Posted on Tuesday, November 1st 2016
(last updated Thursday, January 14th 2021)
On Monday, we began our Winter Fundraiser. You can read a full review of 2016, our goals for 2017 and the details of our fundraising in the full annual review here. If you’d like to donate to CEA you can do so here.
Below I’ve included our usual metrics for November and some of the big updates from our divisions such as:
- The launch of the Giving What We Can pledge campaign.
- The success of our Doing Good Better giveaway.
- The launch of the Effective Altruism Concepts project.
Best Wishes,
Will
CEA Metrics
| Metric | Score |
|---|---|
| Total new members this month (November) | 89 |
| Total new members November 2015 | 52 |
| Total new members last month (October) | 105 |
| Total new members October 2015 | 54 |
New members per month since 2009:
Cumulative membership total since 2009
New newsletter subscribers by month
There were 4,615 new subscribers in November.
CEA Financials
We’ve been working on an updated budget since our merger. You can read more detail about our 2016 spending and 2017 budget in our fundraising prospectus.
This month I’ve included here a brief overview of some preliminary figures for CEA UK.
| Figure at end Nov 2016 | Notes | |
|---|---|---|
| Reserves | 6 months | As at end December |
| Income in November | £7,434.75 | |
| Costs in November | £70,246.04 | Overspend due to high demand for Doing Good Better Giveaway |
| October projection of November spending | £63,168.67 | |
| Projection for December spending | £60,793.69 | We are likely to update this as we think significant extra funds to the Doing Good Better giveaway is a valuable investment. |
| Number of salaried employees | 23 |
Below are brief descriptions of the work from the different teams within CEA over the past month. For more-detailed information, please see CEA’s winter fundraising prospectus.
Community and Outreach Division
Online Infrastructure and Marketing Team
We set up the Effective Altruism concepts website in conjunction with the Special Projects Division and have updated our payments system to make it more user friendly.
We released the Doing Good Better podcast and launched a Doing Good Better book giveaway allowing newsletter subscribers to nominate friends to receive free copies of the book as gifts. At time of writing we’ve had 2,464 requests for the book and 2,090 nominations. We sold out Amazon’s US, UK and Canada book reserves so we’re now exploring alternative suppliers.
At the end of November we launched the Giving What We Can pledge campaign with a small team of volunteers. If you’d like to support the campaign you can find simple actions to take in this group.
Community, Chapters and Events Team
EA Global
As we mentioned last month, we will be holding three EA Global conferences next year. We’ve been narrowing down the focus of these conferences. The Boston/Cambridge MA conference in May will focus on more speculative causes and interventions with likely tracks including topics in science, technology, and policy. The Bay Area conference in July/August will be a primarily community-driven event with the EA community shaping the agenda. Finally, the UK conference in October/November will be our “EA Fundamentals” event, with an academic focus that builds on the 2016 Research Meeting. You can read more on our plans here.
EAGx
The recent EAGx in Oxford had over 400 attendees making it the largest ever EA event in Europe. This coming weekend we have EAGx Prague and then EAGx in Madison, DC, and Philadelphia in the first half of next year.
We will be opening a new application round for EAGx soon, part of the new quarterly application system (rather than annual, as we did this year).
Chapters
Our main focus for Chapters has been on launching the GWWC Pledge Campaign with student groups.
Special Projects Division
Philanthropic Advising and Policy Consulting
The philanthropic advising team continued to focus primarily on their research into potential new funding opportunities, focusing on mental health, evidenced-based policy in low-income countries, and meta research. In addition, we advised the Noorda Foundation on its grantmaking strategy; published a commentary in the International Journal of Epidemiology on the evidence around mass deworming; and advised a Giving Pledge member on where to donate (they are now considering a sizable $1,000,000 yearly donation to a GiveWell charity).
Policy
We completed the report “Existential Risks - Diplomacy and Governance” with over 50 collaborators on behalf of the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs and authored a forthcoming paper on biosafety pandemic insurance. Seb chaired a panel at Chatham House, a foreign policy think tank, on the topic of global catastrophic risk reduction and presented his work at the EAGx Oxford conference.
Fundamentals Research
We launched the Effective Altruism Concepts project, which summarizes nearly 200 effective altruism concepts and organizes them in a rough conceptual map of the research space. In addition, several members of the team gave talks at EAGx Oxford on their ongoing research.
The fundamentals research team is accepting applications for a Summer Research Fellowship.
EA institute
The Institute team prepared a grant application for The Leverhulme Trust and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. In addition, Rossa O’Keeffe-O’Donovan was awarded a 3 year Nuffield Postdoc in Economics. He has already been assisting with the Institute team’s economics grant applications and plans to spend a portion of his time while at Oxford working with the Institute.
About the emails/Q&A
What are the CEA supporters emails?
These are emails we are sending monthly to key supporters of CEA (e.g. major donors, current and some past staff, advisors etc). This to keep people in the loop about our work and demonstrate transparency. They include things like our progress on our key metrics and the state of our finances.
This is different from things like the EA newsletters or the GWWC members newsletter which are both quite public facing and aiming to get people more involved in EA. The CEA supporters updates have a more internal feel and are for people already strongly invested in our work.
Who are they sent to?
Everyone on this list. If you think there’s anyone missing please add them.
What is the process for creating the CEA supporter emails/How do you decide what content to include?
Using this document we collect updates from all of you, across CEA, and use this to provide highlights in the email. This does mean that we don’t guarantee your update will be included. If you do not have anything to include, please leave your team’s section blank.
What do you need from me?
If your team has any updates you think our key stakeholders should know about please add that here. Please keep it to a couple of sentences only.
Can I see an example of a past one to give me ideas of what to write?
Yes, you can find past versions in this folder.