.com/EA-Facebook-Groups-Pages-Directory-2y9LJfdutWh
general posting on 3 Facebook groups and managing the EA Netherlands Twitter account (now at 2,414 followers – still difficult to balance reach with sending out a positive, accurate message of EA): https://twitter.com/EffectAltruisme
networking with new interested people & organisations in the Netherlands
Remmelt
To build the capacity of the EA movement and optimize global flourishing, research suggests it is important to share about your good deeds. After all, so many of our good deeds occur in private, and they can have a substantially bigger impact if we publicize them! So please share any EA-themed accomplishments you have not yet shared on previous Accomplishment open threads, whether recent achievements or ones from long ago. This includes one-time accomplishments or ongoing activities on which you are continuously working.
There is also a Facebook group devoted to sharing about EA-themed accomplishments, which you are welcome to join.
This thread is a completely safe space, with no social norms of "don't be a braggart" applying - just share and be safe in your sharing. Share as many or as few good deeds as you wish. Please both share about your own good deeds and respond to what other people share with your authentic responses, ranging from upvoting to supportive/curious comments :-) Doing so will help motivate each other to greater accomplishments going forward and build capacity for the EA movement.
Now, sharing about our accomplishments may seek awkward at first, since it goes against social norms, but we in Effective Altruism know the benefit of trying out unorthodox approaches for good reasons. This is why the Accomplishments Open Thread was launched in January 2016, and received such positive responses that it became a monthly occurrence, and why the EA Accomplishments FB group is so active. Sharing about our goods deeds results in many benefits for the world:
1) Inspiring others to emulate some aspects of those good deeds through social proof and network effects.
2) Support each other doing good deeds through providing social connections, positive rewards, and warm feelings, which are vital forencouraging further pro-social activities.
3) Amplifying the signal about things you want others to know about, such as EA projects you are involved in, EA articles you published, etc.
P.S. The Accomplishments thread project is very open to optimization - besides sharing about your good deeds, please suggest ways to improve any aspects of it. For the history of previous Accomplishment Open Threads, see here and also this .impact FB discussion.
July has been an exciting month so far for ACE!
We updated our Survey Guidelines, providing resources for animal advocacy groups to evaluate the effectiveness of their own programs.
We worked with Huffington Post to get this fantastic article published, by Nico Pitney.
We launched our Animal Advocacy Research Fund, so academics and organizations can now apply for funding on research projects. We hope that this project will provide much-needed evidence to help all animal advocates be more effective in their work.
I was really pleased to see that Research Fund! I am really looking forward to the results in time - I feel that there are a bunch of people waiting for more research in the animal advocacy field before taking action.
Great article in HP, nice job getting it there! And as an academic myself, I'm glad to see you putting some funding into helping get them on board with providing evidence for animal advocates!