The 2020 Effective Altruism Survey is now live at the following link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/EAS2020Forum
If you would like to share the EA Survey with others, please share this link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/EAS2020Share
The survey will remain open through the end of the year.
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What is the EA Survey?
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.
The estimated average completion time for the main section of this year’s survey is 20 minutes. There is also an ‘Extra Credit’ section at the end of the survey, if you are happy to answer some more questions.
What's new this year?
There are two important changes regarding privacy and sharing permissions this year:
1) This year, all responses to the survey (including personal information such as name and e-mail address) will be shared with the Centre for Effective Altruism unless you opt out on the first page of the survey.
2) Rethink Priorities will not be making an anonymised data set available to the community this year. We will, however, consider requests for us to provide additional aggregate analyses which are not included in our main series of posts.
Also the Centre for Effective Altruism has generously donated a prize of $500 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 Centre for Effective Altruism for supporting our work.
Hi Denise,
Thanks for taking the survey!
The questions about positive/negative influences were CEA requests (although we did discuss them together): I believe the rationale is that for positive influences, they were interested in the most important influences (and wanted to set a higher bar by preventing people indicating that more than three things had the “largest” influence on them), whereas for the possible negative influences, they were interested in anything which had a negative influence, not merely the largest negative influences.
Regarding donations: historically, we have always asked about the previous year’s income and donations (because these are known quantities) and then planned donations for the year the survey is run (since people likely won’t know this for sure, but it’s still useful to know, for broader context. Now that we launch the survey right at the end of the year, the difference between past and planned donations is likely less acute. Naturally, it would be ideal if we could ask for income and donation data for both the previous year and the present year, but we constantly face pressure to include other questions, while trying to maintain survey length, so we have had to leave out a lot of things. (This also explains why we had to cut the questions we had in previous years asking about ‘individual’ and ‘household’ figures, given that many people’s earnings/donations are part of a unit).