Latest posts from the Centre for Effective Altruism

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Hi everyone,

As part of my responsibilities in my new role as COO, I am taking ownership of some of the high-level operational tasks at CEA. As such, I will now be sending CEA’s monthly updates. If you have any questions or suggestions for content, feel free to email me via larissa@centreforeeffectivealtruism.org. — Larissa

**In summary:** We’ve had a busy month; we hosted our first Individual Outreach retreat, opened applications for [EA Global: San Francisco](https://www.eaglobal.org/events/ea-global-2018-san-francisco/), and launched [EA Community Building Grants](http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1l3/announcing_effective_altruism_community_building/) along with our [Summer Internship Program](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/careers/) and updated [Involvement Guide](https://www.effectivealtruism.org/get-involved/).

Recent & Upcoming Events

1\. Individual Outreach February Retreat

In February, CEA’s Individual Outreach Team ran the Individual Outreach Forum. The event brought together ~20 members of the EA community who are, or who might consider doing work involving targeted outreach and training to EAs working on the world’s most pressing problems. We attempted to serve as an impact multiplier for the attendees by empowering them with a network of EAs working in this area, syncing up on strategy, and providing rationality and productivity training.

So far, the feedback has been positive so a big thanks to CFAR, 80K, LessWrong 2.0, and our attendees for helping with some of the content.

Our rough plan for the rest of the year is to do one Retreat or Forum a month of different types, these may include: an Operations Managers Forum, the Leaders Forum, Post-EAG and Post-EAGx Forums, and another Individual Outreach Forum. If you would like to recommend Forum themes that might address important talent gaps in the EA community, or highly-engaged and skilled EAs who might make good attendees, please email Amy at amy@centreforeffectivealtruism.org.

2\. Applications open for EA Global: San Francisco

Whilst the Individual Outreach team is working to better understand our most engaged community members via monthly retreats, the focus for the [EA Global](https://www.eaglobal.org/) conference series this year is to effectively transmit our current understanding of EA core concepts to the large number of community members who have the potential to become even more engaged.

Content for both EA Global events will be aimed at existing EAs who already have a solid understanding of effective altruism, but would like to gain skills, network, master more complex problems, or move into new roles.

We will host two conferences this year:

- San Francisco: 8-10 June

- London: End of October

Applications are [now open](https://www.eaglobal.org/events/ea-global-2018-san-francisco/) for EA Global: San Francisco — [apply now](https://www.eaglobal.org/events/ea-global-2018-san-francisco/). You can suggest content or recommend speakers for both conferences (including yourself!) [here](https://goo.gl/forms/S25u5JTDSfbT0z4N2).

EA Community Building Grants

One of our priorities for 2018 is to improve how our other projects empower our most engaged community members. As such, we’ve launched [Effective Altruism Community Building Grants](http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1l3/announcing_effective_altruism_community_building/), to build the capacity of the EA community to produce value by strengthening a small number of high-potential effective altruism groups.

We believe that community building grants will help drive engagement within the community by helping groups currently run by volunteers to transition to full-time, paid organizers.

In making funding decisions, we’re looking for two main things; exceptional organizers and high-potential groups. A key consideration for us is that organizers have a thorough, nuanced understanding of the core EA ideas, so that they can effectively communicate them to others. If you are interested in applying for a grant, you can read more about our heuristics for evaluating applications [here](http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1l3/announcing_effective_altruism_community_building/).

Applications are open now and close on March 21st 2018\. If an application is particularly urgent, or you have any queries, please contact groups@effectivealtruism.org.

Summer internships

We’ve opened applications for our [Summer Internship Program](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/careers/), which will include community building internships and research fellowships. The main reasons for running this program are:

1) to develop the skills of people in the EA community,

2) give promising people the opportunity to see if direct work is a good fit for them

3) interns tend to do valuable work that can contribute towards CEA’s overall impact.

The application deadline is Sunday 25th March. Please pass on these opportunities to others you think would be interested. If you have any questions about the roles, please email harri.besceli@centreforeffectivealtruism.org.

New Involvement Guide

Finally, we’ve just updated our [Involvement Guide](https://www.effectivealtruism.org/get-involved/) which is a comprehensive list of the ways in which you can engage with effective altruism. The first recommendation of the guide is to ‘Learn more’, which may not seem like a practical first step, but reflects our belief that figuring out how to contribute can be complex and that learning more can be the most useful place to start. If you or people you know are looking to get more involved, we hope this will be a helpful place to start.

CEA update, March 2018

Harri previously worked at CEA and left in 2021.

DSC03755 -Harri - 2880

Harri Besceli

I’m announcing a new project from the Centre for Effective Altruism: Effective Altruism Community Building Grants. This program will provide grants of between $5,000 and $100,000 to individuals and groups doing local effective altruism community building work. We expect to have a particular emphasis on funding groups aiming to transition from being run by volunteers to being run by full-time, paid organizers. We are currently in talks with LEAN about how we will collaborate on administering/implementing grants.

The aim of this project is to build the capacity of the effective altruism community to produce value, by strengthening a small number of high-potential effective altruism groups. We believe that community building grants will help achieve this aim for the following reasons:

* Providing these grants will enable the people with the most expertise and personal fit for local community building to significantly increase the time they can dedicate to building the highest potential effective altruism groups.
* Increasing the groups’ organizational capacity in this way will significantly increase the number of highly talented people dedicated to working on the most important problems, as a result of understanding the ideas and methodology of effective altruism ([furthering CEAs charitable object No. 2](http://beta.charitycommission.gov.uk/charity-details/?regid=1149828&subid=0)).

Providing grants for effective altruism community builders promises to be a scalable way of using funding to increase the talent pool available to the effective altruism community. Upon completing the first round of effective altruism community building grants, we expect to further increase our understanding of both the specific contribution that effective altruism groups can make to the aims of the community, and the role that additional funding can play in strengthening effective altruism groups.

Though we expect the typical application to be for a grant to cover full-time or part-time work organizing an effective altruism group, we are open to grant applications which are outside of this scope but are focused on the aim of creating successful local effective altruism communities.

## Current Landscape
CEA’s mission is to improve humanity’s long-term trajectory by building a community that can work together to solve humanity’s biggest problems. Right now, there are three main mechanisms by which individual EAs can come together as a community: online (e.g. [EA Forum](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/), [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/)), yearly conferences (e.g. [EA Global](https://www.eaglobal.org/)) and local groups (e.g. university groups like [Harvard EA](http://www.harvardea.org/) and community groups like [EA London](http://ealondon.com/)).

Local groups provide the only option for regular, in-person interaction within the EA community. We think this is likely to be essential to a thriving EA community for at least three reasons:

* Regular in-person interactions are essential to establishing informal information networks, which are particularly useful as a way to learn things you didn’t know you needed to know.
* Regular in-person interactions facilitate strong connections within community, and these connections are likely to be essential to helping many people remain stably motivated to work on improving the world.
* Regular in-person interaction is a good method for introducing new people to the community.

The impact of local groups appears to follow a heavy-tailed distribution, with some of the larger, more established groups producing substantially more value than the average local group. Historically, much of the local group support provided by CEA, Rethink Charity, EAF and others has focused on either seeding local groups or providing a small amount of support to a large number of different groups. EA Community Building Grants are an experiment in shifting our focus towards making some of the most promising local groups even better.

In the past, CEA has considered similar plans, but ultimately decided not to push forward for three reasons:

* EA community size
*   The effective altruism community used to be much smaller than it is now, both in terms of the number of people who identified with the aims of the community, and the reach of the ideas of effective altruism.
*   Local groups need to be able to reach a critical mass of regular attendees to succeed. As the number of people in the community has grown, reaching critical mass has become easier, resulting in more groups gaining significant traction.
* High opportunity cost for group leaders
*   The best way for group leaders to attract excellent people to their group is for them to be personally excellent themselves.
*   However, this means that the best group leaders are also likely to have the highest opportunity costs. We weren’t sure that we knew enough about the overall value of local groups to know when a group leader should focus on their local group full time instead of pursuing other options.
* Entrenchment
*   When a stable local group forms, it’s typically the case that no one else attempts to form a competing local group. This is generally quite positive and represents good norms of cooperation rather than defection.
*   However, this creates a lock-in effect whereby the first stable local group crowds out the possibility of different groups forming in the future. Funding full-time organizers exacerbates this effect.
*   As the EA community grows, the importance of local groups will grow as will the quality of the local organizer talent pool.
*   This means that funding a local group today could mean that we can’t fund a better instantiation of that group in the future.

A few things have changed such that we think now is a good time to provide funding for local groups that want to professionalize.

First, the size of the EA community has grown. Local groups serve as an early contact point for people who learn about EA. Therefore as the reach of the ideas of effective altruism grows larger, more people are learning about EA and the more valuable it is for local groups to serve as a first point of contact with the community.

Second, we’ve been increasingly impressed with the productive output of some of the local groups we’ve talked to. This makes it more likely that running a local group is better than the alternative.

Third, we’ve gained a better understanding of what constitutes a promising local group and [how local groups can produce value](https://app.effectivealtruism.org/groups/resources/effective-altruism-community-building). For example, we’ve come to believe that a major comparative advantage of effective altruism groups is in supporting group members to develop high-value future plans, and that groups can achieve this aim more effectively by building strong (rather than simply large) communities.

Fourth, the available funding in the EA community has increased whereas [important talent gaps](https://80000hours.org/2017/11/talent-gaps-survey-2017/) remain. This project may be able to turn money into talent which makes it especially promising.

Finally, we think we can set clear expectations with the groups that we fund such that the project is viewed as an experiment and that part of the goal of the experiment is to determine whether the local group leaders should continue working on community-building full time.

## The Ideal Candidate
In making funding decisions, we’re looking for two main things: exceptional organizers, and high-potential groups.

### The Organizers
In the simplest terms, the heuristic for evaluating organizers is “Would we be excited to replicate these people 10x or 100x in the EA community?” This heuristic is inspired by [YC’s advice on hiring and culture](http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec10/), and we think it encapsulates the importance of local community builders in setting the culture and trajectory of the EA community.

More specifically, we expect the organizers to have the following characteristics:

* EA expertise
*   If you want to spread EA you should first be an expert on EA.
*   This doesn’t mean that you need to be a cutting edge researcher. It does mean that you should have a thorough, nuanced understanding of the core EA ideas, and that you should be able to map out the considerations surrounding questions like what cause area to support, or what careers to consider.
* Adherence to the [guiding principles of effective altruism](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/ceas-guiding-principles/)
*   We want to fund organizers who adhere to the core principles of commitment to others, scientific mindset, openness, integrity and collaborative spirit.
* Judgment
*   We aim to take a relatively hands-off approach to the groups we fund. This means that we will tend to prefer organizers who we trust will tend to make reasonable, well-considered decisions and who display appropriate caution about difficult or risky decisions.
* Skill at EA community building
*   We’ll also look for evidence that organizers possess skill at EA community building. The core heuristic for assessing this is “Will this person be able to attract talented, dedicated people to make major contributions on the most important problems?”
*   There are many different ways of meeting this heuristic, but we expect to evaluate areas like social skill, executional competence, enthusiasm, and thoughtfulness, among others.
* Understanding of EA community building
*   EA community building has the potential for being both highly valuable, but also harmful if done poorly. Organizers should have a very strong understanding of the relevant considerations determining the value of EA community building.

### The Group
We’re looking for groups that are likely to have a strong potential to flourish given a significant increase in their resources.

Building on our experience at Y Combinator and their emphasis on building services for your 100 most dedicated users, we think one of the most important qualities of high-potential groups is the depth of engagement and understanding of the groups’ core members. This is intended to be a departure from assessing groups based on metrics related to size, such as event attendance or number of members.

We are looking for groups with the potential to facilitate the development of people who contribute valuable work to high-priority areas, Specifically, the features that we expect to see are:

* An inner core of well-coordinated organizers
*   Successful local groups need to be able to attract a small inner core of people who can help make the group succeed. The inner core typically consists of people who aren’t working on the group full time, but attend events regularly, are willing to pitch in to help when needed and who the leaders can turn to for support and advice.
* Stable, highly-engaged group members
*   This is a group of people who attend fairly regularly, don’t generally help with organizing events, but who are otherwise highly engaged and derive significant value from the group.
* A goal-oriented activity portfolio
*   This will consist of activities and projects which have been chosen on the basis of a developing understanding of the goals of the effective altruism community, and how they will contribute to achieving these goals.
* A record of past success in attracting talented, dedicated people to make major contributions to the most important problems.
*   This includes looking at whether people currently in the group seem like they could make such a contribution in the future.

## The Grants
The grant period lasts for between three months and a year, and applicants may choose to delay the start of the grant period until the start of September 1st, 2018. By default, grants will be paid out on a quarterly basis, although there is flexibility in the payment schedule to accommodate the needs of grantees. Grant recipients will be required to write a brief quarterly report, including an itemized list of expenditures, as well as periodically checking in with CEA. Groups will also be required to write a full report at the end of the grant period.

For applications for a grant to cover full-time work organizing an effective altruism group, the default grant will be $35,000 to cover the living costs of one organizer over the course of a year, in additional to $10,000 for general expenses related to the group itself. For applications for funding below $5,000, see the [effective altruism groups funding guide](https://app.effectivealtruism.org/groups/resources/mentorship-and-funding) instead. Individual or joint applications may be submitted.

CEA will only be able to make grants which further some of its charitable objects, which are stated within the application form. CEA is not an employer of those to whom it awards grants, and reserves the right to terminate payment of the grants should they deviate from the agreed-upon terms.

## Applications
Applications will open on February 21st and close on March 21st 2018. Applicants will be asked to include their CV, an overview of their group (where relevant), and a proposal for their project or group.  Applicants will receive a confirmation of submission email, and will be contacted within two weeks letting them know whether they will be invited to interview, which will take place within three further weeks. Interviewees will receive notification of the status of their application within three weeks of interview, and successful applicants will receive a grant offer specifying the terms and expectations of the grant.

If an application is particularly urgent, or you have any queries, please contact groups@effectivealtruism.org

We're happy to answer questions from potential applicants about the process, either via email or in a call. 

[Apply here](https://cea-core.typeform.com/to/CJLJCS?source=xxxxx)

***

Edits:
1) 'We are currently in talks with LEAN about how we will collaborate on administering/implementing grants' added to paragraph 1. 
2) 'We're happy to answer questions from potential applicants about the process, either via email or in a call.' Added to the final paragraph

Announcing Effective Altruism Community Building Grants

Hi everyone,

Building on my [last email reviewing 2017](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/blog/cea-s-2017-review-and-2018-plans/), this month I want to share more of our plans, following our January team off-site.

This update covers:

1\. CEA’s 2018 Priorities

2\. Open contract roles at CEA

3\. New COO; Larissa Hesketh-Rowe

# 1. CEA’s 2018 Priorities

As discussed in my last update, CEA seeks to support the EA community by helping to provide the money, people, ideas and coordination necessary for us to collectively have an impact in the long run.

We currently believe that the most prominent bottleneck is the community having enough talented people doing the direct work the community needs. We think there is still low-hanging fruit here where we can help many of the dedicated people already in the community to improve their skills and think about where best to use them.

We believe we need to find out a lot more about the great people we have already in the EA community. This will help us understand what they need now, and learn how to improve the pipelines through which new people discover EA (e.g., EA Global, local group support and online content).

This year, therefore, our three priorities are to:

1\. Get to know the more engaged community members and how we can best help them

2\. Improve our decision-making by improving our metrics and access to data

3\. Improve how our other projects help people become engaged community members

## 1. Get to know the more engaged EAs and how we can best help them

As we discussed in our [year-end review](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/blog/cea-s-2017-review-and-2018-plans/), our thinking about where we can have the biggest impact as an organization has changed over the last year. We believe that, by nature of the resources they have access to, some individuals may well be able to have a much higher impact than others. This means that when it comes to deciding how to prioritize the resources we have (our time and our money) we need to focus more attention there than we have in the past.

This is why we set up the Individual Outreach Team. Their focus this year is to understand better our core community members and the people we think can have the biggest impact through direct work, and learn how we can help them get involved in different projects in EA.

This year they’ll be running small, monthly events, speaking to lots of members of the EA community and trying to learn as much as possible about how to better help them have an impact.

By having this team focus on what [Y Combinator](https://www.ycombinator.com/about/) might call our “[top 100 users](http://blog.ycombinator.com/ycs-essential-startup-advice/)” this still allows our other teams to focus on the wider community and on improving the pipeline by which people get involved.

## 2. Improving our decision-making

Beyond learning about our core users, we also want to improve our decision-making by developing better metrics and data collection. We’ve been trialing one metric for measuring the impact of something like plan changes in EA. While the theory has been useful, there have been bugs in implementation, and so we’re now working on the next version.

We also want to collect more useful data about our work and make existing data more accessible. We hope that these efforts will make it much easier for CEA to notice when we’re off track, and to make course corrections earlier.

## 3. Improve how our other projects help people become engaged community members

We believe that to achieve our vision for an optimal world, we will need many more people than are currently in the EA Community.

Of course, growth — if not managed carefully — comes with potential costs such as added coordination problems or risk of losing much of the nuance of EA. That is why this year we want to use what we learn to build capacity for a much larger, stable future community.

This means improving our content and events so that people new to effective altruism can understand the concepts in full. It also means scaling our proactive community health efforts to ensure that as the community grows, we retain good epistemic norms and the ability to coordinate effectively.

In practice, this means that in 2018, we will be working on:

- Running EA Global events that effectively transmit our current understanding of EA core concepts

- Working to improve community norms and coordination so that adding more people to the community adds more value, without downsides related to growth

- Updating the content on [effectivealtruism.org](http://effectivealtruism.org/) to accurately reflect our current understanding and priorities, so that readers can get on board more quickly

- Similarly, ensuring that local group leaders and other community builders have an up-to-date and nuanced understanding of EA, such that the message shared is more accurate

- Building ops capacity such that we continue to grow as an organization effectively

# 2. Open contract roles at CEA

[ARCHIVE NOTE: These roles are now filled - please do not apply]

We are recruiting for two part-time contractors to help us produce EA Global this year; an [Assistant Event Producer](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/careers/assistant-event-producer/) and a [Communications Officer](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/careers/communications-officer-2018/). Please pass on these opportunities to others you think would be interested. If you have any questions about the roles, please email katie.glass@centreforeffectivealtruism.org.

# 3. New COO; Larissa Hesketh-Rowe

Finally, I am pleased to announce that Larissa Hesketh-Rowe has been promoted to Chief Operating Officer.

This change in title is mostly a belated acknowledgment of the role Larissa has played over the last year. Larissa has been supporting at CEA in many ways; taking on things like managing team retreats, helping with recruitment and setting company-wide priorities.

She was one of the first managers in our current CEA structure and understands our history and our culture. I’m confident CEA’s operations are going to be in excellent hands. This means if you have any questions about CEA do reach out to her at larissa@centreforeffectivealtruism.org.

All the best,

Tara

CEA update, February 2018

Julia is one of the [contact people](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/community-health/contact-us) when community members find themselves in challenging situations. She writes about effective altruism, parenting, and other topics at [Otherwise](https://juliawise.net/). She was president of Giving What We Can from 2017-2020. Before joining CEA, Julia was a social worker, and studied sociology at Bryn Mawr College.

You can contact Julia via [this form](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScWtG3hNhdzSpVSAEHmpEz7mjlvoRhqch8hsFF2lKJX8dzrvw/viewform) (you'll be anonymous by default).

julia.wise@centreforeffectivealtruism.org

Community Liaison

Julia Wise headshot

Julia Wise

I work at the Centre for Effective Altruism as the Community Liaison, which includes being a point person for the EA community. I’m a person you can come to with concerns about problems you’ve noticed or experienced in the EA community.

The best way to contact me is julia.wise@centreforeffectivealtruism.org. You can also contact me [anonymously](https://goo.gl/forms/oqiYRuynO37oOtYv1).

## Why have a point person?
People who encounter a problem in the community often don’t feel up to handling it on their own. It can be helpful to have help from someone with experience in this area and time to dedicate to the role.

Having a central point for collecting information allows patterns to be recognized. For example, imagine that three different people experience a problem from the same person. If there’s no one to collect this data, each case appears to be a one-off incident. But if someone knows about all three incidents, the nature of the problem is much clearer.

## What happens with this information?
Some examples of steps I’ve taken, with help from other CEA staff and volunteers:
- Helping friends of a community member who was experiencing a mental health crisis coordinate to better support their friend
- Providing support to people experiencing emotional or mental health problems at EA events
- Speaking to people about ways their behavior has made people uncomfortable or caused problems (for example, mild sexual harassment), and asking them to change their behavior
- Restricting people from attending CEA’s events based on past serious problem behavior
- Helping local groups and events such as EAGx conferences set up similar systems for handling community problems

## My background
I’m a licensed independent clinical social worker. In the United States this requires a two-year master’s degree focusing on helping individuals and communities improve their own well-being, plus two years of supervised work experience. My focus during my master’s program was on mental health.

My experience includes:
- Volunteering at a women’s domestic violence shelter, counseling callers to a domestic violence and sexual assault hotline, and accompanying sexual assault survivors during examinations at a hospital
- Working in a psychiatric hospital with people in mental health crisis, and helping them plan for return to the community at the end of their stay in the hospital
- Counseling inmates and detainees in a jail, including both survivors and perpetrators of community violence, domestic violence, and sexual assault
- Social work is focused not on blame or punishment, but on reaching better outcomes by reducing risk of future harm and by connecting people with resources and support. This approach is very much the one I use in my work in the effective altruism community.

## Confidentiality
If you contact me about a problem you’ve experienced or a concern you have, I will keep it as confidential as you wish. Here are some possibilities:
- You just want to vent or discuss your concern, and do not want the information to go any further
- You are ok with me discussing an anonymized version of your concern with certain other people with your permission
- You would like to be put in touch with other people who have experienced a similar problem (with their permission)
- You would like me to let others know about the situation, for example the organizers of a local group where you experienced a problem
- You would like someone to speak to the person who caused a problem about their behavior

The time and stress involved in a public discussion of one’s personal experience mean that often people do not want to publicly discuss problems they have experienced. I understand this, and I don’t pressure anyone to share information any more widely than they want to.

__*Exceptions:*__
If I thought someone were in physical danger, I would act to reduce that danger. That might include breaking confidentiality. For example, if you tell me you're planning to physically hurt someone, I would warn them.

Because of the rules for social workers in my area, the only time I have a legal obligation to contact the authorities is if you bring me a concern specifically in my role as a social worker (“Julia, I’m telling you this because you’re a social worker”) AND if the concern is about
- A child under 18 who is being abused or neglected
- A person with an intellectual disability (mental retardation) who is being abused, or
- A person 60 or older who is being abused.

## Options besides talking to me
I know people often don’t feel comfortable discussing a problem they’ve experienced with someone they don’t know well. Some communities (London, Bay Area) have local point people as well, and group organizers are another possible resource. If you have a problem and would rather not talk to me, I suggest asking if your local group has a particular contact person for community problems.

If you’re a local organizer and are interested in setting up a point person in your local group, feel free to contact me for more information about this. julia.wise@centreforeffectivealtruism.org

A contact person for the EA community

Larissa worked at CEA until 2019. 

Before becoming CEO, Larissa was CEA's Chief Operating Officer, and manager of the community team. Before coming to work at CEA, she volunteered for Giving What We Can and in UK party politics, and spent five years working in corporate sales, events and marketing.

Former Chief Executive Officer

DSC03971 -Larissa - 2880

Larissa Hesketh-Rowe

### Community Team

#### Events

Our advertising around EA Global events, especially the London conference, was confusing. We made the decision to shift towards more advanced content aimed at existing members of the community midway through the five-month application period. This led to confusion about the intended audience for the conference and newer members of the EA community who were previously encouraged to attend our events felt shut out. This is a not good way of welcoming people to our community. In the future, we will make sure that our advertising, admissions, and content for events is more consistent and communicated further in advance.

We did not provide enough support to organizers of EAGx conferences. We hope that increased capacity on the team, through hiring a new events specialist and handing operations work to the Operations Team, will help with this.

#### Local groups

Communication with EA group organizers should have been more frequent and more reliable. For example, many student group organizers during EAG London reported having an unclear understanding of the goals of EA groups and CEAs’ thinking in general. The EA Community building guide is intended to address this, but it is yet to be published. Speed of communication should have been prioritized over depth here. There have also been occasions where group leaders have been left waiting because of CEA. For example, the launch of the EA Groups platform has been delayed multiple times while we have been building the capacity in our Tech Team.

Our work on local groups was at times insufficiently focused. In some cases, we tried several approaches, but not long enough to properly assess whether they had succeeded or not. For example, we began a beta version of an EA Conversations platform to facilitate conversations between EAs but discontinued work on it despite initial success, largely because of competing time demands. We have been using a quarterly goal setting and review process to try to improve this.

#### Giving What We Can

We failed to keep some of the content on this website up-to-date, as some of the figures we use have changed. Similarly, while the Pledge is cause-neutral and no longer focused solely on the developing world our website doesn’t fully reflect that. We plan to address these issues in 2018.

At times, particularly earlier in the year, we focused too much on promoting the main Pledge, even though this might not be the right option for some people. For this reason, we have shifted more emphasis to Try Giving.

#### Community health

In responding to existing problems, we have not prioritized preventing or mitigating other problems as much as we could have. We have commissioned the Research Team to produce a report on proactive things we can do to measure and address community health, and we intend to be more proactive on this in 2018.

### Operations

As discussed above, occasionally the team was slow to respond to donor and other enquiries. We have been building our team’s knowledge, capacity and processes to try to improve this. For example, earlier in the year access to donor information to respond to enquiries was restricted to a few staff members, slowing our response times.

We still need to improve our accounting, so that it is more transparent to people outside CEA, and to reduce the time that audits take up.

## Funding

Our current funding situation is secure, with approximately two years of runway. However, we are planning to scale up some activities in 2018, including expanded granting through EA Grants and via local groups, as well as a larger program of events. Given our growth, it is also likely we will need to make new hires during the year. While much of this expenditure will be covered by larger donors, we are also fundraising to make sure we have diversity in our sources of income (especially since some of our funding agreements are contingent on us having multiple backers). If you would like to support CEA, please donate using [this link](https://app.effectivealtruism.org/donations/new?utm_source=centreforeffectivealtruism.org&utm_medium=partner_charity&utm_campaign=partner_charity_donations&allocation%5Bcentre-for-effective-altruism%5D=100&allocation%5B80000-hours%5D=0).


## **Conclusion**

We hope that this post has given you some insight into our work this year and our plans for 2018\. As our mission is to support the EA community in doing the most good we can, we want to keep you in the loop and hear your feedback.

If you would like to receive our monthly supporters emails for more regular updates on our work, please [sign up here](https://goo.gl/forms/tItDlaIXqFBVB7A02). If you would like to discuss any of our plans in depth, please contact the relevant team lead listed at the beginning of this post.

CEA’s 2017 review and 2018 plans

I want to share our review of 2017 and initial plans for 2018, which we have just posted to [our blog](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/blog/cea-s-2017-review-and-2018-plans/). Below I share some of my high-level thoughts on our work this year, how our focus has changed, our plans for 2018 and our current funding situation. There is more on all of this in our post.

I’ve also included a quick update from the [Global Priorities Institute (GPI)](https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/), (which was incubated by CEA) because they are currently [advertising positions](https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/opportunities/) that I think will be of interest to you.

If you have questions or feedback on CEA’s work please comment on the [forum post](http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1ir/centre_for_effective_altruism_cea_2017_review_and/) version of our update or reply to this email.

# CEA in 2017

It has been a big year for CEA. We went through [Y Combinator’s](http://www.ycombinator.com/about/) startup accelerator program, during which we created a new donation platform called [EA Funds](https://app.effectivealtruism.org/funds) to help people donate more effectively. We launched [EA Grants](https://www.effectivealtruism.org/grants/), which funded 21 projects in the EA community. We also ran three [EA Global](https://www.eaglobal.org/) conferences to bring the community together.

As I’ve mentioned in past updates, we’ve also restructured this year. I am now CEO, Will is our president, and we’ve split our activities into five teams.

We’ve included more highlights from the year in our [blog post](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/blog/cea-s-2017-review-and-2018-plans/).

# How our focus has changed in 2017

Our mission is to

_Create a global community of people who have made helping others a core part of their lives, and who use evidence and scientific reasoning to figure out how to do so as effectively as possible._

This is our mission because we believe that in order to solve the world’s most pressing problems and improve the world’s long-term trajectory we need a community of people working together.

Such a community needs the money, people, and ideas necessary to have an impact, as well as the ability to coordinate so that collectively we can achieve more than the sum of our parts.

Earlier in the year, we focused mainly on money. This was in part because our time at [Y Combinator](http://www.ycombinator.com/about/), with access to the advice of successful founders, seemed like the best place to build a product that focused on bringing more donations to effective cause areas. We still believe that having diversity in the sources of income in EA is important, which is why we run [EA Funds](https://app.effectivealtruism.org/funds) and use the platform to support things like the [newly-launched $100k donor lottery](https://app.effectivealtruism.org/lotteries).

We currently believe, however, that the more prominent bottleneck for the EA community is in talent. It also seems plausible that the distribution of impact is “heavy-tailed,” meaning that a small number of people might provide a significant amount of the value that the community creates. This seems obvious when it comes to donations (for example, the money that Cari Tuna directs through Open Phil dwarves the money most of us can ever hope to donate). This pattern seems likely to be true for the impact of people’s research or other direct work as well.

This is why we have set up the Individual Outreach Team: to identify people within the effective altruism community who we expect will make significant contributions to important projects, and to help them to have a higher impact. This involves mentoring, providing individuals with grants and working with our Community Team to experiment with smaller events.

We have also been focusing more on supporting some of the larger, more established EA groups that seem to be having the biggest impact in getting people on board with EA ideas. We’ve been working with local groups to direct more people to 80,000 Hours coaching and go into direct work in high-impact fields.

We continue to focus on prioritization. We need to focus our efforts where we believe we can have the highest impact, but naturally, we have a lot of uncertainty about what those areas will turn out to be. It’s therefore important that we balance projects that could be extremely high-impact (like our individual outreach) with meeting the needs of the broader EA community that has made much of our work possible.

# Looking ahead to 2018 for CEA

In 2018, this means we will continue to devote more resources to experimenting with more targeted support to members of the community through individual outreach, internships, and smaller events.

We will, however, work hard to ensure that this does not come at the expense of providing the infrastructure (such as the EA groups platform, Giving What We Can Pledge infrastructure, EA Funds donation platform) or coordination (events, local communities and online discussion) the community needs to continue to thrive.

# CEA’s Fundraising

Our current funding situation is secure, with approximately two years of runway. However, we are planning to scale up some activities in 2018, including expanded granting through EA Grants and via local groups, as well as a more extensive program of events. Given our growth, it is also likely we will need to make new hires during the year. While we hope larger donors will cover much of this expenditure, we are also fundraising to make sure we have diversity in our sources of income (especially since some of our funding agreements are contingent on us having multiple backers). If you would like to support CEA, please donate using [this link](https://app.effectivealtruism.org/donations/new?utm_source=centreforeffectivealtruism.org&utm_medium=partner_charity&utm_campaign=partner_charity_donations&allocation%5Bcentre-for-effective-altruism%5D=100&allocation%5B80000-hours%5D=0).

# An update from GPI

The Global Priorities Institute (GPI) is a new research center at Oxford University which spun out of CEA and which we continue to support. It aims to develop the intellectual roots of the effective altruism movement with an academic level of rigor and detail and to spread effective altruism theory and concerns throughout academia. We believe this is crucial because academia attracts many of the world’s best researchers, and is so influential amongst policymakers, the media and in teaching the next generation of leaders.

GPI has recently released a new [research agenda](https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/gpi-research-agenda.pdf), which we encourage you to check out – it’s a work in progress, so do send them comments. They are also hiring. They are looking for maternity cover to run their operations and a Research Fellow and Senior Research Fellow, both in Philosophy. For more information, please check out their [website](https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/) or get in touch with them.

Many of you, our supporters on this mailing list, are likely to be qualified or know people who are, so please do consider applying, or passing on the opportunities to others you think would be interested!

Finally, I just want to thank all of you for your continued support throughout this year. I’m excited to see what we will achieve together in 2018\.

Enjoy the holidays and have a great new year,

Tara

CEA update, December 2017

As we move towards the end of the year, we’re reviewing our recent events and planning for 2018\. This update covers:

1.  EA Global London and high touch recruitment,
2.  Planning for 2018
3.  A new hire for our Operations team; Mason Hartman

# 1. EA Global London 2017

We’ve just finished our third and final EA Global conference for this year, this time in [London](https://www.eaglobal.org/events/ea-global-2017-uk/).

As I mentioned in my last update, we’re currently focusing on two broad areas:

a) helping people become deeply engaged with the ideas and community of effective altruism, and

b) the long-term health and trajectory of the effective altruism community.

Our EA Global conferences have an essential role to play in achieving these goals.

## Helping EA Global attendees become more engaged with EA

At EA Global London we experimented with achieving the first goal by focusing on more advanced content aimed at people who already had a solid understanding of effective altruism. Content included potential new interventions in policy reform and health, as well as workshops to help participants improve their decision-making skills, productivity, and self-care.

We need to review the surveys and conduct follow up interviews with attendees, but early reviews of the survey seem positive. So far almost half (253) of the attendees filled in our post-event survey. 68% of those selected deepening their understanding of EA concepts as one of their goals and of those a majority (83%) entirely met or exceeded their goals.

One thing we notably experimented with at EA Global London to increase the engagement of attendees was pre-arranging short (15 minutes) one-to-one meetings between our staff and attendees. Four other members of staff and I focussed on this, and we met about a third of attendees to discuss their plans, answer questions and connect them with others. On the first pass, this seems very valuable and in some cases has led to arranging to follow up with attendees who could be promising for direct work. We learned a lot about how to create valuable interactions between attendees, what messaging issues we need to work on and where we can help both new and highly involved EAs.

We came away from the conference with a strengthened belief that in-person events (compared to media and online interaction) are particularly good opportunities to deepen EAs in their understanding and engagement.

## The long-term health of the EA community

While our first goal is more focused on individual impact, we recognise that to do the most good, in the long run, we need to ensure we have a healthy community. We need to work well together, remain mindful of all our uncertainty and keep an open mind to all possible interventions.

Shaping norms and values to this end is challenging. Our EA Global conferences are one way we can influence the focus of the community. We used the themes of Doing Good Together and intellectual exploration at our conferences this year to make steps in that direction. I’d be very interested to hear if you have noticed any shifts in focus in the community as a result.

# 2. Planning for 2018

Much of our work this quarter will be planning for 2018\. The main areas we are looking at include:  

1.  Planning our 2018 budget and beginning our winter fundraiser
2.  Liaising with Open Phil to review our first grant and plan our activities for 2018
3.  Planning our calendar of events for next year
4.  Looking at how we can increase our support to local groups
5.  Prioritizing our tech projects
6.  Deciding whether to run a summer internship program.

To this end I’d be very interested in hearing from many of you about:

1.  Your experiences with the in-person EA community (local groups and events, more on this below)
2.  The tech solutions we should prioritise.

## 2018 Events and local groups

For both our events and local groups support, we plan to experiment with and encourage more one to one and small group interactions.

We hypothesise that by meeting more people one-on-one, we can both tailor the ways they can become more involved and learn more about the needs of the community. We want to run specialised events so that we can deliver more advanced and targeted EA content. For example, we’re considering running a small event for EA group leaders to sync up on strategy with group leaders.

Having experimented with making EA Global London more advanced, we’re also considering how we might better segment our conferences next year. Limiting the audience to those with a stronger understanding of EA means we are better able to tailor content to the level of the audience, but it means those who are newer do not gain the benefit of interacting with more experienced EAs.

My colleague Larissa and I plan to speak to more people over the next couple of months.  

Since you are very much our target audience, I would be interested in any rough thoughts you have on the following:

i) If you were to discover EA today, what sort of event would it be most valuable for you to attend?

ii) What, if anything, do you think is the most important benefit to the community at large of coming together at conferences?

iii) what do you get out of interacting with the EA community in person?

# 3. Welcome Mason Hartman

And finally, I would like to invite you all to join me in welcoming Mason Hartman to CEA. She is joining Miranda’s operations team to help us systematise many more of our processes.

Mason has a strong interest in process automation and has experience organizing events, designing and coding user interfaces, and developing research workflows.

We continue to trial or have volunteer support in tech product management and high touch recruitment, and I’ll keep you posted as to whether or not this leads to any additional hires.

All the best,

Tara

CEA update, November 2017

I don’t typically send the CEA supporters emails, but I have important news that I wanted to share with you all.

It’s with great pleasure that I can announce that Tara Mac Aulay has moved from COO to CEO of CEA, and I have moved from CEO to President.

In significant part, this is simply making our titles match our existing de facto roles. For many months, Tara has been acting in the CEO position, setting the strategic direction for CEA and managing the team, while I have been focusing on representation of effective altruism in academia, in the media, and among high net worth individuals.

From our perspective, this division makes sense. Tara is exceptionally competent at running an organisation, with an impressive blend of quick decision-making ability, sound judgment, and intense dedication to the mission of CEA. Meanwhile, I have difficult-to-pass-on opportunities available to me in virtue of my position at Oxford and my status as the author of Doing Good Better. So it’s playing to each of our comparative advantages if she focuses on building CEA and I focus on helping build the intellectual foundations of effective altruism. One way of thinking of the distinction is that Tara and CEA will focus on developing effective altruism as a community and I, my two assistants, and my colleagues at the Global Priorities Institute, will focus on developing effective altruism as an idea.

I will still be a Trustee for CEA, and my activities naturally complement the rest of CEA’s, so we will naturally continue to sync up.

I’m very excited to see everything that CEA will achieve under Tara’s leadership; I can’t think of anyone who is better suited to be CEO.

I hope you will all join me in congratulating Tara and continuing to support CEA’s work.

All the best,  
Will

**************

Hi everyone,

I have lots to cover in this CEA supporters update. We’ve recently had our quarterly off-site as a company, renewing our focus for the next few months, and I’d like to share our current thinking with you all.

Before I go into that, I would like to thank Will MacAskill for his kind words in his last email to you all. In case any of you missed the announcement, I have changed titles from COO to CEO of CEA, and Will is now the President. We felt this better reflected our current de facto roles. For some months now I have been setting the strategic direction of CEA while Will has focused more on representing EA in academia, the media and to high net worths. Think of CEA as supporting EA as a community and Will, his assistants and the Global Priorities Institute as focusing on EA as an idea.

Naturally, we will continue to collaborate closely as his work crosses over with ours. I am grateful for Will’s confidence and support and am excited to see where we can take the EA community.

This brings me to the usual supporters email which is below and covers:

1.  Our current focus in the long term and Q4
2.  Details of our recent, internal restructure

We’ll be sharing a more detailed write up of our current strategy in the coming months but this gives you an initial insight into our work.

If you have any questions or comments, as always please do get in touch.

All the best,

Tara

# CEA’s current focus long term and in Q4

We believe that the right communities can improve the world today and long into the future. That is why our mission is to create a global community of people who have made helping others a core part of their lives, and who use evidence and scientific reasoning to figure out how to do so as effectively as possible and help that community thrive.

## CEA’s Q4 focus

Once a quarter we get together in person as a team to review our recent progress and set goals to keep us on track for the next few months.

At our most recent off-site we discussed:

1.  How to help people become deeply engaged with the ideas and community of effective altruism
2.  The long-term health and trajectory of the effective altruism community

### 1. Helping individuals engage deeply with effective altruism

In the early days of Effective Altruism, the community was small enough that most people knew each other. Once you heard about effective altruism, you could learn more and become more engaged through conversations with others.

Today, the community has grown so large, and the quantity of online content so vast, that it can be confusing to know where to start. We think we might be missing out on great people, who don’t know how to get involved or learn more.

We’re trying to get people up to speed more effectively so that they can start having an impact in the community.

In particular, in Q4 we  are focusing on:

1.  **One-to-one interactions**   
    As a trial, a couple of members of staff are focusing on one to one interactions with people who are already involved with EA. We want to see whether we can help connect them with material or people who can further their understanding of EA, or help them find new ways to get actively involved.
2.  **Creating canonical content on EA**  
    We are updating the introductory content on [www.effectivealtruism.org](http://www.effectivealtruism.org) and creating a series of posts explaining the core ideas of effective altruism. We aim for this series to be an up-to-date survey of EA thinking. We are also trying to support the EA Forum as a place for discussion of new ideas in EA.

### 2. Protecting the long-term trajectory of the EA community

We’ve been discussing how to ensure that the EA community reaches its potential. That means both avoiding potential risks to the community, and ensuring we cooperate well, making the most of opportunities that arise.

One risk the community faces is that one individual could potentially tarnish the reputation of the EA community. We do a lot of work to guard against this, taking an active role in online moderation and collaborating on projects like putting together the EA Guiding principles.  

But communities face other risks as they develop - for instance, they could fracture or simply [miss important opportunities](https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/moral-progress-and-cause-x/). In the next few months, we’ll be researching these risks and working out what we should do to address these risks.  

We have also been discussing cooperation as a community using the theme of our EA Global conferences: doing good _together_. This quarter, one of our Summer Fellows will publish a piece on which norms are valuable for this.

## Other plans for Q4

Of course, we are maintaining our activities in other areas. The events team is busy working on [EA Global: London](https://london.eaglobal.org/), which is taking place at Imperial College London at the beginning of November. Our Tech Team have been helping our Community Team to build a new online portal, which will make it easier for people to find local effective altruism groups. And our operations team have been helping hold everything together. In particular, they soldiered through two audits!

# CEA org structure

Over the last few months our headcount has increased. We’ve reached the point where we need to add in another layer of management to support me.

We’ve now created five teams at CEA. Each team plays a different role, to help us reach our overall goals.

1.  **Community Team**  
    Managed byLarissa Hesketh-Rowe, covering events, local groups, Giving What We Can and community support. Members of the EA community do a lot of valuable work. They share knowledge and encourage others to get more involved. This team fosters this community, both online and in person, encourages useful norms and mitigates risks.  

2.  **Research Team**  
    Managed by Max Dalton, this team will survey recent work from the effective altruism research community on effectivealtruism.org. For now, the emphasis is on structured communication of existing ideas (in contrast to the more expansive work of the old fundamentals research team). We aim to help individuals understand the core ideas, and then current research, in effective altruism.  

3.  **High Touch Recruitment**  
    Currently Kerry Vaughan but with a view to expand this team if the trial project goes well. As mentioned above this team will focuson one-to-one interactions with promising people in the community.  

4.  **Operations Team**  
    Managed by Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg. This team underpins all of our work with financial, legal, HR and other support.  

5.  **Tech Team**  
    Managed by Sam Deere, this team supports the various websites we run. As the team scales up, they will be able to find tech solutions for the problems both we at CEA and the broader EA community face.

Here is our current org chart.

![](https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/VJZCRXJGqTrNvFD8jyvHNOI1UYTYsZwMzwmUI95IlzfZfLTXmqUQOkkhgQfqYEsbCu844OuBTqn1-ATYMh0ZeQBAo6WSGj_qnHalgBD5lya17ye-ft0MIiTuYMwrp5FycYnp-cYt)

We are also currently running a few trials and internships including:

*   a Product Management role working with our tech team,
*   an additional person in high touch recruitment,
*   someone to help conduct an evaluation of CEA’s current projects,
*   and an additional person in our operations team to help us build efficient ops processes

CEA update, October 2017

Today the [Open Philanthropy Project](http://www.openphilanthropy.org/) (Open Philanthropy) announced [a grant of $2.5 million to the Centre for Effective Altruism](http://www.openphilanthropy.org/giving/grants/centre-effective-altruism-general-support) (CEA). The aim of this post is to share information about the grant, what we plan to do with the additional funds and how we’re addressing the reservations Open Phil had before making the grant.

We’d like to thank Open Philanthropy both for the funding which will allow us to do more to support effective altruism and for their review of our work. Please note that the grant investigator, Nick Beckstead, is also a Trustee of CEA.

[toc]

## Projects we are funding with the grant

We expect that the $2.5 million grant will result in fewer donations from some of our larger individual donors leaving us with an additional $1.5 million this year as a result. We expect some of our biggest donors will be less inclined to donate to us now that we have less of a funding gap. At the same, because of the grant, we can spend less time on fundraising. This money will be split between projects with some flexibility to scale projects up or down as we learn more, or as promising new opportunities arise. Approximately half of the money we’re receiving from Open Philanthropy, we expect to regrant to promising work in the community, either directly through EA Grants or via separate grants to local groups.

We will divide the money across the areas outlined below. We plan to publish our full budget in August.

### New staff and increased salaries

CEA has recently been recruiting for positions such as a Full Stack Developer and Assistant Producer for our Events Team. We will be able to provide more information on this and present the new team members CEA when we’ve finished recruitment (hopefully in August). 

We intend to use some of the funds to increase salaries. We hope this will attract more experienced and skilled employees, and also give our staff more flexibility to use money to save time where appropriate. Experienced staff, particularly in positions such as web development, tend to have a high market value. Thus using some of the grant funding to raise salaries should hopefully help us recruit the top talent we need to improve our products and support to the effective altruism community. 

### Events

CEA manages a variety of events. Historically we have supported [smaller volunteer run events](https://www.eaglobal.org/eagx/) aimed at introducing new people to effective altruism, as well as the [Effective Altruism Global conference series](https://www.eaglobal.org/). 

Our current priority is to take people who are already interested in the ideas in effective altruism and help them become more engaged. By bringing the community together, we hope to connect talented candidates to promising organizations, encourage those with the right skills to pursue risky but high expected value paths and facilitate new research ideas and partnerships.

This year we are subsidizing a portion of the ticket price for our EA Global conferences to help ensure that price poses as low a barrier to entry as possible. The Open Phil funding helps make that more manageable. 

#### Open Philanthropy’s reservations about our events

Open Philanthropy mentioned that the execution of our larger conferences could be improved and that we have sometimes seemed to focus more on the prestige of events than intellectual content. We will be hiring another full-time member of staff to work on events. Currently, we have one person managing our three conferences with ad hoc support from the rest of the team.  

We’re pleased to hear that Open Phil’s initial impression that EA Global Boston was an improvement (relative to past events) in terms of organization, execution, and focus on intellectual content relative to prestige. We have begun to shift the focus of our events to make them more focused on helping attendees engage with the core concepts and research in effective altruism.

### Local Groups

We expect to increase our spending on local groups, particularly regarding the grants we give to groups up front for particularly promising projects. We would be particularly excited to see local groups trying out new activities and then writing up an assessment of how it went and — where the project was successful — how to roll this out to other groups. We’re happy to give funding to facilitate valuable projects and even in some cases to have group leaders intern or work in close collaboration with us to get more one on one support in trialing new ideas.

An example of a new project that we’ve funded in the past and are considering whether or not to roll out to more groups is the Oxford Prioritisation Project.

If you run a local effective altruism group and would like to apply for funding for activities over the summer, please refer to [this document](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QQAvFGXKLOKjtlgTLyiFJNFzC5MTkvRVpR1YlpH3qwg/edit). We plan to release an updated procedure for applying for money for the next academic year in August 2017.

### EA Grants

You may have seen that we [recently announced](http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1b5/announcing_effective_altruism_grants/) our [EA Grants project](https://www.effectivealtruism.org/grants/). Effective Altruism Grants aims to provide grants of up to £100,000 (~$130,000) to help individuals work on promising projects.

There are many talented and motivated people in our community. At CEA, we can’t do everything in-house, so we’re hoping to spur the creation of new and exciting projects in the EA space. We believe that many people in the community would take up direct work, if only they had secure funding. 

This project is a successor to our previous project EA Ventures, with the difference that EA Grants already has funding (whereas EA Ventures sought to match projects with donors) and is more focused on individuals than start-up projects. You can read more about this project [on our website](https://www.effectivealtruism.org/grants/). Will MacAskill has also [written up a list of projects](http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1bb/projects_id_like_to_see/) he would like to see. 

If you have any questions about any of these projects, please comment on this post at the [Effective Altruism Forum](http://effective-altruism.com/) or email Larissa Hesketh-Rowe at larissa[at]centreforeffectivealtruism[dot]org.

## Open Philanthropy’s reservations 

Open Philanthropy mentioned reservations about some of our marketing and research. Below is more information on these areas.

### Marketing

We have received feedback from Open Philanthropy and members of the community on where our marketing and communication has seemed overly pushy.

One of the primary reasons for this is our promotion of EA Global San Francisco 2016 which was discussed at the time [here](http://effective-altruism.com/ea/10i/ideas_for_future_effective_altruism_conferences/). We scaled back our marketing heavily this year as a result of this feedback. However, we currently believe we over-corrected, as this led to many fewer applications to EA Global Boston and San Francisco. We think that attending the conferences is valuable and so on reflection believe promoting them is important. Moving forward, we will publicize our conferences much more than we did for the Boston event while trying to avoid being pushy.

On other campaigns, such as promoting the Giving What We Can pledge during giving season, it can be hard to get the right balance. 44 people took the Pledge directly from our emails (some of whom may have taken the Pledge at a later date anyway), but the emails may also have been unwelcome to others or may have encouraged people to pledge too hastily. As a team, we have been thinking hard about how to balance these sorts of trade-offs.

We are currently putting less weight on growth in terms of numbers, and we are trying to build a metric that captures the different way the EA community generates value both now and in the future.

Feedback from the community on our EA Funds website, saying that it did not include enough detailed arguments, led to us providing more information about the reasoning behind the Funds, which increased users’ engagement with the site. We hope that the community will continue to provide this kind of constructive feedback.

### Research

When assessing our research, Open Philanthropy will be looking particularly at whether our research is “useful to link to in order to explain core EA concepts to our readers or [Open Phil] learn important things from reading it.” Open Phil have felt our research has not always provided that sort of value in the past.

The research part of the Centre for Effective Altruism has undergone significant change over the last year. We have closed several projects, including Giving What We Can’s charity research, research into donation opportunities for high net worth donors, and policy research. Earlier this year, we had a Fundamentals research team operating somewhat independently from the rest of the Centre of Effective Altruism. The Fundamentals team’s research focused on prioritization and crucial considerations for effective altruism. 

Our current plan is for the staff from the Fundamentals team to integrate much more with the rest of the Centre for Effective Altruism. Our researchers will explore two main projects:
- Analysis of strategic issues around the development of the EA community, with the aim of advising CEA's management in order to keep the research decision-relevant. We are unsure how much our researchers will write up these ideas for broader dissemination.
- An online guide which will aim to give an explanation of effective altruism that is more advanced and comprehensive than Doing Good Better. Our hope is that it can help facilitate a better understanding of what effective altruism is, and prevent our message from being garbled. 

Separate from CEA, there is a new academic institute, the Global Priorities Institute, being established at Oxford to investigate philosophical and economic matters relating to effective altruism (led by Hilary Greaves). Our researchers have supported their early explorations of research directions and will continue to work closely with this institute. We think that researchers at a high-prestige academic institution are better placed to pursue foundational work and build a field around these important questions.

We are excited about the projects that this additional funding will help us support. We hope that in sharing our spending plans and with Open Phil sharing some of their review criteria the community gains some insight into our priorities and will continue to provide feedback to us to help us improve. In many cases, you will experience our work first-hand through things like our events or reading and sharing our content, and so we value your comments. 

Announcing grant from the Open Philanthropy Project to the Centre for Effective Altruism

I know it’s been a while since my last update. A lot has been happening over the last couple of months. The Open Philanthropy Project have given CEA a grant of $2.5 million to support our work, we’ve begun running trial periods with new staff and just ran both the the EA Global San Francisco conference and a small event for EA community leaders.

# Open Philanthropy Project $2.5 million grant to CEA.

You can read about some of our plans for the grant in our announcement and more about the Open Philanthropy Project will be assessing us on in theirs.

Broadly speaking, we will be spending approximately half of the money we’re receiving from Open Philanthropy on regranting to promising work in the community, either directly through EA Grants or via separate grants to local groups. There are many talented people in the effective altruism community and we believe providing them with funding to try promising projects and share what they learn could be really impactful.

The rest of the funding will be going towards increasing staff salaries and hiring new staff, particularly to increase our events team capacity. Now that the community has grown we no longer know each other in person. This means sharing all the nuance of the different considerations is much harder. We’re currently thinking about how we can both create online content that gives people an in-depth understanding of important EA concepts but also create events that really help increase people’s understanding of and commitment to effective altruism.

# Organization Structure and Hiring

After an intensive hiring process we’ve offered month trial positions to four people, one to work on events and three developers. These are two areas where we are especially bottlenecked as a team.

As we added people to the team we also needed to add structure in order to ensure we have capacity to give all our staff have the support and direction they need. I’m pleased to announce that Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg, who has been taking on more and more of our US operations, has stepped up to manage our operations team. This team consists of Caitlin Elizondo and Kathryn Mecrow, our new office managers in the US and UK respectively. Larissa Hesketh-Rowe our communications specialist will manage our Community Development Team which includes our events, Giving What We Can, community and local group support. This is an important step for us both in improving our efficiency as an organisation and our focus in particular areas. We do have further to go on this but this is an important step.

# EA Global San Francisco and Leaders Forum.

At this year’s conference we focused on _doing good together_; the importance of trying a hits based or portfolio approach to doing good.

In the early days of the EA community we had a few bright people with unusual ideas but little resources with which to effect change. This meant that every individual really needed to focus on how can _I_ do the most good. As the community has grown we had a lot more resources available both in terms of money and talent with which to make a difference. Instead of thinking about how can _I_ do the most good, we now need to start thinking how can _we_ do the most good.

With more people in the community and money to support promising projects we can specialise. We can explore new paths to impact in higher risk areas like policy or entrepreneurship and share what we learn with a lot more people (making the knowledge more useful). We also have a lot more people to cooperate with and so poor interactions between people can have greater negative effects.

This was also some of the motivation behind us organising small events to bring together leaders in the EA community, to ensure we’re cooperating more on an organisational level and can tackle challenges and make progress on disagreements together.

At CEA protecting and supporting the effective altruism community in this way as it grows is a big part of what we see as our role.