Hello, my name is Tim Sankara, and I am the lead facilitator at the EA university group at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT). Founded in September 2022, our group operates just an hour away from Nairobi, the Kenyan capital. In this article, I want to share some outreach strategies that have significantly boosted our group's engagement, hoping they might help other community builders achieve similar success.

When speaking with other group organizers, a common question I encounter is: "How many people are in your group?" People are often surprised when I tell them that we have over 75 members, each with varying levels of commitment to the EA cause. While a larger group may lead to a bigger impact, it is not always guaranteed. However, I’d like to share some tips on how we've managed to maintain consistent engagement and grow our numbers.

Our primary outreach strategy is headhunting. This involves asking current EA group members to recommend others who might benefit from our mission and to invite them to apply for our introductory fellowships. Initially, most of our founding fellows were my friends—people with whom I frequently discussed ways to positively impact the world. When founding our group, we did utilize online ads, tabling, handing out flyers, and hanging posters in high student traffic areas as recommended by the groups outreach guide, workshops and UGAP mentor. But the core membership of our initial fellowship comprised individuals I already knew and could easily introduce to EA concepts.

This headhunting approach has set the tone for our community-building efforts ever since. We extend this strategy by encouraging our current fellows to reach out to their own networks after we've coached them on the basic EA pitches. This method has yielded a massive amount of connections and leads for our fellowships. The main benefit is the general lack of resistance to EA ideas, as the person pitching is someone the prospective fellow already knows and trusts.

A welcome benefit of the headhunting method is how welcome it has made most of our members feel at EA JKUAT. The community aspect of this method is significant: most new members already have a known person they can easily chat with during socials and other EA JKUAT events. This helps them feel more committed to attending and inadvertently provides them with an accountability buddy who often encourages them to show up to all the sessions. Additionally, this approach fosters a strong sense of belonging and support within the group, as members are more likely to help each other and share resources, further enhancing community health and cohesion. Thus creating a group that students actually want to be a part of.

Another notable benefit of the headhunting method is its positive impact on member retention. By bringing in new members through personal connections, we've noticed that individuals are more likely to stay engaged with the group beyond their introductory fellowships. This has significantly reduced dropout rates over time.

One particularly impactful story from our headhunting efforts involves my current co-lead, a pharmacy student and friend outside of EA. Initially unsure how to make an impact with their career post-undergrad, they have now pivoted their plans and fully intend to work on existential risk research, focusing on bio risks. This impact is a direct result of our headhunting outreach strategy and the amazing content provided by the groups team.

Another highly effective outreach method we've used is pitching EA at student clubs and societies that share an interest in making a positive societal impact. We identify clubs with overlapping values, approach their leaders, and request a short slot to present EA to their members. During these pitches, we invite members to our upcoming social events, providing a friendly introduction to our movement. For instance, in one of our cohorts, most of the fellows came from a university club that we had pitched to. The members of this club were already interested in making a massively positive change, which aligned perfectly with EA's goals.

Although headhunting and pitching at clubs are not official outreach methods and are not directly recommended by the standard outreach handbook, they have proven to be super effective for our group. Perhaps other community builders might find these strategies helpful as well.

These two tactics, coupled with significant feedback from our Organizer Support Program (OSP) mentor, have led to unexpected growth in our membership. I believe that with the right approach, other community builders can leverage these strategies to enhance their outreach efforts and increase involvement in the EA movement.

Comments1


Sorted by Click to highlight new comments since:

Executive summary: The EA university group at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) in Kenya has successfully grown to over 75 members by using headhunting and pitching to aligned student clubs as their primary outreach strategies.

Key points:

  1. Headhunting, which involves current members inviting friends and connections to apply for introductory fellowships, has been the most effective outreach method for EA JKUAT.
  2. Headhunting leads to less resistance to EA ideas, as pitches come from trusted friends, and fosters a strong sense of community and belonging in the group.
  3. Member retention is higher when new members are brought in through personal connections.
  4. Pitching EA to student clubs with overlapping values and inviting their members to EA socials has also proven to be a successful outreach strategy.
  5. These two outreach tactics, along with feedback from the Organizer Support Program (OSP) mentor, have led to significant growth in EA JKUAT's membership.

 

 

This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.

Curated and popular this week
Paul Present
 ·  · 28m read
 · 
Note: I am not a malaria expert. This is my best-faith attempt at answering a question that was bothering me, but this field is a large and complex field, and I’ve almost certainly misunderstood something somewhere along the way. Summary While the world made incredible progress in reducing malaria cases from 2000 to 2015, the past 10 years have seen malaria cases stop declining and start rising. I investigated potential reasons behind this increase through reading the existing literature and looking at publicly available data, and I identified three key factors explaining the rise: 1. Population Growth: Africa's population has increased by approximately 75% since 2000. This alone explains most of the increase in absolute case numbers, while cases per capita have remained relatively flat since 2015. 2. Stagnant Funding: After rapid growth starting in 2000, funding for malaria prevention plateaued around 2010. 3. Insecticide Resistance: Mosquitoes have become increasingly resistant to the insecticides used in bednets over the past 20 years. This has made older models of bednets less effective, although they still have some effect. Newer models of bednets developed in response to insecticide resistance are more effective but still not widely deployed.  I very crudely estimate that without any of these factors, there would be 55% fewer malaria cases in the world than what we see today. I think all three of these factors are roughly equally important in explaining the difference.  Alternative explanations like removal of PFAS, climate change, or invasive mosquito species don't appear to be major contributors.  Overall this investigation made me more convinced that bednets are an effective global health intervention.  Introduction In 2015, malaria rates were down, and EAs were celebrating. Giving What We Can posted this incredible gif showing the decrease in malaria cases across Africa since 2000: Giving What We Can said that > The reduction in malaria has be
LintzA
 ·  · 15m read
 · 
Cross-posted to Lesswrong Introduction Several developments over the past few months should cause you to re-evaluate what you are doing. These include: 1. Updates toward short timelines 2. The Trump presidency 3. The o1 (inference-time compute scaling) paradigm 4. Deepseek 5. Stargate/AI datacenter spending 6. Increased internal deployment 7. Absence of AI x-risk/safety considerations in mainstream AI discourse Taken together, these are enough to render many existing AI governance strategies obsolete (and probably some technical safety strategies too). There's a good chance we're entering crunch time and that should absolutely affect your theory of change and what you plan to work on. In this piece I try to give a quick summary of these developments and think through the broader implications these have for AI safety. At the end of the piece I give some quick initial thoughts on how these developments affect what safety-concerned folks should be prioritizing. These are early days and I expect many of my takes will shift, look forward to discussing in the comments!  Implications of recent developments Updates toward short timelines There’s general agreement that timelines are likely to be far shorter than most expected. Both Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have recently said they expect AGI within the next 3 years. Anecdotally, nearly everyone I know or have heard of who was expecting longer timelines has updated significantly toward short timelines (<5 years). E.g. Ajeya’s median estimate is that 99% of fully-remote jobs will be automatable in roughly 6-8 years, 5+ years earlier than her 2023 estimate. On a quick look, prediction markets seem to have shifted to short timelines (e.g. Metaculus[1] & Manifold appear to have roughly 2030 median timelines to AGI, though haven’t moved dramatically in recent months). We’ve consistently seen performance on benchmarks far exceed what most predicted. Most recently, Epoch was surprised to see OpenAI’s o3 model achi
Rory Fenton
 ·  · 6m read
 · 
Cross-posted from my blog. Contrary to my carefully crafted brand as a weak nerd, I go to a local CrossFit gym a few times a week. Every year, the gym raises funds for a scholarship for teens from lower-income families to attend their summer camp program. I don’t know how many Crossfit-interested low-income teens there are in my small town, but I’ll guess there are perhaps 2 of them who would benefit from the scholarship. After all, CrossFit is pretty niche, and the town is small. Helping youngsters get swole in the Pacific Northwest is not exactly as cost-effective as preventing malaria in Malawi. But I notice I feel drawn to supporting the scholarship anyway. Every time it pops in my head I think, “My money could fully solve this problem”. The camp only costs a few hundred dollars per kid and if there are just 2 kids who need support, I could give $500 and there would no longer be teenagers in my town who want to go to a CrossFit summer camp but can’t. Thanks to me, the hero, this problem would be entirely solved. 100%. That is not how most nonprofit work feels to me. You are only ever making small dents in important problems I want to work on big problems. Global poverty. Malaria. Everyone not suddenly dying. But if I’m honest, what I really want is to solve those problems. Me, personally, solve them. This is a continued source of frustration and sadness because I absolutely cannot solve those problems. Consider what else my $500 CrossFit scholarship might do: * I want to save lives, and USAID suddenly stops giving $7 billion a year to PEPFAR. So I give $500 to the Rapid Response Fund. My donation solves 0.000001% of the problem and I feel like I have failed. * I want to solve climate change, and getting to net zero will require stopping or removing emissions of 1,500 billion tons of carbon dioxide. I give $500 to a policy nonprofit that reduces emissions, in expectation, by 50 tons. My donation solves 0.000000003% of the problem and I feel like I have f