EA - National EA groups shouldn’t focus on city groups by DavidNash

Welcome 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: National EA groups shouldn’t focus on city groups, published by DavidNash on June 5, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.SummaryNational EA groups have a variety of strategies available to them, but many seem to focus on supporting local city groups as the main activity with less consideration of other interventions. I think this leads to neglecting more impactful activities for national groups. Potentially this is because they are following more established groups/resources where city groups are given as a default example.Most people interested in EA are not joining local EA groups, and most people who could get more involved in EA don’t necessarily want to do that via joining a local group firstFrom EA London attendance data for 2016-18, out of ~1300 people roughly 75% attended just 1 event, and only 10% attended 4 or more which suggests that most weren't aiming to become regular membersThere is an unseen majority of people who know about EA and want to have more impact who are neglected by a city-first strategyEA should attract more people than those also looking for communityCommunity is still important, but should be seen as additional rather than a main focusCommunity can mean a lot of different things but I’m defining community in this post as a more densely connected subset of a network based around a locationIn practice this means a community is more likely to involve social gatherings, daily/weekly in person touchpointsA network will involve conferences, mentorship, newsletters/social media, monthly/yearly touchpointsThere is probably value to having some city organisers if there is a critical mass of people interested in EA and the city has strong comparative advantagesAlternative strategies could include cause specific field building, career advising, supporting professional networks nationally, organisation incubation, translationThe Unseen MajorityWhen most people hear about EA for the first time, it’s usually via an online resource (80,000 Hours, GWWC, podcast) or word of mouth. The message they receive is that EA cares about having more impact and that EA as a movement is trying to help people have more impact.This can contrast to the experience of going along to a local group (which is regularly suggested as a good way to get more involved with EA), and experiencing the main message as ‘join our community’, with less focus on helping that person have impact. This could lead to people who are focused on generating a lot of impact bouncing away from EA. Anecdotally I have heard people say that they don’t find that much value from attending local group events but are still interested in EA and focus on having an impact in their career.For the subset of people who are looking for community, local groups can be great. But for a lot of people who do not have that preference/have other life circumstances, this isn’t what they are looking for. People already have communities they are a part of (family, friends, professional, hobbies) and often don’t have time for many more. Anecdotally from conversations with other organisers the people most likely to join are those looking for a community - students, recent graduates or people who are new to the city.This can be self reinforcing as the people who are likely to keep on attending meetups are the ones with spare time and lacking community. We often use neglectedness when choosing cause areas, leading to support of unseen majorities - people in poorer parts of the world, animals and future beings. But when it comes to movement building there is less thought paid to those who aren’t visible. A lot of strategies I have seen are about increasing attendance or engagement at events rather than providing value to people who may not be as interested in attending lots of events each year but still wan...