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Hi Khorton,

Thanks for your comment. We’d be happy to talk to any data scientists in the EA community who would like to suggest ways to improve our anonymization practices. We have taken a lot of steps this year and last year to ensure anonymization. We remove respondent names, contact information and city, as well as removing or replacing open comment responses with broad categories. We will also take other items like country and income and replace them with bins. Finally, if there is any question the answer to which you think might identify you or which you feel uncomfortable being made public for any other reason, you can decline to answer it.

It’s worth noting that I am a “data scientist in the EA community” and also that we talked to someone with specific security and privacy expertise. We also had the survey vetted by CEA’s team, including working with a lawyer with expertise in GDPR.

We hope this can earn your trust that the survey successfully protects your privacy with best practices. If not, we’d love to discuss further to ensure this is useful for the community. Thanks!

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Please Take the 2019 EA Survey!

by Peter Wildeford

Sep 23 20191 min read 11

47

CommunityBuilding effective altruismEffective Altruism Survey

Frontpage

This is a linkpost for https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/EASEAForum

The 2019 Effective Altruism Survey is now live at the following link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/EASEAForum

The average completion time for this year’s survey is 20 minutes.

The survey will close on the 15th of October at midnight BST.

The EA Survey provides valuable information about the demographics of the EA community, how people get involved, how they donate, what causes they prioritise, their experiences of EA, and more.

This year, we worked more closely than ever with the Centre for Effective Altruism, 80,000 Hours, and other EA organizations to identify questions that would be as valuable as possible to their work. Overall, we received more than 100 requests for questions to be included from various members of the EA community, which meant making many tough decisions about what questions we could include, while keeping the survey to an appropriate length.

This year, the Centre for Effective Altruism has generously donated a prize of $1000 USD that will be awarded to a randomly selected respondent to the EA Survey, for them to donate to any of the organizations listed on EA Funds. Please note that to be eligible, you need to provide a valid e-mail address so that we can contact you.

We would like to express our gratitude to the EA Meta Fund for supporting our work.

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Peter WildefordOct 15 20197

The EA Survey is closing today! Please take! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/EASEAForum

Andy_SchultzOct 1 20196

I gave my 2018 quota of donations in early January 2019 in order to bunch my donations. I'm planning on doing this every other year, giving near the end of the alternate years. Should I report those donations in this survey or wait until next year?

Peter WildefordOct 1 20194

Hi. I think it would be best for you to report donations made in calendar year 2019 in the forthcoming 2020 EA Survey (that will ask about 2019 donations) and for this year enter 0, but make a note of your bunching strategy in the "Any other additional details you'd like to share" section if you would like to note it.

David_MossOct 1 20194

I think it would be best for you to report donations made in calendar year 2019 in the forthcoming 2020 EA Survey (that will ask about 2019 donations) and for this year enter 0

Just to clarify: you can mention the donations you have already made in 2019 in the "In 2019, how much do you currently plan to donate?" box (along with any other donations you plan to make). Then if you didn't make any donations in 2018 as a result, you can write '0' in the "In 2018, roughly how much money did you donate?" box, and then mention bunching in the open comment.

Peter WildefordOct 1 20194

(^David runs the survey in case that isn't clear. I approve this message.)

Mati_RoyOct 16 20191

by the way, I've only skimmed the Privacy Policy, but still ticked "yes". I assumed we weren't expected to read all words. would have been nice to have a summary IMO.

Mati_RoyOct 15 20191

> The average completion time for this year’s survey is 20 minutes.

how was this measured?

David_MossOct 16 20193

SurveyMonkey tracks and reports completion time and this was the average time at the point this was posted on the EA Forum (which was after several hundred respondents had already taken the Survey via other means). The median time spent, as it stands now, is still 20 minutes.

Mati_RoyOct 17 20192

thank you!

KirstenSep 24 2019-1

Using the term "anonymized responses" is very misleading. From what I've heard, data scientists in the EA community do not recognize this data as properly anonymized.

Peter WildefordSep 24 201928

Hi Khorton,

We hope this can earn your trust that the survey successfully protects your privacy with best practices. If not, we’d love to discuss further to ensure this is useful for the community. Thanks!