Thanks Sarah, good to know!

Thanks for the reply Toby! These seem like great steps to be taking, and I’m glad they’re in the works. 

Since you ask about suggestions, here are some other things I’d be looking at if I were in your shoes.

• Working with campus groups to solicit subscriptions. Organizers at Middlebury, a very small school, just reported creating 80 GWWC trial pledges through tabling. Presumably they could garner much higher numbers if they were asking for subscriptions rather than donations.
• The total subscriber count has been falling since FTX. I suggest digging into the data on unsubscribers to learn more about this cohort. When did they subscribe? Were they previously engaging with the newsletter or does it look like people just unsubscribing from something they never looked at in the first place? I think this could provide a valuable data point regarding community retention/attrition, and I hope other projects (e.g. the forum team) would undergo a similar exercise.
• There are currently ~60k subscribers, and approximately half of them joined in the short window between June 2016 and February 2017. This was obviously a period of aggressive outreach for the newsletter. The obvious question is: was it worthwhile? Presumably a lot of these folks never engaged with the newsletter or unsubscribed. But if a decent percentage of people who subscribed as a result of the more aggressive marketing went on to behave similarly to “normal” subscribers, that has big implications for the newsletter and other EA outreach activities.

Thanks, edited to fix

It’s great that CEA will be prioritizing growing the EA community. IMO this is a long time coming.

Here are some of the things I’ll be looking for which would give me more confidence that this emphasis on growth will go well: 

• Prioritizing high-value community assets. Effectivealruism.org is the de facto landing page for anyone who googles “effective altruism”. Similarly, the EA newsletter is essentially the a mailing list that newbies can join. Historically, I think both these assets have been dramatically underutilized. CEA has acknowledged under-prioritizing effectivealtruism.org (“for several years promoting the website, including through search engine optimization, was not a priority for us”) and the staffmember responsible for the newsletter has also acknowledged that this hasn’t been a priority ( “the monthly EA Newsletter seems quite valuable, and I had many ideas for how to improve it that I wanted to investigate or test… [But due to competing priorities] I never prioritized doing a serious Newsletter-improvement project. (And by the time I was actually putting it together every month, I’d have very little time or brain space to experiment.”) Both assets have the potential to be enormously valuable for many different parts of the EA community.
• Creation of good, public growth dashboards. I sincerely hope that CEA will prioritize creating and sharing new and improved dashboards measuring community growth, the absence of which the community has been questioning for nearly a decade. CEA’s existing dashboard provides some useful information, but it has not always been kept up to date (a recent update helped with this, but important information like traffic to effectivealtruism.org and Virtual Program attendance are still quite stale). And even if all the information were fresh, the dashboard in its current state does not really measure the key question (“how fast is the community growing?”) nor does it provide context on growth (“how fast is the community growing relative to how fast we want it to grow?”) Measuring growth is a standard activity for businesses, non-profits, and communities; EA has traditionally underinvested in such measurement and I hope that will be changing under Zach’s leadership. If growth is “at the core of [CEA’s] mission”, CEA is the logical home for producing a community-wide dashboard and enabling the entire community to benefit from it.
• Thoughtful reflection on growth measurement. CEA’s last public effort at measuring growth was an October 2023 memo for the Meta Coordination Forum. This project estimated that 2023 vs. 2022 growth was 30% for early funnel projects, 68% for mid funnel projects, and 8% for late funnel project. With the benefit of an additional 18 months of metric data and anecdata, these numbers seem highly overoptimistic. Forum usage metrics have been on a steady decline since FTX’s collapse in late 2022, EAG and EAGx attendance and connections have all decreased in 2023 vs. 2022 and 2024 vs. 2023, the number of EA Funds donors continues to decline on a year over year basis as has been the case since FTX’s collapse, Virtual Program attendance is on a multi-year downward trend, etc. There are a lot of tricky methodological issues to sort out in the process of coming up with a meaningful dashboard and I think the MCF memo generally took reasonable first stabs at addressing them; however, future efforts should be informed by shortcomings that we can now observe in the MCF memo approach.
• Transparency about growth strategy and targets. I think CEA should publicly communicate its growth strategy and targets to promote transparency and accountability. This post is a good start, though as Zach writes it is “not a detailed action plan. The devil will of course be in those details.” To be clear, I think it’s important that Zach (who is relatively new in his role) be given a long runway to implement his chosen growth strategy. The “accountability” I’d like to see isn’t about e.g. community complaints if CEA fails to hit monthly or quarterly growth targets on certain metrics. It’s about honest communication from CEA about their long-term growth plan and regularly public check-ins about whether empirical data suggests the plan is going well or not. (FWIW, I think CEA has a lot of room for improvement in this area… For instance, I’ve probably read CEA’s public communications much more thoroughly than almost anyone, and I was extremely surprised to see the claim in the OP that “Growth has long been at the core of our mission.”)

Concretely, we’re planning to identify the kinds of signs that would cause us to notice this strategic plan was going in the wrong direction in order to react quickly if that happens. For example, we might get new information about the likely trajectory of AI or about our ability to have an impact with our new strategy that could cause us to re-evaluate our plans.

Glad to hear this is being planned. Do you have an estimate, even if rough, of when this might happen? Will you post the factors you identify publicly to invite feedback?

Relatedly, what do you think the probability is that this change is the wrong decision?

Our crux is likely around how much research a lottery winner would need to conduct to outperform an EA Funds manager.

I’m very skeptical that a randomly selected EA can find higher impact grant opportunities than an EA Funds manager in an efficient way. I’d find it quite surprising (and a significant indictment of the EA Funds model) if a random EA can outperform a Fund manager (specifically selected for their competence in this area) after putting in a dedicated week of research (say 40 hours). I’d find that a lot more plausible if a lottery winner put in much more time, say a few dedicated months. But then you’re looking at something like 500 hours of dedicated EA time, and you need a huge increase in expected impact over EA Funds to justify that investment for a grant that’s probably in the $100-200k range.

I do agree that a lottery winner can always choose to give through EA Funds which creates some option value, but I worry about a) winners overestimating the own grantmaking capabilities; b) the time investment of comparing EA Funds to other options;  and c) the lack of evidence that any lottery winners are actually deferring to EA Funds (maybe just an artefact of not knowing where lottery winners have given since 2019).

I think this is likely due to the huge amount of publicity that surrounded the launch of What We Owe the Future feeding into a peak associated with the height of the FTX drama (MAU peaked in November 2022), which has then been followed by over two years of ~steady decline (presumably due to fallout from FTX). Note that the "steady and sizeable decline since FTX bankruptcy" pattern is also evident in EA Funds metrics. 

From the side of EA, the CEA, and the side of the rationality community, largely CFAR, Leverage faced efforts to be shoved out of both within a short order of a couple of years. Both EA and CFAR thus couldn't have then, and couldn't now, say or do more to disown and disavow Leverage's practices from the time Leverage existed under the umbrella of either network/ecosystem/whatever…

At the time of the events as presented by Zoe Curzi in those posts, Leverage was basically shoved out the door of both the rationality and EA communities with--to put it bluntly--the door hitting Leverage on ass on the on the way out, and the door back in firmly locked behind them from the inside. 

While I’m not claiming that “practices at Leverage” should be “attributed to either the rationality or EA communities”, or to CEA, the take above is demonstrably false. CEA definitely could have done more to “disown and disavow Leverage’s practices” and also reneged on commitments that would have helped other EAs learn about problems with Leverage. 

Circa 2018 CEA was literally supporting Leverage/Paradigm on an EA community building strategy event. In August 2018 (right in the middle of the 2017-2019 period at Leverage that Zoe Curzi described in her post), CEA supported and participated in an “EA Summit” that was incubated by Paradigm Academy (intimately associated with Leverage). “Three CEA staff members attended the conference” and the keynote was delivered by a senior CEA staff member (Kerry Vaughan). Tara MacAulay, who was CEO of CEA until stepping down less than a year before the summit to co-found Alameda Research, personally helped fund the summit.

At the time, “the fact that Paradigm incubated the Summit and Paradigm is connected to Leverage led some members of the community to express concern or confusion about the relationship between Leverage and the EA community.” To address those concerns, Kerry committed to “address this in a separate post in the near future.” This commitment was subsequently dropped with no explanation other than “We decided not to work on this post at this time.”

This whole affair was reminiscent of CEA’s actions around the 2016 Pareto Fellowship, a CEA program where ~20 fellows lived in the Leverage house (which they weren’t told about beforehand), “training was mostly based on Leverage ideas”, and “some of the content was taught by Leverage staff and some by CEA staff who were very 'in Leverage's orbit'.” When CEA was fundraising at the end of that year, a community member mentioned that they’d heard rumors about a lack of professionalism at Pareto. CEA staff replied, on multiple occasions, that “a detailed review of the Pareto Fellowship is forthcoming.” This review was never produced. 

Several years later, details emerged about Pareto’s interview process (which nearly 500 applicants went through) that confirmed the rumors about unprofessional behavior. One participant described it as “one of the strangest, most uncomfortable experiences I've had over several years of being involved in EA…  It seemed like unscientific, crackpot psychology…  it felt extremely cultish… The experience left me feeling humiliated and manipulated.” 

I’ll also note that CEA eventually added a section to its mistakes page about Leverage, but not until 2022, and only after Zoe had published her posts and a commenter on Less Wrong explicitly asked why the mistakes page didn’t mention Leverage’s involvement in the Pareto Fellowship. The mistakes page now acknowledges other aspects of the Leverage/CEA relationship, including that Leverage had “a table at the careers fair at EA Global several times.” Notably, CEA has never publicly stated that working with Leverage was a mistake or that Leverage is problematic in any way.

The problems at Leverage were Leverage’s fault, not CEA’s. But CEA could have, and should have, done more to distance EA from Leverage.