My personal messy thoughts on some of the things EA Netherlands (and maybe other community building orgs?) should be doing in the near future (building on our recent post). Sharing to get input. Please tell me what you think I'm getting wrong. 

Some Tenets 

Community building, not talent placement. EAN is primarily a community-building organisation. Our theory of change is to grow community capital — the community's capacity for future impact, which we take to be roughly (sum of individual career capital) × coordination ability. This is the stock we're building. Members deploy it over time through three medium-term outcomes: career switches into impact-relevant roles, significant donations to effective organisations, and community organising or advocacy for EA-aligned causes, solutions, and tools. (Organising and advocacy are partly deployments and partly investments back into coordination ability — meta-work, worth flagging as such.) 

Over a longer horizon, those flows aggregate into population-level outcomes: shifts in awareness and perception of EA and EA-style thinking, and eventually norm and institutional change. 

Career switches and donations in any given year are how we tell whether the stock is being built well; they're not what we should be optimising for.

This is the difference from talent placement. Placement orgs — BlueDot for AI safety upskilling, AIM for entrepreneurship, MATS for AI safety research — convert specific kinds of career capital into specific roles on roughly annual cycles. That's a different job, and it's done well elsewhere. EAN's contribution is to grow the underlying stock: more members, more career capital per member, more coordination ability across them. What makes this worthwhile is what the approach produces over long horizons: engagement spread across many roles rather than concentrated in one bet, ecosystem infrastructure that no single placement focus would build, values that persist when people switch careers, and the candidate pipeline that placement orgs themselves depend on. Maybe the Dutch ecosystem does need a placement org, but that should probably be an EAN spinout (as was the case with Doneer Effectief).

Who we target with our outreach. EA-curious people with skillsets identified as being particularly valuable by sources such as the meta coordination forum survey. 

Product-Market-Impact Fit (PMIF). Standard PMF asks "do people love and use it?" EAN's job is harder. PMIF resolves into three fits at once: people engage (PMF); the people engaging could plausibly drive the outcomes above (market-impact); and engagement actually causes the outcomes rather than merely correlating (product-impact). (h/t to people like Peter McIntyre and Jamie Harris, who have been pushing for more of this in EA community building).

What we need to do next

1. Supplement our QuIP research with surveys and interviews of people from the Dutch EA community who have gone on to do cool things. Our recent QuIP research interviewed a selection of programme participants. However, it didn't select based on impact achieved, just engagement with our work. This would complement it by surveying and interviewing Dutch EAs who have done genuinely impactful things post-engagement. The question we'd be asking: what helped, what hindered? Builds on Open Philanthropy's 2020 "What helped and hindered our respondents" and CEA/RP's 2024 "What helps people have an impact and connect". The distinctive contribution is Dutch-specific signal. Mix surveys for breadth and interviews for depth.
2. Run generative interviews with our target group. For each priority segment, conduct a series of interviews with people who fit the profile: in the skill bucket, at the right career stage, Dutch-based or Dutch-relevant, currently unknown to EAN, EA-curious, and looking for community and learning. We're looking to learn about their needs, blockers, jobs-to-be-done, and unmet desires — what they're looking for, what they've tried, what would resonate, what almost made them give up trying.
3. Combine both, generate solution ideas, test cheaply. The cool-people analysis gives us info on what has tended to help people who succeed in the Dutch context. The generative interviews give us within-segment specificity (what this particular cohort needs). Combine them to generate 3-5 distinct candidate solutions. Then test cheaply before building anything: landing-page tests (a one-pager describing the imagined programme — do they apply?), concierge MVPs (deliver the service entirely by hand to the first five users), interview the solution ("would you use this? what would make you not? what would you give up for it?"). Validate against Cagan's four risks before scaling: value, usability, feasibility, viability. Pre-commit kill criteria for every programme — including the intro course, which is our current on-ramp because it's been the on-ramp, not because it's been proven against alternatives. 

Thanks for taking the time to anonymise and share this - good insights here so it’s great to have it in the public domain

Nice piece, thanks for sharing it on here! 

Nice! I’ll be there, see you then :)

Great stuff, congrats on launching! Curious how you funded it - EA Australia’s general budget or a specific grant? Asking because we explored something similar at EAN and would love to compare notes. Happy to take it to DM if easier :)

From what I understand, Forum usage declined for a couple of years and has now stabilised. 

My guess is that, since the Forum is mostly used by fairly engaged EAs, the post-FTX slowdown in top-of-funnel growth is showing up here on a lag. People don't usually arrive on the Forum cold; my impression is there's typically a runway of a year or two between first contact with EA and posting or commenting in earnest. So a recruitment hole in 2023–24 produces a Forum hole now, even if intake has since recovered.

If that's roughly right, two things should follow: the share of activity from accounts under ~12 months old will have dropped more than overall activity has, and Forum recovery will lag whatever recovery CEA is seeing at the top of the funnel by another year or two.

And then it's probably compounded by dispersion — as you point out, a lot of the conversation that would once have happened here has migrated to LW, X, or Substack. 

Good points! I've found the book 'Change: how to make big things happen' useful in my work at EA Netherlands. I wrote up a few takeaways in a comment here.

Yup, that's a risk! I think you can mitigate it by learning how to do marketing well, but that's easier said than done! 

Thanks Vasco! 

I think it isn’t used much by EA event organisers because it probably doesn’t really measure precisely what it claims to measure. However, I do think it’s nonetheless a reasonable measure of overall quality, and because it’s widely used outside the EA bubble, you can more easily use it to benchmark (compared to likelihood to recommend scores).

Oh, this is perfect timing. I had just ordered The Goal in an effort to get better at this sort of thing. Great to see how it helped someone like yourself - a decent signal that it's a useful book to read.