EA - Growth and engagement in EA groups: 2022 Groups Census results by BrianTan

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: Growth and engagement in EA groups: 2022 Groups Census results, published by BrianTan on June 23, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.SummaryIn December 2022, CEA sent out a survey to all groups. 309 EA groups reported that they were active. However, based on our records, we estimate that ~63 active EA groups didn’t fill out the census. Therefore, it’s important to note that the data in this post are not representative of all active groups.Almost half of all active groups (309) are university groups (150). After that, most groups are location-based (53 city groups, 25 city-university hybrid groups, and 40 national groups). There were 40 groups of other types (e.g. workplace).The number of groups has been growing quickly in recent years. The net growth in the number of groups was 19% in 2020–2021 and 31% in 2021–2022. Most of the groups that were founded in recent years are university groups: the number of university groups roughly doubled between 2020 and 2022.We hypothesize that the two main reasons for the fast growth rate in general are CEA’s University Group Accelerator Program (UGAP) and the increased focus on and funding for EA community building in 2021–2022.We’d like to note that we don’t aim to just maximize the number of groups or members — we care about the quality and fidelity of groups, and we’re taking steps to measure and help improve group quality.There are active groups in 56 countries. Most of the currently active groups are in Europe and North America (39% and 30% respectively). However, the number of groups in Asia, South America, and Africa significantly grew in 2022, ranging from 65-86% growth per continent that year.We think the high growth in these continents is partially due to UGAP, EA Virtual Programs, and other community building efforts (e.g. by the Spanish-speaking community).We also asked groups for attendance and engagement data.The data we have shows that the median group size remained constant between 2020 and 2022, although due to changes in the questions we asked between the 2020 and 2022 surveys, we can only meaningfully compare the attendance and engagement data of groups on two measures (total event attendees and engaged EAs).While the total number of attendees per group stayed the same, the number of members who engaged with EA deeply — defined as 100 hours of engagement with EA content and taking some significant action — increased significantly. That is, the mean number of “engaged EAs” per group doubled (from 6 to 12) and the median even tripled (from 2 to 6). We think it’s plausible that this suggests that it has become easier to deeply engage with EA for people around the world (e.g. through accessible fellowships, more conferences, and higher Forum activity).As expected, engagement data across all measures we asked for were skewed: a small share of the groups produced the majority of outcomes in terms of number of events organized, EAG(x) attendees, engaged EAs, and total attendees. The least skewed measures were the number of regular attendees and intro fellowship participants per group. We discuss potential explanations for this in this post.On average, organizers rated their satisfaction with CEA’s support as 7.6/10. This is roughly the same as in 2020 — though it’s worth noting that the number of groups that CEA supports, and thus the number that rated their satisfaction with CEA’s support, has increased by ~50%.Compared to two years ago, there was an increase both in groups that are dissatisfied and groups that are very satisfied with CEA support. We think that one of the reasons may be that CEA’s support has become more targeted at specific groups (e.g. city/national groups in key locations and new uni groups in UGAP).Profession-based and virtual groups were on average less satisfied with support fro...