Hi! I'm a product manager in my background, now focusing on two projects:
• I've been the executive director of EA Israel for two years now. I've made some writeups about community-building strategy, and worked on several projects focused on messaging and user experience in the context of the EA movement.
• I also work on VIVID (VIVID-app.me) - a social startup launching a mobile app providing a simpler, day-to-day version of CBT practice, with the vision of figuring out a scalable way to help individuals with long-lasting self-change.
VIVID helps users implement and bring about the benefit of any self-help theory they wish to test, as well as provides the most effective programs made by VIVID’s community of professionals. VIVID helps translate these theories and programs into meaningful, long-lasting change.
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The point about diversity seems especially important, given that the community lacks robust ways to increase diversity. We should suggest this to the community health team.
EA Israel is sending Asaf Ifergan - he cooks well in natural environments, which can be very useful in a case of a global food shortage.
These are great news, and I find it extremely useful that you're giving a brief update since we've had discussions about opening an Instagram account recently. If you'd like to start another pilot, EA Israel would be happy to collaborate.
Thank you for this Ollie, I strongly agree with your perspective.
FYI, Probably Good has a writeup on grantmaking that makes some of these points very well and points out additional useful nuances about grantmaking as a path.
I think it does! It's important in my opinion that there would be someone who can maintain the map over time, and that it would be easy to make changes to (e.g. if it's an infographic then it can be made easy if it's made in Canva)
These might be useful for creating a map:
- EAHub's list of organisations: https://resources.eahub.org/learn/orgs and check if there's any big projects that just aren't in a status of an organization on EAColabs: https://www.impactcolabs.com
- For concepts, pick the big stuff from the forum tags: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/tags/all
- Forums of engagement: https://resources.eahub.org/learn/connect
- For some data on the community: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/tag/effective-altruism-survey
Thank you Charlie!
I don't think that the point of a lot of our introductory pitches should to transfer the most bits of information, but rather to get people on the right track, interested and attracted to the idea.
I totally agree with this! Let me clarify my opinion:
- I distinguish between a pitch and an explanation.
- I think that pitches should maximize attraction, but also need to satisfy some level of explanations for the concept discussed.
- I think that the common EA pitches are quite good at attracting people, but I believe we’re pretty bad at explaining what EA is (I’d love to hear if you’re not sharing this belief!)
- I hope that being able to explain EA better:
- will also improve our pitches by improving the explanation component of our pitches.
- will help onboarding individuals once they were initially attracted by a good pitch.
I think one rule of thumb that can help people simplify the framing problem is to know who your audience is.
I think it's great to frame the quality of a pitch by its fit to its audience. Yet what I'm missing in this framing is the size of the audience in question:
- Many of my criticisms in this post can be thought of as "this articulation aims for a too narrow audience", for instance, to an audience that tends to think very analytically.
- Many of my suggestions in this post are trying to broaden the audience so it can be clearer and more convincing to a wider audience, without relying on their background or prior knowledge.
- In addition, many of my suggestions are about explicitly and simplification (e.g. saying “time and money” instead of “resources”, or explicitly saying “donating, volunteering, and career choices”) and I think are relevant regardless to the audience we’re aiming to attract.
In general, I think that pitches should change drastically according to the audience in hand, while explanations should be (a bit) more audience-neutral.
Thanks Oldman! I totally agree with your point on examples.
Regarding 'helping others' and animals - I think it's a great question whether individuals who are interested in animal welfare and hear about EA for the first time would be put off by this expression.
If it's not the case, then I think the benefits of using 'helping others' are still relevant, and it's not that 'doing good' would signal to these individuals that the movement also cares about animals. Nevertheless, in some contexts, I think it can be beneficial to say explicitly 'helping other people and animals' even though it makes this sentence a bit longer.
Anyhow, in terms of accuracy, I think that 'others' can refer to animals as well (though I'm not sure of that).
Interesting! Our basis for EA being talent constrained is also by Abraham Lincoln - our first citation might have been outdated. Thank you for this, it's a great improvement!