Summary

Note: I expect this post is only interesting to a small number of people who are highly engaged with EA, so I haven't spent a lot of time cleaning it up. Please feel free to comment or reach out to me or Ben West with any questions you might have.
One of CEA’s goals is to help individuals who are highly engaged with effective altruism to stay highly engaged in a meaningful way.
In order to provide useful support and to evaluate our work, we need to learn what retention looks like today.
This analysis builds on the data analysis Ben West presents here, evaluating the retention rates of highly engaged EAs by tracking 3 representative cohorts from 2019-2021.
The highest estimate I found was a 95.05% yearly retention rate for highly engaged EAs.

Background

One of CEA’s goals is to help individuals who are highly engaged with effective altruism to stay highly engaged in a meaningful way. In order to provide useful support and to evaluate our own work, we need to learn what retention looks like at the present. As part of this work, I have explored ways of evaluating whether someone is still highly engaged that can allow us to evaluate retention from year to year, even quarter to quarter.

This was difficult for a number of reasons. One major challenge was the variation in email addresses used at different times and in different places; this made it difficult to trace individuals’ engagement with CEA’s programs and effective altruism in general.

As such, we decided to track 3 cohorts of people on whom we had reliable data:

Employees at certain organizations connected to effective altruism
Recipients of Community Building Grants
Attendees of EA Global

I conducted this work as a CEA contractor.

Previous Work on Retention

For those interested in this topic, there have been efforts to estimate retention of EAs and highly engaged EAs before. In the Discussion section, I will discuss how my results compare to these estimates:

Ben West’s recent estimate of retention based on EAGxVirtual attendees (2021)
Ben Todd’s data on dropout rates in the community, based on six different data sources (2020)
Peter Hurford’s estimate of how long people stay in EA, based on EA Survey data (2019)
Joey Savoie’s estimate of dropout rates based on people he met during his first year in EA (2018)
Ben West’s writing on how the EA community’s retention rates in co

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