The Centre for Effective Altruism has begun its 2016 fundraising round. We’ve put together a document that summarises our activities, impact and mistakes in 2016, and plans for 2017. You can read it here (there’s an option to download it as a PDF file); we’ve also reproduced the executive summary below.
There are a couple of differences between this fundraising round and some previous fundraising rounds. First, we’ve not tried to aggregate all our activities into a “single dollars spent: dollars raised for charity” ratio. Doing so made sense for Giving What We Can, when it was an independent organisation, because the primary metrics for Giving What We Can were money moved and total money pledged. (Though even then it’s still plausible that Giving What We Can’s main impact lay beyond moving money, such as by helping foster the effective altruism community.) CEA currently has several distinct aims: raising money for extremely effective charities is one, but it also aims to grow the effective altruism community, to increase the value of the community to each member, to reduce risks of collapse or fragmentation of the community, to produce and encourage research that advances our understanding of how to do the most good, and to try out new projects that might be extremely high-value. We therefore think it would be misleading to put heavy emphasis on money moved.
Second, our assessment of our room for more funding is much higher than in previous years. This reflects a change of attitude. First, we’ve taken more seriously the implication that, if donating to a meta-charity like CEA is more effective than donating to a first-order charity, then we should be trying to grow CEA’s activities so that there is a greater room for funding among meta-charities. For this reason, we’ve spent more time than in previous years thinking about how we could do a lot more than we’re currently doing without hiring more staff, such as Facebook ad campaigns and regranting to the EA community, including to local groups, EAGx conferences, and other non-CEA EA projects. Second, recently many more people have been emphasising talent gaps rather than funding gaps in EA, to the extent that many people who are earning to give are considering moving to do direct work. This meant that we spent more time figuring out how much we could reasonably grow, even beyond the amount we expect we could raise, so that people could make career decisions based on a good understanding of the room for more funding in CEA (I wrote a little about the risk of overcorrecting on talent/funding here).
I don’t think it’s currently meaningful to say that CEA is more talent-constrained or funding constrained. We’re always on the lookout for exceptional people to hire, and would be able to do a better job if we had even more exceptional people to work for us, and so in that sense we are talent-constrained. But unless a very large donor steps in, I think it’s unlikely that we’ll reach our aggressive growth target so it’s likely we could still spend additional money well, and in that sense CEA will also be funding-constrained.
Read the full prospectus here: CEA Winter Fundraising Prospectus
Executive Summary
The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) helps to grow and maintain the effective altruism movement. Our mission is to:
- create a global community of people who have made helping others a core part of their lives, and who use evidence and scientific reasoning to figure out how to do so as effectively as possible; and
- make the advancement of the wellbeing of all a worldwide intellectual project, doing for the pursuit of good what the Scientific Revolution did for the pursuit of truth.
We have two divisions. The community and outreach division focuses on growing, strengthening, and serving the effective altruism community. The special projects division focuses on improving our understanding of how to do the most good, which includes exploring new applications for effective altruism.
2016 was a year of significant change for CEA. We went from being a collection of largely autonomous teams to a single team under one management structure. Although the internal reorganization is complete, the process of integrating the various projects continues. Our overarching goal for 2017 is to build a strong, focused CEA, which we believe is essential to achieving our long-term mission.
Key projects we intend to pursue in 2017 include the following:
Turn effectivealtruism.org into the landing page for the effective altruism community
Host three Effective Altruism Global conferences
Establish a scalable model for facilitating student and local groups
Launch a multidisciplinary institute at the University of Oxford for the study of effective altruism
Develop advanced quantitative cause prioritization models
Below we provide a detailed review of our activities over the past year and our plans for next year. In summary, we believe the case for supporting CEA based on marginal cost-effectiveness alone is strong. But we also maintain that that is not how CEA should be evaluated.
We believe that effective altruism has the potential to have a transformative impact on how people think about doing good in the world and that CEA is currently best positioned to help effective altruism realize its potential. We estimate that most of CEA’s value in expectation comes from the chance–small as it might be–that it realizes that mission. In other words, funding CEA is a gamble, albeit (because of its marginal cost-effectiveness) a gamble in which the “bad” outcome still looks pretty good.
For 2017, the minimum we’re looking to raise is £2.5 million. We believe we could spend much more than that before hitting strongly diminishing returns: we could spend £5.1 million in our growth scenario and £7.3 million in our stretch growth scenario. In both of these latter two scenarios, we would regrant a significant amount of money to smaller projects in the effective altruism community.
I find it difficult to evaluate CEA especially after the reorganization, but I did as well beforehand.
The most significant reason is that I feel CEA has been exceedingly slow to embrace metrics regarding many of its activities, as an example, I'll speak to outreach.
Big picture metrics: I would have expected one of CEA's very first activities, years ago when EA Outreach was established, to begin trying to measure subscription to the EA community. Gathering statistics on number of people donating, sizes of donations, number that self-identify as EAs, percentage that become EAs after exposure to different organizations/media, number of chapters, size of chapters, number that leave EA, etc.
Obviously, some of these are difficult, and others involve assumptions, gaining access to properties other organizations run, or gathering data yourselves, but I would expect to see a concerted effort to do so, at least in part. The community has embraced Fermi Estimates where appropriate, and these metrics could be estimated with much more information than those often require.
So a few years in, I find it a bit mindblowing that I'm unaware of an attempt to do this by the only organization that has had teams dedicated specifically to the improvement and growth of the movement. Were these statistics gathered, we'd be much better able to evaluate outreach activities of CEA, which are now central to its purpose as an organization.
With regard to metrics on specific CEA activities, I've also been disappointed by the seeming lack of measurement (though this may be a transparency issue, more on this later). For example, there have been repeated instances where outreach has actively turned people off in ways that I've been told have been expressed to CEA. Multiple friends who applied to the Pareto Fellowship felt like it was quite unprofessionally run and potential speakers at EA Global mentioned they'd found some of the movement's actions immature. In each instance, I'm aware of them becoming significantly less engaged as a result.
At times concerns such as these have been acknowledged, but given the level of my (admittedly highly anecdotal) exposure to them, it feels like they have mostly not been examined to see if they were at a magnitude that should give pause. It would be nice to see them fully acknowledged through quantification, so we could understand if these were a small minority (which does matter of course regardless) or actually of great concern. Quantification could involve, for example, getting feedback on the process from all of those who applied to the Pareto Fellowship or EA Global or all of those who considered them. I do believe that some satisfaction measurements for EAGx and EA Global did in fact come out recently; I was glad to see those and also hope that they are just seen as starting points rather than as representing the majority of CEA’s growth in measurement.
Other examples of where quantification could be helpful is in the relative prominence of various communication vehicles. The cause prioritization tool, for example, is quite prominently shared, but has its success been measured? Have any alternatives been considered? Measuring and sharing this could be beneficial both for CEA’s decision making as well as for the community understanding what works best for their own outreach activities.
The second most significant reason I find CEA tough to evaluate, which is interconnected to much of what I said regarding the first, is that I feel transparency, especially around decision making, is lacking. I feel that other EA organizations better document why they are pursuing much of what they do, but CEA too often feels like a collection of projects without central filtering / direction. I do believe the reorganization may have been to target a similar feeling, but new projects such as EA Concepts, after the reorganization have similarly seemed to come out of nowhere and without justification of their resourcing. It'd be quite helpful to better understand the set of projects CEA considers and how its decision making leads to what we observe. So many of us have been exposed to the book giveaway… what was the decision making behind doing it? Should taking such a proactive action make us update that CEA has found a quite effective promotion vehicle, or was it a trial to determine effects of distribution?
CEA has taken initial steps toward improvement, with the monthly updates, and I'd like to see them greatly expand and specifically address decision making.
Could CEA speak to its planned approach to growing measurement and transparency moving forward?
I have many additional strong feelings and beliefs in favor of CEA as a donation target, had many strong anecdotal experiences, and have a few beliefs that give me great pause as well. But I think measurement and transparency could do a great deal toward putting those in proper context.
Hey Josh,
As a preliminary matter, I assume you read the fundraising document linked in this post, but for those reading this comment who haven’t, I think it’s a good indication of the level of transparency and self-evaluation we intend to have going forward. I also think it addresses some of the concerns you raise.
I agree with much of what you say, but as you note, I think we’ve already taken steps toward correcting many of these problems. Regarding metrics on the effective altruism community, you are correct that we need to do more here, and we intend to. Before the reorganization, this responsibility didn’t fall squarely within any team’s jurisdiction which was part of the problem. (For example, Giving What We Can collected a lot of this data for a subset of the effective altruism community.) This is a priority for us.
Regarding measuring CEA activities, internally, we test and measure everything (particularly with respect to community and outreach activities). We measure user engagement with our content (including the cause prioritization tool), the newsletter, Doing Good Better, Facebook marketing, etc., trying to identify where we can most cost-effectively get people most deeply engaged. As we recently did with EAG and EAGx, we’ll then periodically share our findings with the effective altruism community. We will soon share our review of the Pareto Fellowship, for example.
Regarding transparency, our monthly updates, project evaluations (e.g., for EAG and EAGx, and the forthcoming evaluation of the Pareto Fellowship), and the fundraising document linked in this post are indicative of the approach we intend to take going forward. Creating all of this content is costly, and so while I agree that transparency is important, it’s not trivially true that more is always better. We’re trying to strike the right balance and will be very interested in others’ views about whether we’ve succeeded.
Lastly, regarding centralized decision-making, that was the primary purpose of the reorganization. As we note in the fundraising document, we’re still in the process of evaluating current projects. I don’t think the EA Concepts project is to the contrary: that was simply an output of the research team, which it put together in a few weeks, rather than a new project like Giving What We Can or the Pareto Fellowship (the confusion might be the result of using "project" in different ways). Whether we invest much more in that project going forward will depend on the reception and use of this minimum version.
Regards, Michael
Would CEA be open to taking extra funding to specifically cover the cost of hiring someone new whose role would be to collect the data and generate the content in question?