EA - 7 learnings from 3 years running a corporate EA Group by Conor McGurk

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: 7 learnings from 3 years running a corporate EA Group, published by Conor McGurk on September 30, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Thanks to my co-organizers, Will Hastings, John Yan, Denisse Sevastian and Farhan Azam for their input and feedback on this post 3 years ago, I founded the Effective Altruism @ Meta corporate interest group. We’ve had middling success in drumming up interest for EA at the company, and thought it may be useful to share some of our learnings for others doing the same thing. I wouldn’t assume that these learnings necessarily generalize to other corporate settings, but I’m eager to hear from others on what does and doesn't resonate. 1. Finding committed organizers is difficult in a corporate setting In a higher intensity environment like Meta, people don’t have much time to commit to activities outside of their core responsibilities. We cycled through 8-10 organizers before we finally found a more committed group of 3-4. Most other organizers flaked and eventually stopped attending events altogether. Beyond being busy with their day jobs, there are a few other reasons I think people consistently flaked: first, unlike a city or university community, there is no additional personal incentive to volunteer your time. Individuals are not in need of financial compensation, and holding volunteer positions does not meaningfully further their careers. Secondly, given organizers are not colocated and have varied time zones, it can be hard to find consistent times for organizers to interact. Ultimately, the organizers that stuck around seemed to be motivated by two things. First, most were independently excited about effective altruism and inherently motivated by the altruistic goals of the group. Secondly, they were more integrated with the social elements of our group: hosting events and attending meetings was their primary way to connect with other EAs. 2. Community & discussion oriented activities are probably high ROI Fairly early on in our work at Meta we started a bi-weekly discussion group. We would host a poll for discussion topics a few days before, and had an open meeting to discuss the top-voted item for 45 minutes. Actual attendance for these events were low - rarely more than 10 attendees per session - but through regular attendees we eventually found consistent organizers and several individuals that took more serious EA actions. Many of these individuals took donation pledges, several helped us organize events and raise money, attended EAGs, and some considered or are taking career pivots. It’s obviously hard to assess counterfactual impact, but given that for most of these individuals this was their primary interaction with other EAs and EA ideas, it seems likely that their further EA actions were attributable to us. The actual investment in setting up this regular social community where we discussed EA ideas was negligible. We crowd-sourced discussion topics or pulled from personal reading or existing databases, and advertised the meeting once every two weeks. By that measure, this was possibly the highest ROI activity we took. 3. Speaker events are probably low ROI Most of our tactical efforts were online events targeted at exposing Meta employees to EA ideas or effective giving principles. Our very first event had Peter Singer come speak about EA principles, and afterwards we had speakers from ACE, GiveDirectly, Google Brain, Giving What We Can, 1 For the World, and a slew of other EA-aligned organizations. Events were meaningful amounts of work to set up, as they involved internal approvals, event logistics, and internal advertising to ensure attendance. Despite the medium-high lift to run an event, we became increasingly skeptical that the events were high impact. Actual event attendance numbers were low: smaller events would ...