EA - EA Estonia's Impact in 2022 by RichardAnnilo

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA Estonia's Impact in 2022, published by RichardAnnilo on May 29, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.BackgroundThis report is about January to December 2022 in EA Estonia, corresponding to our last grant period (funding from the EA Infrastructure Fund for 1 FTE and group expenses).Quick facts about Estonia: it has a population of 1.3 million and is placed both geographically and culturally between the Nordics and Eastern Europe. Our language has 14 noun cases, it is the birthplace of 10 unicorns, and we have the best mushroom scientists. Go figure.In our national EA group, there are 23–30 people whom I would consider to be “highly engaged” (meaning they have spent more than 100 hours engaging with EA content, have developed career plans and have taken significant steps in pursuit of doing good). You could expect around 30 people to attend our largest community event (Figure 1) and our Slack channel has 50–60 active weekly members (Figure 2).Figure 1: Attendees of our largest community event, the EA Estonia Summer Retreat. August 2022.Figure 2. EA Estonia Slack statistics from its creation. Weekly active members have been oscillating between 40 and 65 throughout 2022.Group strategyHere are the main metrics we used to evaluate our impact:Awareness: Number of people aware of the term “effective altruism” and EA Estonia.Activities:Introductory talksDirect outreachSocial media outreachFirst engagement: Number of people who took action because of our outreach.Activities:Introductory courseCause-specific reading groupsCareer planning: Number of people that develop career plans based on EA principles that are well informed and well reasoned.Activities:Career courseTaking action: Number of people taking significant action based on EA-informed career plans (e.g. starting full-time jobs, university degrees).Activities:1-1 career callsPeer-mentoringDirectly sharing opportunitiesConcerns with this model:The actual impact comes when people take action within high-impact jobs, which we currently don't measure.We don't measure value drift or other kinds of decreased engagement after taking significant next steps.This model doesn't prioritize targeting existing Highly Engaged EAs (HEAs) to have a higher impact.This also doesn't include a more meta-level goal of keeping people engaged and interested while moving towards an HEA status. We do organize social events for this reason, however the impact of them is not quantified.Regarless of these concerns, the main theory of change feels relatively straight-forward: (1) we find young altruistically-minded people who are unclear about their future career plans, then (2) we make them aware of the effective altruism movement and various high-impact career paths, and then (3) we prompt them to develop explicit career plans and encourage them to take action upon them.Below I will go into more detail regarding the goals, activities and results of 2022 in two categories: (i) outreach and (ii) growing HEAs. I will end with a short conclusion and key takeaways for next year.I OutreachGoal: 5,000 new people who know what “effective altruism” means and that there is an active local group in Estonia.Actual: 20,776 people reached.Activities:Liina Salonen started working full-time as the Communictions Specialist in EA Estonia.Reached at least 20,000 people on Facebook with the Introductory Course social media campaignStudent fair tabling.At least 155 people reached (played the Giving Game)Goal: 10 lecturers mentioning EA EstoniaActual: 1 lecturers reachedVisited a philosophy lecture. Number of students: 20.Talked about effective altruism and longtermism. Created a discussion with the lecturer.Suggested people sign up for our career course. Nobody responded.Wrote to two other philosophy lecturers, but the...