I do think the situation is significantly more complicated with orgs that receive substantial institutional funding so I think the original post applies a bit less to orgs like CEA, and more to specific EA groups or small-scale projects (including projects that the EAIF funds).

Agree

I suggested to various regional EA groups that they should try and cover some fraction of their costs from members, but there was quite a lot of negative push back (e.g. fundraising distracting them from their main jobs).^[1]

That's a shame. I think we're in a strange situation if non-profits / charitable projects don't think fundraising should be at least a non-trivial portion of their time. I also think fundraising forces projects to more clearly define their vision, goals, funding needs etc.

Perhaps I'd feel differently if they were several funders fighting over who gets to fund each EA Group, but that doesn't seem to be the case (at least not any more).

Hm, this strikes me as worrying about drought during a flood (is that a saying? It should be).

Currently, I'm pretty worried about funding diversity. A large number of EA groups rely on funding from a very small number of donors and, as covered in the post, it's hard for those funders to allocate funds efficiently. This pot also doesn't seem to be growing.

Moving a bit more in the direction of my post will help with this situation, but I'm not yet worried about a scenario where EA groups have costs (incl. several full-time staff and large events in many cases) covered by membership fees.^[1] So, I still expect funders tracking impact to retain strong influence over the group's impact.

Also, as mentioned in my reply to Angelina, I don't think we should assume that members/alumni/smaller donors won't also care a lot about outcomes.

1. ^{^}

   Unless my post is so wildly persuasive that it changes the culture of the entire ecosystem overnight and brings in millions of dollars. Disastrous.

Reading again though, maybe what you mean is "the group that helped you might not be the best group to support any more". Yeah, that makes sense.

Thanks!

There seems to be an assumption here along the lines of "EA funders will continually track the impact of EA university groups and steer them well, while alumni donors won't".

I don't think that's correct. EA funders are busy and have to make decisions about groups with limited context and information. You might even get alumni donors who care more about the quality of the organisers, the long-term outcomes and operations of the group relative to the EA funder who has many options available, and doesn't have the capacity to invest in and support a group.

We're really excited to announce the following sessions for EA Global: Boston, which kicks off in just two weeks time:

- Fireside chat with Iqbal Dhaliwal, Global Executive Director of JPAL. 
- Rachel Silverman Bonnifield, Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development, on the current state of the global movement to eliminate childhood lead poisoning.
- A workshop on Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy, led by Zac Hatfield-Dodds, Technical Staff at Anthropic.

Applications close Sunday! More info and how to apply on our website.

Thanks, Austin :)

Results from the survey we conducted at the event (similar to the one you linked to) are still to come. Rethink Priorities led on that this year, and are still gathering data / putting it together. 

I want to add that my colleagues and I on the CEA events team were really impressed with this event.

• The likelihood to recommend score for this event is the highest ever reported. Smaller events do typically get higher scores because there's higher variance, but this is still a remarkable accomplishment for a team organising a conference for the first time.
• The EA Nigeria team prepared this event autonomously, creating their own application form and identifying impressive speakers with minimal input from CEA.
• This event attracted many more attendees than we expected, and I think that's a result of the years of community-building that this team has done. It's great to see that paying off!

I'm very excited to see more EA events in Nigeria!

(I helped organise this event)

Thanks for your feedback.

Actually, I think this event went well because:

• The organising team (CEA) were opinionated about which issues to focus on, and we chose issues that we and MCF attendees could make progress on.
• Our content was centered around just two issues (brand and funding) which allowed for focus and more substantive progress.

Many attendees expressed a similar sentiment, and some people who’ve attended this event many times said this was one of the best iterations. With that context, I’ll respond to each point:

1. We wanted to focus on issues that were upstream of important object-level work in EA, and selected people working on those issues, rather than object-level work (though we had some attendees who were doing object-level work). I agree with you that a lot of (if not all!) the impact of the community is coming from people working at the object level, but this impact is directly affected by upstream issues such as the EA brand and funding diversity. Note that many other events we run, such as EA Global and the Summit on Existential Security, are more focused on object-level issues.
2. To the contrary, I think we made valuable progress, though this is fairly subjective and a bit hard to defend until more projects and initiatives play out. I’m not sure what the distinction is you’re pointing to here; you mention we should’ve considered “[EA]’s strategy with outreach and funding”, but these were the two core themes of the event.
3. This was a deliberate call, though we’re not confident it was the right one. CEA staff and our attendees spend a lot of time engaging with the community and getting input on what we should prioritise. We probably didn’t capture everything, but that context gives us a good grasp of which issues to work on.
4. I don't think every event, project and meeting in EA spaces needs to be this stringent about measuring outcomes. We use similar metrics across all of our events, things like LTR/NPS are used in many other industries, so I think these are useful benchmarks for understanding how valuable attendees found the event.

On top of Jason's point, this argument presupposes that animals are food and therefore not worthy of much if any moral concern, but there are many reasons to think animals are worthy of moral concern.

This is an excellent post, and I'm really grateful for RP's work on these topics. I appreciate that this post is both opinionated but measured, flagging where the reader will want to inspect their own views and how that might affect various models' recommendations.