CEA's work in 2022

CEA and the EA community have both grown and changed a lot in the year since our last org-wide update. We (the CEA Executive Office team) have written this post to update the community on the work CEA has done in 2022.

This post is mostly focused on the progress of our core work in 2022, not on reflections on anything related to FTX's collapse (though we touch on these issues in the final sections of the full post).

This is a summary of our review published on the EA Forum. You can read the full post here.

2022 in summary

2022 was a year of continued growth for CEA and our programs.

What went well?

Growth of our key public-facing programs

Many of our programs scaled up very rapidly, while maintaining (in our opinion) roughly constant quality.

Some examples of this:

• Events: The number of connections made at our events grew by around 5x this year, which should help many more people find a way to contribute to important problems.
• Online: Engagement on the EA Forum grew by around 2.9x, helping the spread of important new ideas and richness of discussion.
• Groups: 208 organizers went through our University Groups Accelerator Program (10x growth for a new program starting from a low base), receiving 8 weeks of mentorship designed to accelerate EA journeys for organizers and their groups.

Our top-of-funnel metrics (e.g. for EA.org and Virtual Programs) were more steady, partly (but not entirely) because we focused less on growing them (and more on the other programs and on quality improvements).

You can see a public dashboard with some of our key metrics here.

Expanding community health and communications work

The community health and special projects team has made some extremely strong hires who have taken on important new strands of work. While we continue our work on interpersonal harm, the team’s mandate is now much broader than this, aiming to address important (and potentially trajectory-changing) issues in EA that are receiving insufficient attention.

We helped with media and communications work throughout the year, including spearheading an update to EffectiveAltruism.org, with a new intro essay which we think is a much better representation of EA. In September we hired a head of communications to lead this work, with a focus on communicating EA ideas and related work to the outside world (rather than on CEA’s brand).

Team

The CEA team has roughly doubled in size, while maintaining high retention and morale. People Operations have been focused on helping the team to grow in a healthy way: assisting in hiring rounds and improving onboarding (which now gets very positive feedback). We’ve added many people with crucial new skills (e.g. in product, communications, design), or who add to our existing strengths (e.g. in engineering and event production).

I think that our leadership team has developed especially well over the course of the year, and we’ve begun to train up a strong set of new(er) managers.

What went badly?

As discussed in the conclusion of the full post, we're still reflecting on the FTX collapse, and what (if anything) we should change based on that. So for now, this focuses on non-FTX-related mistakes.

We were too slow to get started on communications

• We were too deferential to other organizations here, and this meant that we started seriously leading and hiring for communications work for EA later than we otherwise would have.
• This lost us vital time, and probably set discussion about EA on a worse trajectory than if we had begun preparing when we initially wanted to.

Cost control

• In particular, we could have reduced EAG spending without much reduction in impact if we had focused more on contract negotiation early in the year. (Though we had a smaller and newer team at the time, so we’re not sure whether focusing heavily on this would have sacrificed our focus on growing EAG.)
• Overall, this still meant that we came in at our “expansion” budget – but we could and should have come in lower than this.

Product failures

• We allowed the EA Forum homepage to be “too meta” for too long in the middle of the year, which promoted lower-quality posts and community drama rather than interesting and productive discussion about how to improve the world. (We addressed the visibility issue by changing the frontpage algorithm, though there isn’t a clear sign that this affected total engagement time with these posts.)
• Our attempts in late 2021 and early 2022 to support top uni groups didn’t pay off as we hoped, and we passed on this strand of work to Open Philanthropy in early 2022.
• Although these were failures, and we should have changed more quickly, we’re still pleased that we changed our plans within a few months in both cases (and in similar less important cases).

(This isn't an exhaustive list, but covers some of the high-level issues.)

Closing thoughts

In an effort to make CEA’s work more legible to the community, we’ve created a dashboard of key metrics from some of our programs. In the spirit of our values, we are publishing this prototype now rather than waiting until we have a perfect product. We’ll monitor community feedback to decide whether to continue, drop, or improve this dashboard, so if you have feedback on what you’d like to see next, we’d welcome comments either on this post or via our anonymous feedback form!

We think that this year was, in many ways, very successful for EA and for CEA. However, the events of the last month or so have cast a pall over some of those achievements. We’re actively reflecting on what this means for CEA and for EA, and making longer-term plans for CEA. We plan to share more of our reflections and plans in due course.

In some ways this is an odd time to post an annual review. But, while we’re reflecting on what we should do differently, we think it’s important to stay committed to our mission, and celebrate the growth we’ve seen in our core programs this year. We’re aware that only with a combination of reflection and hard work can we help the community to have the impact that we hope it can have.

This is a summary of our review published on the EA Forum. You can read the full post here.