Framing Outreach

<aside> 🗣️ Outreach should be thought of as an invitation, not as persuasion. In other words, we’re enabling altruistic students to do good better, not convincing them they have to.

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• This means we shouldn’t be bothered when someone just isn’t interested in the ideas. If we make our invitation, and they don’t find it appealing that’s totally okay. There will be many people that do.
• Our job as group organizers is just to know our stuff, and present the core ideas of EA accurately. There’s no need to twist Effective Altruism to “get” someone to join

Note: this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put effort into making your club a desirable place to be. It’s possible to avoid criticizing people’s past choices, avoid unnecessarily polarizing discussions, and generally be friendly without twisting EA’s core ideas.

Keep your goals in mind

Most EA university Groups’ ultimate goal is something like “do as much good as possible”. We think that aggressive, broad outreach is not the best way to achieve this goal. Outreach is important, but we think establishing excellent group culture, and inspiring impactful career change probably does more good. We’d rather see a small group of students dedicated to EA principles than hundreds with a vague and incomplete notion of what EA is.

Optimize for Skill Building not Outreach

Outreach is important, but we think top Uni Organizers should spend more time focused on skill building, or helping other members skill build. This post summarizes some of our reasoning.

<aside> ⬆️ Skill building → taking action to improve one’s epistemics, knowledge of key global problems, or career.

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You can free up time for this sort of work by,

• Focusing on the most efficient outreach strategies.
  • Most groups should join the activities fair, run faculty directed outreach, and table before spending time on physical outreach and social media pushes.
  • A step by step walkthrough of an outreach campaign can be found in Asana (For UGAP Groups only) or in GDocs (For everyone)
• Using resources and templates
  • EA Groups are more than willing to share their resources. Before starting a new outreach project, look online (e.g., the Groups Resource Center, Global Challenges Project) or ask in the EA Groups slack for existing resources.

Do outreach early

Early outreach reaches students before they become overwhelmed with school or join other clubs. An outreach push which starts the week before school and ends two weeks into school is considerably more effective than later outreach.

<aside> 🕢 Harvard EA organizes their outreach around a “crunch time” which starts the day freshmen move in and ends a couple weeks into the school year. We recommend new groups adopt this practice.

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We recommend devoting a significant fraction of your capacity to outreach during this period. Then switch your focus to non-outreach projects.

If you’re able to execute a strong outreach push very early in the semester, consider moving your Fellowship application deadline to within the first two weeks of school. This forces people to commit before things get busy.

Take an experimental approach

The information in this guide is a summary of what works best on average for EA Groups in the US and UK. It’s perfectly reasonable that some of our broadest recommendations don’t apply for your school.