Hi Nathan, I'm one of the co-organizers along with Juliana and I've thought a lot about quantitatively measuring attrition rates and the types of people more interested in EA.
We found it hard—at least on the level of one club—to measure things like attrition rate for a few different reasons:
But as you mentioned, there may be a lot of value in sort-of qualitatively-quantitatively measuring attrition rates on the scale of CEA—instead of trying to find reasons as for why people are not staying on a group-level, the CEA Groups team could survey reasons for why group organizers think people leave, and perhaps use that to create helpful resources.
Hi David, I think that is actually quite a big factor! I noticed in particular that there are people in our group we think are particularly well-suited for EA but don't have the time and/or energy to engage. These sorts of people agree with the ideas, are motivated to make an impact, and also have sufficient work ethic to do so, but can't make it to the meetings precisely because they're too busy making an impact. I personally think these people are the ones we want to expose to EA ideas, but it is difficult to engage them.
We have a couple different ideas for engaging these sorts of people more: