I work for CEA, but this post isn’t intended as a fundraising post for CEA. The main beneficiaries I want to direct readers to are e.g. EA groups and EA communicators who might not have capacity for fundraising. I expect similar arguments apply to e.g. AIS, rationality and animal welfare community-building efforts but I know those spaces less well. There’s a version of this post where I pull actual donation numbers and iron out the details of what I’m proposing but this is not that version.
It’s difficult for funders to figure out which community-building efforts are successful. The reason your inbox is littered with surveys for every event, retreat and course you take part in is because we want to know if they’re working, and, ultimately, whether we should continue using EA resources to run them. Roughly, things work like this:
- Community builders (CBs) help new community members build their networks, plan their careers and have more impact.
- New community members let the CBs know how it helped them (thanks!)
- New members usually donate elsewhere (I think?), to whatever they consider to be most cost-effective. If new members think EA community-building efforts are important, some of that amount might go somewhere like EA Funds (or CEA or the Meta Funding Circle, or Giving What We Can).
- The EA Infrastructure Fund, for example, wants to figure out which CBs are most impactful. They ask the CBs for the information provided by community members to do this.
- In a perfect world, the CBs have this information, because everyone responds to surveys and we can accurately attribute a reasonable portion of all the new members’ impact to the right CB intervention.
Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world and this process is imperfect, largely because information is hard to gather and communicate. If only 10% of community members respond to a survey (heaven forbid!), CBs and funders need to do a lot of guessing and extrapolation to figure out which CB efforts are impactful and who they’re impacting.
But community members have this information. They (usually) know exactly which person they met, which blog they read or which event they went to that helped them have more impact, by their own lights. Instead of members giving, say, 25% of their donations to the EA Infrastructure Fund, and hoping they can figure out which CB efforts are impactful, they could consider giving that amount (perhaps one large-ish donation for convenience) to the group, blogger or event organisers that helped them on their path to impact.
Of course, donations from community members are a relatively small portion of CB funding in the grand scheme of things. A lot of it is subsidised by funders like Open Philanthropy who want the community to grow and have more impact. But a donation to e.g. a small EA group or an independent blogger can make a big difference. I think even a small adjustment here can also serve as a valuable signal within the ecosystem. If EA [European country] reported getting a big boost in donations by asking their members to donate, that tells funders and other CBs that members are happy with their work and keen to support them. That’s also a good incentive for that group to do work that benefits their members.
Here are some assorted other benefits to more people donating to CBs that helped them:
- This would increase funding diversity for EA CB, providing more stability to groups. EA CB could become more self-sustaining and independent over time.
- It might lead to groups finding more EA-interested donors; perhaps those earning to give in their community who didn’t realise their local group would benefit from their support.
Some caveats
- I’m not anti-EA Funds or other funds like it. I think EA Funds generally do a good job of identifying impactful opportunities. I’ve donated to them consistently for several years and I’ll probably continue to do so.
- Some people are richer than others, but that doesn’t correlate with how much impact they can have. This means that, under this model, CB efforts in wealthy countries might get more funding than they “deserve”, and CB efforts in LMICs will be underfunded. You might resolve this by giving some fraction of your CB donations to EA Funds (who then receive fundraising requests from LMIC groups in need).
What next?
I suggest donating some portion of your end of year donations or upcoming monthly donation to the community-building work that helped you have more impact. I think the smaller the better here; donations to CEA are very welcome (!) but if there’s a local group you used to attend with just one part-time organiser or a blogger with a “buy me a coffee” PayPal link, that might be a better target because they’ll notice it more, and it’s a stronger signal relative to the size of their work.
I plan to talk to my old university group, EA Warwick, and see if I can offer some funding for their activities next term. A decade of inflation might bite me here, but I recall that even a small pot of money for facebook ads or for food at events went a long way. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if other EA Warwick alumni could almost entirely fund the EA university group’s activities there each year.
Light musings, I work with Ollie but am sharing personal thoughts only.
I overall feel sympathetic to the argument that folks should consider supporting meta orgs, and I find the “tipping” model interesting! E.g. I liked this post about effective giving :) But I have some pushback.
Take the example of university groups. My model is that groups can change pretty dramatically over time due to organiser turnover. Alumni who think their university group positively impacted their trajectory would almost definitionally be funding an entirely new set of organisers by the time this impact has been realised. I have a strong prior that organiser fit is one of the most important variables in how successful a group is. So in many cases, I think you should model the current EA group at your alma mater as a pretty different project, with a less strong track record than you might think.
I think the above is a specific application of a general problem:
I think this all means I’m more sceptical than Ollie that the tipping model is the right approach, even though I agree it has nice qualities :) I expect this idea works better for long standing projects (e.g. city and national groups) that experience less turnover, or meta projects with shorter lag times for impact. I could see myself changing my mind here!
All this is true, but I think alumni groups like I mentioned could actually add as little stability and consistency to the quality of university groups. My parallel could be something like the Oxford or Cambridge Union or a range of university associations or clubs. The management changes every year but they maintain quality and prestige. That model could transfer to EA groups too to some degree, especially once they have gained some pedigree after being active for 15 or 20 years.
Thanks!
There seems to be an assumption here along the lines of "EA funders will continually track the impact of EA university groups and steer them well, while alumni donors won't".
I don't think that's correct. EA funders are busy and have to make decisions about groups with limited context and information. You might even get alumni donors who care more about the quality of the organisers, the long-term outcomes and operations of the group relative to the EA funder who has many options available, and doesn't have the capacity to invest in and support a group.
Reading again though, maybe what you mean is "the group that helped you might not be the best group to support any more". Yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah, your second comment is the message I meant to convey :)
Random, I realized I misread your comment the first time around — yeah I do think the above consideration (maybe alumni have unusual local knowledge on small CB projects that influence them) is interesting pushback. Thanks!
Thinking about it again, I'm weakly positive about people in general taking advantage of "local knowledge" when donating, and people knowing which CB efforts helped them is a good example of 'local knowledge' effects.
(I do still think the second consideration holds — bigger funders have a much better birds eye perspective on the meta ecosystem as a whole than the average EA, even if they have worse local knowledge.)