CEA is fundraising, and funding constrained

Posted 20 November, 2023 (updated 29 November, 2023)
The basic case for CEA
Community building is sometimes motivated by the following: suppose you spent a year telling everyone you know about EA and getting them excited. Probably you could get at least one person excited. Then this means that you will have doubled your lifetime impact, as both you and this other person will go on to do good things. That’s a pretty good ROI for one year of work!
This story is overly simplistic, but is roughly my motivation for working on (and donating to) community building: it's a leveraged way to do good in the world.
And it does seem to be the case that many people whose work seems impactful attribute some of their impact to CEA:
  1. The Open Philanthropy longtermist survey in 2020 identified CEA among the top tier of important influences on people’s journey towards work improving the long-term future, with about half of CEA's demonstrated value coming through events (EA Global and EAGx conferences) and half through our other programs.
  2. The 80,000 Hours user survey in 2022 identified CEA as the EA-related resource which has influenced the most people’s career plans (in addition to 80k itself), with 64% citing the EA Forum as influential and 44% citing EAG.
  3. This selection of impact stories illustrates some of the ways we’ve helped people increase their impact by providing high-quality discussion spaces to consider their ideas, values and options for and about making impact, and connecting them to advisors, experts and employers.
Our public dashboard includes key metrics for some of our core programs. You can read more about our strategy (but it’s worth reiterating that being in an interim period pending the appointment of a new CEO means we’re more uncertain about our strategy in 2024 and beyond than we typically would be).
Specific asks
Our financial runway currently extends until June 2024 (based on our current reserves, existing funding commitments, and budgeted spending). We have an expected 2024 funding gap of $3.6m.
We expect that Open Philanthropy’s GCR Capacity Building program will fund us at roughly similar levels in 2024 as they did in 2023, meaning that where marginal funding on top of OP goes today is likely to be fairly similar to where it would go next year.
Therefore, we expect marginal funding that we raise from other donors to most likely go to the following:
  • Community Building Grants: We would be interested in funding an organizer in Boston but currently don't have the budget. (Approx cost: $110,000).
  • Travel grants for EA conference attendees. Many of the people we would like to attend our conferences are financially unable to do so; giving them some money to cover travel and accommodation ($350 average for EAGx, $1,100 on average for EAG) can result in them attending. We estimate that we could spend an additional $295,000/year here before hitting diminishing returns (from people for whom the grant wasn't actually counterfactual, or whose impact we feel will be influenced less by our events).
We are raising unrestricted funds, but if one of these projects (or something else) seems substantially more cost-effective to you than the others, we would be interested to hear that. Also please note that these are illustrative of our current cost-effectiveness bar (as opposed to a commitment that the next dollar we receive will go to one of these things).
You can read the full version of this post on the EA Forum, including more details about our funding picture and some illustrative assessments of the relative impact of donating to CEA rather than comparable alternatives.
You can donate to CEA here.