Introduction

EA Workplace and Professional Groups make up an important part of the EA landscape. Building effective altruism is a top cause area according to 80K and EA surveys indicate that something like 50% of EAs are professionals not working for EA organizations. These facts together imply that community building with workplace and professional groups has a large potential for impact. 

As part of our work at High Impact Professionals (HIP), we’ve been conducting research into the companies where EA professionals work. A better understanding this will allow high-impact professionals to:

• better determine where to start workplace groups
• join existing workplace groups they might not have known existed
• decide which companies to join in the first place

This is the first in a series of posts about EAs and workplaces and presents data about companies with the most EAs. 

Thanks to Adam Steinberg, Sunnie Huang and Jona Glade for their feedback, as well as Soon Khen Ow Yong for his research. All errors are our own.

Companies with the Most EAs

The diagram below shows the 30 organizations with the most in-house EAs, according to our research, along with the number of EAs we were able to identify. The colors represent the stage of each workplace group. 

Organizations in green have an active workplace group; we plan to support these groups and help them thrive. For red and yellow organizations, we are looking to help create or revive a group by recruiting a group organizer whose efforts we can support. Finally, blue represents organizations where groups are currently being created.

If you are interested in more, you can also check out our more comprehensive list of organizations and the EAs working for them.

Actions Professionals Can Take

If you are a working professional interested in having more impact, here are some actions you can take.

Start a workplace group

As a working professional, you can have significant impact by creating a workplace group at your organization, by getting colleagues interested in EA, running workplace initiatives, and keeping members value-aligned to EA principles, just to name a few. If you are interested in learning more about what setting up a group could look like and whether this might be a good fit for you, please book some time with us.  

If you happen to work for one of the companies listed in the bar graph above, so much the better, as these companies have a critical mass of EAs who can help get your group off to an especially solid start. That being said, even if you work for a company that isn’t listed we’d still love to talk to you.

Help us find high-impact leaders

If you are not in the position to start a group yourself, chances are good you know someone who is, so please also reach out if you know someone who works for an organization who might be a good candidate for starting a group. Making connections that otherwise wouldn’t have been made can be an easy way to be impactful.

Connect with an existing group

You can also have an impact and build out your network by joining an existing group - there are something like 40-50 active groups, so the ones above represent only a fraction of what’s out there. Watch our website for a list of all active EA workplace and professional groups. We will let you know when this goes live, but until then you can check out this post or look on the EA hub. 

Methodology In Brief

To gather this data, we analyzed EA group membership on LinkedIn as an indicator of the number of EA-aligned professionals at different organizations. Employees who declared themselves a member of any of a number of EA LinkedIn groups were counted as an EA at that organization. 

While we are currently using “number of EAs” as the only criterion to calculate workplace group potential, we have been investigating other criteria as well to complement our formula and wanted to share our progress step-by-step: we will post an updated analysis in the future. Please let us know if you have any criteria you think are relevant.

It is worth noting that the number of EAs listed is a proxy for the number of EAs at these organizations. These numbers could be an overestimate as membership to one of the Linkedin EA groups does not necessarily imply that the person self-identifies as EA. They could also be an underestimate as we also have data on some groups’ actual sizes as provided by the groups’ organizers and in some of these cases the numbers above are underestimates and would suggest a 2-3x multiplier. There are yet other cases where the actual group size mirrors the above estimate.

About HIP

HIP’s mission is to enable working professionals to maximize their positive impact by supporting them in utilizing their time, skills and resources effectively. 

Concretely, we are running multiple programs, such as creating and supporting workplace groups, helping EAs to run workplace initiatives such as fundraising campaigns at their companies, matching professionals to volunteering opportunities and helping facilitate career changes to EA organizations. You can read more about this in our introduction post or on our website.

We plan to make our research and strategy transparent so that others in the community can both benefit from them and improve them. We prefer posting shorter and more concise results, and posting these more often, over posting longer, more detailed posts less often. We are, of course, open to discussing our methodology in more depth: the curious need only reach out.

We welcome feedback - just post a comment below. For more general inquiries, please contact us. For updates, join our newsletter.