EA Germany's Strategy for 2023

By Sarah Tegeler, Patrick Gruban šŸ”ø @ 2023-01-08T08:30 (+126)

Based on interviews with stakeholders, feedback from German community members and other national community builders, the new co-directors of EA Germany (EAD) drafted this strategy for 2023.

Summary

Background

EA Germany (EAD)

In the 2020 EA Survey, 7.4% of participants were from Germany, the third largest population behind the US and the UK. Apart from the US, Germany has the largest population and GNI of the ten largest countries in the survey. Germany has about 50 volunteer community builders in 25 local / university groups. 458 people have taken the GWWC pledge, and more than 400 Germans visited EAGxBerlin in September 2022. In 2021, Effektiv Spenden raised 18.86 Mio. Euros for effective charities.

The registered association EA Germany was founded in 2019 as Netzwerk fĆ¼r Effektiven Altruismus Deutschland e.V. (NEAD) by EAs in Germany and has a board of volunteers. In parallel, one person on a national CEA Community Building Grant (CBG) worked independently from the association from 2020-22. The German website effektiveraltruismus.de was run by the national regranting organisation Effektiv Spenden. In late 2021, NEAD started offering employer-of-record services to grantees and EA organisations as well as fiscal sponsorship for local groups and hired a part-time operations associate on a CBG.

A new board was elected in May 2022 and decided to apply for three CBGs ā€“ two co-directors and one project manager, in addition to the operations associate. The co-directors started in September and November 2022, and the project manager will start in January 2023. Funding for two other roles was promised but is not finalised as of December 2022. The association was renamed Effektiver Altruismus Deutschland (EAD) e.V. in 2022, and will now also run the website effektiveraltruismus.de.

Epistemic Status

Sarah Tegeler and Patrick Gruban drafted this document in November 2022 after having started working together as co-directors in the same month. Both have volunteered as local community builders, but this is their first role in an EA organisation. Most of the work on this document was influenced by interviews with stakeholders, other national EA community builders and reviews of different national strategies. About 150-200 hours went into discussing and writing the strategy.

While the authors are confident the strategy will help foster a healthy community, their overall epistemic status is uncertain about the organisationā€™s and its programsā€™ counterfactual impact. Thus, many areas are not listed under foundational programs. EAD will try out exploratory programs that are conditional on prioritising them according to still-to-be-developed impact estimations.

Current Confusions & Questions are listed below the document.

Role of National EA Organisations

ā€œEA national groups are a solution in search of a problemā€ is the title of an unpublished document that Jonas Vollmer, who helped start the Swiss and German EA Community as co-founder of the EA Foundation in 2016, wrote this summer. Also, this year David Manheim wrote the post, ā€œEA is a global community - but should it be?ā€. Both point to the same question: What counterfactual impact does community building have, especially on a scale bigger than a city or university?

Ultimately funders, professional community builders and volunteers will have to decide if their investment of time and money is best spent on a national organisation. There are clear-cut cases where media outreach by the national group leads straight to a donation or a pledge from someone who would otherwise not have heard of effective charities. But in cases of career changes that may take years and several contact points, it can be much harder to assess the impact of the change and the factors influencing it. If the national group contributes indirectly by helping local community builders, the distance between the input and the actual impact is even greater.

Many national organisations are close to local groups, mainly serving people in the capital city or a small cluster of places. The team of EA Germany and the local community builders are dispersed throughout the country. 

Analysis

SWOT

StrengthsWeaknesses
  • 3rd biggest EA community worldwide
  • EAGxBerlin - biggest EA conference on European mainland
  • 20+ local/university groups
  • Registered association
  • Employer of Record for individuals
  • Fiscal Sponsorship for local groups
  • Effektiv Spenden as major regranting organisation
  • Berlin as hub with co-working space
  • With new team:
    • more capacity
    • new, clearer structures can be established
  • Low number of EAs per capita acc. to EA survey
  • History of double structures: foundation, CB grants, association led to confusion
  • Chaotic communication structures with various tools and lists
  • Some large metropolitan areas in Germany have only small EA groups (e.g. Rhein-Ruhr with 10 mio people)
  • No active outreach/network to media (e.g. longtermism negatively connotated)
OpportunitiesThreats
  • Size of Germany & level of English proficiency
  • Quality and quantity of universities
  • German research landscape (Max Planck, Fraunhoferā€¦)
  • Germany is major EU player in policy
  • Access to a higher number of people by using German as additional language 


 

  • Some CB formats, such as uni groups, might not work as well as in UK/US for cultural reasons
  • No sustainable community in Germany as hubs such as Oxford, Bay attract senior German EAs
  • Distributed population centres and universities
  • One funder & unclear funding situation in the future
  • Legal challenges (e.g. Employer of Records, Fiscal Sponsorship)


 

Stakeholder Interviews & Feedback Forms

We asked more than 60 stakeholders who are part of or knowledgeable of the German community for their expectations, wishes and advice, talked to 40 individuals and received written feedback from 24 people. In addition, we held a session at the EAGxBerlin in September 2022, where we asked ~70 community members for their perspectives, which yielded 133 expectations and wishes. 

The following aspects were regularly named:

Needs and bottlenecks

This analysis is based on the stakeholder interviews, communication with community members and internal discussions that resulted in this strategy. These are our current assumptions that might change with a better understanding of the methodology to be used to measure impact.

For this analysis, we assume that we want to grow the EA community in Germany ā€“ this assumption might change with our learnings around impact measurements.

If we divide the community according to CEAā€™s concentric circle model into audience, followers, participants, contributors and core team, we need to scale the subgroups differently.

CEA's concentric circle model

Potential failure modes ā€“ Premortem

To assess the risks EAD faces, we conducted a Premortem.

Our currently most significant risks are structured in two categories: EAD as an organisation and the German EA community.

EAD

RiskLikelihood (/5)Impact (/5)Importance (/25)Prevention / Mitigation
Registered association is dissolved2510
  • Introduction of accounting systems
  • Legal review
EAD staff quits236
  • Weekly 1-1s
  • 2 retreats/year
  • Feedback forms
EAs in Germany are not satisfied/do not feel represented by EAD236
  • Exchange with local CBs (calls and 1-1s)
  • Exchanges with EAs at retreats, conferences, local group meetings
  • Anonymous feedback forms
Board is held financially liable155Legal review of insurance


 

German EA community

RiskLikelihood (/5)Impact (/5)Importance (/25)Prevention / Mitigation
No impact growth248
  • Refining impact model
  • Regular impact monitoring via CRM
  • Lean startup approach
Fewer EAs in Germany236
  • Media strategy and implementation
  • Local community builder support
  • Exploratory programs that engage more EAs
Deterioration of public and internal image of EA326
  • Diverse representation of the community
  • Media strategy and implementation
  • Low barriers to get in touch (e. g. contact form with quick response time)
Volunteers are discouraged from starting projects 236
  • Actively encourage volunteers to take on new projects


 

You can find our full premortem, along with mitigation/prevention strategies for each identified risk, in this document.

EA Germany

Vision

A diverse and resilient community of ambitious people in and from Germany who are thinking carefully about the worldā€™s biggest problems and taking impactful action to solve them.

What do we mean by that?

Mission

Our mission is to serve as a central point of contact for the German EA community and to continuously improve ways to guide people to take effective action, either directly or by supporting local groups.

We provide coordination, communication, programs and professional services to help grow the impact of the community.

Values

The team of EA Germany aims to run a professionally managed organisation based on the values of

Theory of Change

Click on the image to enlarge or use this link to open in Miro.

Impact Considerations

Coming up with impact estimates that are useful in deciding if a national organisation in a bigger country like Germany matches the impact of other infrastructure investments will be important for the future of EAD as well as other countries. Similarly, prioritising programs will require estimating their impacts. Enabling other countries to learn from EA Germany could increase the impact of the organisation.

EAD aims to generate impact through three dimensions:

  1. Direct Guidance: Guiding people from the first contact with EA to impactful actions (career changes, donations or volunteering)
  2. Indirect Guidance: Helping local community builders (CBs) guiding people to impactful actions
  3. Efficiency Services: Saving time and money for EAs through services

Direct Guidance is a marketing approach because itā€™s about communicating offerings that have value for people. Finding the people that could be interested in making a change to effective altruistic actions, guiding them through the process of learning and connecting while keeping them engaged up to the point where they take action and beyond is a multi-step process. We expect most people to have multiple touchpoints with content and people along the way, like media, the EAD website, newsletter, books, local community events, fellowships, EAG(x) or 1-1s. Each is expected to affect the personā€™s engagement and the likelihood of taking the next step in larger commitments. Looking back at a person's steps until they made a large change, we can ask them what share of the decision they attribute to the touchpoints along the way. In marketing, this is called multi-touch attribution.

In evaluating the impact of different programs such as PR, website content, fellowships, retreats etc., we use the product of these factors:

Currently this is our first very rough sketch in thinking about impact measurement. It will take time to break it down into a simple, useful model containing enough information to make principled decisions about program priorities. Weā€™re developing it as we havenā€™t seen a framework for comparing the impact of programs in community building. However, we might find a better one and abandon this approach.

The key uncertainties for this model are:

Working on this model will be part of the first step of prioritising potential exploratory programs.

Indirect Guidance can be seen as a combination of applying the model of Direct Guidance to look at the impact of local community builders and the impact of touchpoints of EAD with CBs. We expect the impact estimate on the local level to be a rough estimate of the average impact we expect local groups to have.

Efficiency Services is relatively straightforward as we can estimate the time and costs weā€™re saving EAs in providing services.

Focus Areas

We list our foundational programs below. Our foundational programs are the basis of our work and we will offer them throughout the year. 

For each program, we added how we consider the impact to be measured in the future by referring to the model introduced in Impact Considerations.

In addition to the foundational programs listed, we plan to try several exploratory programs within the next year.

Volunteers are invited to initiate programs themselves, even if they overlap with our planned strategy. We encourage volunteers to contact us for collaboration and support. We are also happy to hand over programs that we have started to volunteers.

Foundational Programs

These programs are either the continuation of existing ones or programs that seem broadly beneficial to grow a sustainable community. However, after we have worked out the impact considerations in more depth, we will review the effectiveness of the foundational programmes and discontinue them if necessary. The implementation should be narrow and efficient to leave enough resources for exploratory programs. The measurements mentioned below are initial considerations that will be refined in the course of further considerations on impact measurement. 

An overview of the planned activities in 2023 can be found here: Calendar 2023

Exploratory Programs

We are planning to use the lean startup methodology as a basis for developing and testing new programs. The potential programmes could cover a wide range of topics, such as new volunteer programs, funding diversification, outreach to specific target groups or incubating new organisations. After developing actionable impact metrics, we will use an iterative process:

  1. Build: 
    1. Prioritize programs based on expected impact and scalability
    2. Develop a minimum viable product (MVP)
  2. Measure: Test the MVP and gather impact data
  3. Learn: 
    1. Decide to shut down, scale or pivot the program
    2. Write up a report if others might be able to learn from our experiences

The bandwidth of programs we can develop and test will depend on the capacity of employees and volunteers. With more team members, we are able to scale by having parallel streams of the build-measure-learn cycle.

If we identify programs with higher impact opportunities, we might prioritise scaling them over launching further exploratory programs for some time.

As we are not sure at this stage what exploratory programs we will pursue and we want to avoid confusion, this strategy does not include a list of possible programmes.

Confusions & Questions


Konstantin @ 2023-01-17T13:58 (+15)

Thanks for writing this! 
 

Your high-level strategy sounds great but is also fairly generic, so hard to criticize. One theme throughout seems to be an emphasis on creating solid structures and making sure everything is legally backed. I think this is important-especially after the FTX crisis-though I sense a risk of an overemphasis on security. EA Germany is yet a small community and has so much room to grow! I think we need a large number of capable people to solve some serious problems fairly soon. EA Germany should thus emphasize ambition and growth, primarily through targeted outreach and connecting the community better internationally.

I was hoping to learn more about the concrete projects that you are working on/ about to start. Here are some ideas that I see as priorities (Most are already happening to some degree):

Thanks for all the work you are already doing! It's always easy to suggest a lot of projects without having to start them myself :D

Looking forward to your strategy playing out.
 

Sarah Tegeler @ 2023-01-17T17:25 (+6)

Thank you for the feedback and the suggestions, Konstantin! For Berlin, we are currently hiring a paid community manager who will organise regular events and work together with the volunteer organisers in Berlin. For the other suggestions: We are currently developing actionable impact metrics and will use an iterative process to prioritise several ideas. We will share our impact considerations on the forum and keep everyone updated with our newsletter (https://www.effektiveraltruismus.de/#newsletter) about what projects we start.

Konstantin @ 2023-01-17T20:22 (+2)

Sounds good! Thanks for the reply.
I think I would additionally find it helpful to get some insights into what you are prioritizing to give feedback on project plans (or maybe your future post on impact metrics will include that?) - but I know communication takes a lot of effort, so it may be easier to just receive that feedback as you're rolling out the projects. Looking forward to your next post

Vaidehi Agarwalla @ 2023-01-09T00:02 (+12)

Really appreciate the thoroughness and transparency of this post and looking forward to digging more into it at some point! Thank you for sharing :)

marcel.steimke @ 2023-01-10T13:49 (+4)

Thank you very much for sharing this! I just skimmed it and will come back to study it in more detail when thinking about EA Switzerland's strategy. Looking forward to seeing you execute this strategy and to exploring synergies between the German-speaking EA community! :-)

SebastianSchmidt @ 2023-01-11T20:27 (+3)

Thanks for this - it looks great! Just a few thoughts.

1. How much time did you invest in the entire process?

2. Impact measurement:
Overall, I like the idea of the multi-touch attribution model useful but it'd come down to how you operationalize it. In particular, I wonder whether the expected impact of an individual is sufficiently operationalized in a way that's going to be useful and pragmatic for you. For Future Academy, we found some combination HEA and 80K's IASPC quite useful (although we haven't seen the process to completion yet).

3. Time allocation across programs:
Do you have forecasts from previous iterations of the programs that can inform the time distribution?

4. The Lean start-up BML seems like a good model to me. Perhaps batching the different phases in a quarterly way by front-loading the build and then have the rest of the quarter (time period) be about the measure and learning part.

5. Failure-modes:
Great that you did the analysis. The "importance" section appear too conservative to me (e.g., it seems as if you're ranking it on scale of 25). 


 

Patrick Gruban @ 2023-01-11T21:55 (+4)

Thank you for the detailed feedback! Iā€™ll quickly try to answer:

  1. Without looking it up I would say 200-250 hours in total (including a list of exploratory programs that we didnā€™t publish)
  2. Weā€™re currently looking more in detail at the impact model and Iā€˜m curious to know more about your approach. As we write weā€™re still unsure if we can come up with something that is operational.
  3. We could probably get time estimates from previous programs but didnā€™t see that this would be helpful as we decided to pursue them anyway.
  4. My feeling would be to scope the build process by defining the minimal features and not by time. Similarly different programs will yield useful measurements on different time scales. But weā€™re still not at the point where thought much about this.
  5. I see this can be confusing as the third column is just multiplying the first two. We then only used the product for ranking. We probably should have stated this in a clearer way.
Konstantin @ 2023-01-17T20:24 (+7)

Weakly held opinion that you could be investing too much into this progress. I'd expect to hit diminishing returns after ~50-100 hours (though have no expertise whatsoever)

Patrick Gruban @ 2023-01-18T07:08 (+3)

I agree that there are diminishing returns and wouldn't see too much value in continuing at this point. The time spent on strategy (about three weeks for the two of us) was also the first time working in this new role, getting to know each other and getting to know stakeholders in the community. As we wanted to lay the basis for the next years of the organisation, this didn't seem overly long, especially as we could present the document to the board within the first month of my joining.

Konstantin @ 2023-01-18T07:26 (+2)

That sounds very sensible

SebastianSchmidt @ 2023-01-12T17:35 (+1)

Thank you. All those comments make sense to me. I just messaged you privately to request your email so I can share our impact documents.

 


 

Patrick Gruban @ 2023-03-14T06:35 (+2)

As discussed in the impact considerations section, we continued work on a more useful model for impact estimation and just published this post about it: A BOTEC-Model for Comparing Impact Estimations in Community Building

Sarah Tegeler @ 2023-09-25T08:10 (+1)

For more up-to-date informoation, you can find our mid-year update here!