EA Netherlands' Annual Strategy for 2024

By James Herbert, mariekedev @ 2024-06-05T15:07 (+40)

Summary

In Q4 last year we spent time strategising for 2024. We already shared the resulting strategy with our amazing organisers at our Christmas EA Organiser Meetup but we thought it'd be valuable to share it here as well.

We think the EA community in the Netherlands can be much bigger, we want to ensure we have a good reputation, and we want to do something about the lack of opportunities for Dutch EAs to put their values into practice through their work or volunteering. 

This being the case, our 'guiding policy' is targeted expansion whilst ensuring growth does not compromise our core epistemic values. This will require maintaining a balance between outreach, intellectual rigour, and field building. 

More concretely, we will:

• Develop and implement a communications strategy targeting people who we think would like to be a part of the community, but don't yet know of its existence (thus leading to growth, a stronger reputation, and more new projects)
• Develop and implement an EA-related-research field-building strategy (thus contributing to our level of intellectual rigour and providing more career opportunities)
• Use EAGxUtrecht to encourage and support attendees in starting new projects or initiatives (thus leading to more career opportunities)
• Increase our use of volunteers to help with all of the above 

Meanwhile, we will maintain our existing programmes, e.g., our national EA crash course, our support for organisers around the country, and our co-working office.

Introduction

Previously, we shared our theory of change. In this post, we're sharing the annual strategy we've been working with in 2024. Together, these are our main strategic documents. They are supplemented by a set of five-year aspirational goals^[1] and quarterly OKRs. 

We developed this strategy in Q4 of 2023 after conducting 20 or so 1-1 calls with key stakeholders. We then held a feedback session using the near-final draft with 30+ key organisers at our Christmas get-together (we sure know how to have a good time!).

We developed it using advice from Rumelt’s book, Good Strategy Bad Strategy. It consists of a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and a set of coherent actions.

It’s important to note that our strategy for 2024 is not an exhaustive description of what we will work on. Instead, it describes what we will focus on improving whilst continuing to run our established programmes. For example, we will continue as usual with our national intro programme, our support for organisers around the country, and our co-working office.

Diagnosis

We begin by defining and explaining the challenges we face and making a ‘diagnosis’. This simplified model of reality allows us to make sense of the situation and engage in further problem-solving. 

The first challenge is the size of our community. With an estimated ~700 effective altruists in the Netherlands, we’re smaller than many student associations. This limits our influence and obstructs our capacity to create substantial positive change: namely, helping more people use evidence and careful reasoning when trying to help others. 

Suppose we want to end factory farming or spend a not-insignificant proportion of society’s resources on ensuring the longterm future goes well. In that case, more people need to get involved and start new initiatives. 

EAN has a good track record here. Many new initiatives from the Netherlands have an origin story closely tied to our community, e.g. Doneer Effectief, several AI Safety Initiatives, and the Tien Procent Club. If we have a bigger community then more of this can happen. 

The second challenge is the proliferation of negative narratives surrounding effective altruism, primarily in English-speaking regions, and the early signs these are beginning to influence the narrative in the Netherlands and hinder collaborations with potentially useful allies, e.g. policy wonks, cultural institutions, researchers, and the general population. 

The third challenge is the lack of events for highly engaged EAs, e.g., the recent community-led EA UnConference at the EAN office. Doing good better is hard, but a strong community helps. 

The fourth challenge is the lack of truly impactful work opportunities for people in the movement, both in the Netherlands and abroad. Effective altruism is a research field and a social movement that tries to put its research into practice. We have the core of a social movement in the Netherlands, but we don’t have much by way of a research field or a set of organisations putting said research into practice. This means that, while we have many people in the community who want to use their time and their talents to do good, we lack the organisations that can provide the work. There are opportunities abroad, but not enough, and the fact they are abroad limits their capacity to absorb talent located in the Netherlands. 

In an ideal world, we would incubate new organisations, but this is very hard. Another approach would be to focus on effective giving, but we’re lucky enough to already have two organisations in the Netherlands that do this very well (Doneer Effectief and the Tien Procent Club). The next best thing is to provide talent development programmes that address known bottlenecks and to learn more about opportunities to do impactful work in the Netherlands in existing institutions.^[2] Again, we’re fortunate that the forthcoming School of Moral Ambition will do this for more ‘mainstream’ fields such as alternative protein and tobacco regulation. This is fortunate because the funders we have the best relationships with are not prioritising these fields.^[3] This frees us to focus on developing talents and fields related to the more niche cause area of global catastrophic risk reduction. 

On the plus side, we have several things going for us. We have firmly established our educational and organiser support programmes, and this has resulted in 100s of intro programme graduates every year and more than a dozen local groups. Beyond this ‘principles first’ EA social change work, we have contributed to the growth of the burgeoning Dutch AI safety field. Looking further back, EAN played a significant role in the founding of valuable projects such as Doneer Effectief and the Tien Procent Club. Looking ahead, we have secured funding for another EAGx in 2024.

Guiding policies

Given the above diagnosis, we have developed a guiding policy for dealing with the challenges we face in 2024. It is a ‘guiding’ policy because it channels action in certain directions without defining exactly what shall be done. Our guiding policy is targeted expansion whilst maintaining epistemic integrity. 

Coherent actions

Guiding policies are not enough. Strategy is about action. Therefore, given the above guiding policy, we have developed a set of coherent actions. 

Again, it’s important to note that the below is not an exhaustive description of what we will work on in 2024. Instead, it describes where we will push ourselves forward. For example, we will continue as usual with our national intro programme, our organiser support programme, our co-working space, etc.

Develop and implement a communications strategy

1. Develop a communications strategy. We don’t yet know what this will consist of, but things like targeted public relations campaigns, social media outreach, and content creation tailored to various audience segments in the Netherlands, seem like a good first guess. We also think, based on advice from PR professionals, that this strategy should highlight the positive impact of EA.
2. Use this strategy to apply for funding for the targeted dissemination of relevant high-quality Dutch content relating to effective altruism and reducing global catastrophic risks.

Develop and implement an EA-related-research field-building strategy for the Netherlands 

1. Our current best guess is that this will involve a programme for identifying and nurturing emerging research talent in the Netherlands, particularly focused on areas related to Global Catastrophic Risks.
2. Use this strategy to apply to Open Philanthropy for funding to implement it.

Host EAGxUtrecht 2024

• A 2.5 day event held in July in the Randstad, with approx 50% of attendees from the Netherlands and 50% from abroad (mostly North West Europe).
  • Overall objective: deepen and grow the effective altruism community in the Netherlands, with a particular focus on starting projects. 

Double-down on our volunteering programme

• Increase our use of volunteers, including an internship programme, to increase our capacity as an organisation and to offer more structured opportunities for EA-aligned work experience in the Netherlands.

How we will evaluate the impact of our three main actions

Our three main projects in 2024 will be: 

1. Marketing and communications
2. EA-related research fieldbuilding
3. EAGxNetherlands 2024

Marketing and communications

We still need to develop the strategy and so it is not currently possible to say in detail how we will evaluate it. Broadly speaking, we want to increase awareness of, and inclination towards, effective altruism amongst people in the Netherlands who we think would find effective altruism to be a valuable project. We also want to ensure inclination remains high amongst the general public. Therefore, to evaluate the impact of this project, we will probably conduct surveys to measure awareness and inclination amongst members of our target audience and the general public before and after the interventions outlined in the strategy, whatever they may be, are implemented. 

EA-related research fieldbuilding

We still need to develop the strategy and so it is not currently possible to say in detail how we will evaluate it. Broadly speaking, we want to develop the research fields associated with effective altruism. Our current best guess for doing this is by providing support to young researchers who are interested in these fields. Therefore, to evaluate the impact of this project, we will probably monitor the number of young researchers engaging with our initiatives and we will conduct surveys to learn about their experiences during their engagement. 

EAGxNetherlands 2024

Our objectives and indicators for this event are listed below. 

1. Keep costs down
   • Cost-per-attendee target: <€500
2. Help attendees make new connections
   • Total connections: 7,000
     • EAGxRotterdam 2022: 5200 
     • EAGxNordics 2023: 5900
     • EAGxBoston 2022: 9000 
3. Inspire people to start new organisations
   • 50 attendees report planning to found an EA organisation in the ‘actions’ section of the survey
     • EAGxCambridge 2023: 16 reports
4. Inspire people to give effectively
   • 50 attendees report planning to take the Giving What We Can pledge in the ‘actions’ section of the survey
     • EAGxCambridge 2023: 12 reports
5. Ensure professionals feel welcome
   • Increase the proportion of attendees who describe themselves as ‘Working (6-15 years of experience) to 10%
     • EAGxNordics 2023: 6.7%
     • EAGxBerlin: 6.4%
6. Ensure reasonable gender diversity
   • Max 55% of attendees identify as male
     • EAGxCambridge 2023: 67.4%
     • EAGxBerkely 2022: ‘50-60%’
     • EAGxRotterdam 2022: 60%
   • 50:50 speaker gender ratio
      

1. ^{^}

   We have been asked by a key stakeholder not to share this too widely as it contains goals that overlap with their goals. 

2. ^{^}

   For example, this survey on AI Safety bottlenecks suggests a need for people with more experience, policymakers, senior ML researchers, and information security experts. 

3. ^{^}

   Update: the EA Infrastructure Fund might be able to provide more support to ‘principles-first’ EA work next year, according to this post.