Hide table of contents

I'm pleased to announce the results of the first ever Effective Altruism Local Group Organizers' Survey. 

At the start of the year, .impact wanted to mirror the success of the EA Survey by surveying the rich variety of local groups that promote Effective Altruism in their area. One of the key aims was to get to know more about the audience that the Local Effective Altruism Network is trying to help out - what do they want, where are they succeeding, and in which areas can we support them?

After a few months of chasing groups up and cleaning up the results, we're ready to release the initial results! 

See the results here (About 19 pages, mostly graphs)

 

Shortcomings

This survey is the most comprehensive data available on local groups, but it is lacking in several places.

 

  • The most pressing problem is likely a selection bias, where the more enthusiastic groups are more likely to respond, giving us an overly optimistic view of how local groups are performing. 
  • Many of the questions asked were difficult to estimate; it’s also possible that groups were biased towards exaggerating their activity and membership.
  • There was some uncertainty regarding particular questions. For instance, when asked how many occasional or regular participants groups had, some surveyees reported being unsure if they were being asked about how many participants they had at present, or how many participants they had had since the group began. Some groups were also unclear on what level of participation would make an attendee an ‘occasional’ or ‘regular’ participant, terms which unfortunately weren't defined.
  • We will make every effort to clear up these discrepancies in future surveys. Unfortunately this sort of thing happens with a completely new survey! 

Key Results

  • 101 groups filled out the survey, out of approximately three to four hundred groups that are believed to exist.
  • The top fraction of groups have a disproportionate amount of influence. For example, the top 30% of groups have more than double the number of regular participants than the bottom 70%. The fact that we’re likely to have preferentially not sampled smaller groups means that larger groups are probably even more disproportionately influential than shown here. This means that if it takes the same amount of effort to grow a group from medium-to-large size as from non-existent to small, then it’s worth focussing on growing medium sized groups.
  • It is hard to judge the impact of groups. This wasn’t helped through questions that were unclear at times, but it’s clear that relying on memory and estimation does not work very well. Steps to improve this are ensuring that questions asked in the survey are as precise as possible, and that groups should keep records of numbers at events, as well as mini surveys they can send out to to work out how much impact they’ve had. I can’t imagine this would be too hard to sell - groups who are interested in EA should understand the value of using evidence to know how well their group is doing.
  • The final point arises from the more qualitative answers, and is that groups often seem to die out due to lack of motivation, and lack of people’s time. Both factors can be addressed with extra support from EA organisations: on a personal level via Skype conversations to get people interested and motivated by EA; by creating ready-made template emails, and handling some admin remotely to cut down on the amount of time that the first founders have to put in to seed the group.
We very much welcome any comments, including suggestions about what people would like to see in future versions of the survey. It's fair to say that we've learnt a lot from pushing the first iteration out that we wish we'd thought about before we'd started! If you're a member of a local group and would like some support, please don't hesitate to send an email to lean@effectivealtruismhub.com. Feel free to comment and discuss with others below, or email at chris.cundy.impact@gmail.com.

Comments2


Sorted by Click to highlight new comments since:

This is great, thanks to everyone involved in making it happen!

I argued that supporting EA groups is a major leverage channel for Giving Game sponsors in my recently published fundraising appeal, and I think these survey results bear that out in two big ways.

1) In response to the question "How likely is it that your group would use any of the following outreach resources?", more groups (42) said they were "very likely" to use "funding for Giving Games" than any of the other nine options.

2) Who guessed this survey would show more EA chapters reported running events connected with "TLYCS or Giving Games" (50, with GG accounting for ~48-50) than GWWC (44), Animal rights/welfare (45), 80k (33), or rationality and critical thinking (32)? Not me! I know better than anyone that a lot of groups run GG, but I was still pretty shocked by these survey results. The only type of event more people ran was global poverty (65)… and of course most GG involve global poverty so groups may be counting the same events in both categories.

For those who don't know, the Giving Game Project has <1 full time employee (~ half my time). And since we do plenty of stuff that doesn't even involve EA chapters, EAs seem to be putting very few resources into a model that represents a disproportionate amount of what EA groups actually do and want to do more of. So if anyone's looking for a good way to support EA groups, supporting Giving Games is a highly leveraged opportunity to do so (while also supporting great charities and teaching people about better giving). Did I mention that we just started a fundraising campaign?

Excellent job running the survey, and in my role as an organizer of the Columbus EA group, I appreciate the follow-up to provide more resources that took place after the survey. On a meta-level, it would have been good to see a survey question about how good a job LEAN has been doing in providing resources, I know it has been helpful for our group!

Curated and popular this week
 ·  · 1m read
 · 
 ·  · 5m read
 · 
When we built a calculator to help meat-eaters offset the animal welfare impact of their diet through donations (like carbon offsets), we didn't expect it to become one of our most effective tools for engaging new donors. In this post we explain how it works, why it seems particularly promising for increasing support for farmed animal charities, and what you can do to support this work if you think it’s worthwhile. In the comments I’ll also share our answers to some frequently asked questions and concerns some people have when thinking about the idea of an ‘animal welfare offset’. Background FarmKind is a donation platform whose mission is to support the animal movement by raising funds from the general public for some of the most effective charities working to fix factory farming. When we built our platform, we directionally estimated how much a donation to each of our recommended charities helps animals, to show users.  This also made it possible for us to calculate how much someone would need to donate to do as much good for farmed animals as their diet harms them – like carbon offsetting, but for animal welfare. So we built it. What we didn’t expect was how much something we built as a side project would capture peoples’ imaginations!  What it is and what it isn’t What it is:  * An engaging tool for bringing to life the idea that there are still ways to help farmed animals even if you’re unable/unwilling to go vegetarian/vegan. * A way to help people get a rough sense of how much they might want to give to do an amount of good that’s commensurate with the harm to farmed animals caused by their diet What it isn’t:  * A perfectly accurate crystal ball to determine how much a given individual would need to donate to exactly offset their diet. See the caveats here to understand why you shouldn’t take this (or any other charity impact estimate) literally. All models are wrong but some are useful. * A flashy piece of software (yet!). It was built as
Garrison
 ·  · 7m read
 · 
This is the full text of a post from "The Obsolete Newsletter," a Substack that I write about the intersection of capitalism, geopolitics, and artificial intelligence. I’m a freelance journalist and the author of a forthcoming book called Obsolete: Power, Profit, and the Race to build Machine Superintelligence. Consider subscribing to stay up to date with my work. Wow. The Wall Street Journal just reported that, "a consortium of investors led by Elon Musk is offering $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI." Technically, they can't actually do that, so I'm going to assume that Musk is trying to buy all of the nonprofit's assets, which include governing control over OpenAI's for-profit, as well as all the profits above the company's profit caps. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman already tweeted, "no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want." (Musk, for his part, replied with just the word: "Swindler.") Even if Altman were willing, it's not clear if this bid could even go through. It can probably best be understood as an attempt to throw a wrench in OpenAI's ongoing plan to restructure fully into a for-profit company. To complete the transition, OpenAI needs to compensate its nonprofit for the fair market value of what it is giving up. In October, The Information reported that OpenAI was planning to give the nonprofit at least 25 percent of the new company, at the time, worth $37.5 billion. But in late January, the Financial Times reported that the nonprofit might only receive around $30 billion, "but a final price is yet to be determined." That's still a lot of money, but many experts I've spoken with think it drastically undervalues what the nonprofit is giving up. Musk has sued to block OpenAI's conversion, arguing that he would be irreparably harmed if it went through. But while Musk's suit seems unlikely to succeed, his latest gambit might significantly drive up the price OpenAI has to pay. (My guess is that Altman will still ma