After many months of hard work from everyone on the .impact team, this year's EA Survey results are finally available.
It's a long document (~25 pages), however, so we've put it together in an external PDF.
Introduction
In November 2015, a team from .impact released a survey of the effective altruist community. The survey offers data to supplement and clarify our perception of people who identify as Effective Altruists, with the aim of better understanding the community and how to promote EA.
The results should be useful to anyone involved in movement-building, analysing the impact of the Effective Altruism community as a whole (especially with reference to donations), or anyone who’s interested in a snapshot of what Effective Altruism looked like in 2015.
Summary of Important Findings
- 2904 sincere people took the survey, and out of those 2352 people would consider themselves EAs. All the following results consider only the people who’d consider themselves EAs. This is three times as many people as last year!
- The most popular way for the people we sampled to hear about EA was Less Wrong (20%), followed by ‘personal connection’ (11%) and ‘Book/article/blog post etc.’ (11%), but 20% of people didn’t answer this question. More people heard about EA for the first time this year than any other year.
- 37% of EAs sampled identified Poverty as the ‘Top Priority’ cause area. The next-most-popular top priority cause was prioritisation, with 9.4% of EAs sampled identifying this as the Top Priority.
- 885 of the EAs sampled donated money to an EA or EA-recommended organisation. The most popular organisations to donate to were AMF, SCI, and Give Directly.
- Total donations (in 2014) from EAs sampled were $6,765,244, with the median being $330; this is very skewed by large donors.
- We recorded 56 donating both last year and this year, and the median increase in donation amount was $296
- 436 (37% of those who answered the question) said yes to ‘Do insecurities about not being “EA enough” sometimes prevent you from taking action or participating more in the EA community?’
- 717 (64% of those who answered) said that EA was welcoming, 103 (9%) said that EA was unwelcoming.
The Full Document
You can read the rest at the linked PDF! -->
A Note on Methodology
One large concern is that we used a convenience sample, trying to sample as many EAs as we can in places we knew where to find them. But we didn't get everyone, and those who replied are not likely to be representative.
This year we initially launched the survey on the EA Facebook page under strict instructions not to share it further, and so we can be fairly sure that the initial group of people sampled were all members of the EA Facebook Group, although not necessarily representative ones. This gives us a benchmark to compare the other subpopulations against.
As we said last year,
"It’s easy to survey, say, all Americans in a reliable way, because we know where Americans live and we know how to send surveys to a random sample of them. Sure, there may be some difficulties with subpopulations who are too busy or subpopulations who don’t have landlines (though surveys now call cell phones).
Contrast this with trying to survey effective altruists. It’s hard to know who is an EA without asking them first, but we can’t exactly send surveys to random people all across the world and hope for the best. Instead, we have to do our best to figure out where EAs can be found, and try to get the survey to them.
We did our best, but some groups may have been oversampled (more survey respondents, by percentage, from that group than are actually in the true population of all EAs) or undersampled (not enough people in our sample from that subpopulation to be truly representative)."
This is a limitation that we can’t fully resolve, although we have tried to make some headway by using the staggered-release mechanism described above.
At the bottom of this report, we include a methodological appendix that has a discussion of the limitations of convenience sampling, and a comparison of the different subpopulations in the survey, ultimately concluding that the data we have doesn't allow us to detect a statistically significant difference between different subpopulations in donations and primary cause choice, although certain demographic indicators - such as meat consumption and gender - are different between the subpopulations.
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Overall, this is the most comprehensive survey yet of people who identify as Effective Altruists, and should help to inform discussion about the movement for the next year.
Excellent job, thanks for taking the time to analyze the data so well. Kudos!
I'm glad the survey asked questions about how welcomed people feel. It's really important to help people feel welcomed in order to motivate them to engage with EA well. It's concerned to me that 36% percent felt that the EA community was not actively welcoming, and of those a quarter felt that the EA community was actively unwelcoming.
This number is very similar to the outcomes of another question that makes me highly concerned, "Do insecurities about not being "EA enough" sometimes prevent you from taking action or participating more in the EA community?" The fact that 37% answered yes make this an obvious area of concern, as the survey report correctly identified. I'd be highly interested in seeing what is the correlation between these two questions, and would be willing to bet money the correlation is not insignificant.
Of course, the likely number for these 2 questions is much higher, since many more of the people who feel this way would not take the survey. I think Julia's recent post has some great ideas about how to address this issue.
I'd also like to see the correlation between those people who feel this way and the amount and proportion of income of donations. Like others, I'm concerned that the median number is only $330. Are the people who perceive a high obligation to give and insecurities about not being "EA enough" also the ones not donating much or are they donating more than the average EA? That would impact how to address the question of how to get the median donation up.
On the positive side, I see that the average proportion donated by EAs is 7.5% of their annual income, which is 350% higher than the average donated by Americans. Nice to see that number.
Overall, I think that being more welcoming would cause more people to be more positively engaged with the EA community, identify more strongly as EAs, and be more eager to give their money and time. This should be a win-win!