Charitable donation (and earning-to-give) has been, and continues to be a prominent, prevalent, and impactful component of the Effective Altruism movement. The EA Survey has been distributed between 2014 and 2020, at roughly 15 month intervals. As a result, surveys were released at various points in the year, ranging from April to August, and no survey was released in 2016. In each survey we asked EAs about their charitable donations in the previous year, and their predicted donations for the year of the survey. Our work in this post/section reports on the 2020 survey (2019 giving), but our analysis extends to all the years of the EA survey.

There are 21 countries with 10 or more respondents - 17 of which are in North America, Europe, or Australasia. 92% of our respondents came from these countries. The percentage of respondents outside the top 5 countries has grown in recent years, from 22% in 2018, to 26% in 2019 and 31% in 2020. There are fewer EAs from the UK among those who joined EA more recently (in contrast to steady or growing numbers elsewhere). The largest numbers of the most highly engaged EAs come from the US (39%), followed by Europe (29%) and then the UK (21%) and the rest of the world (14%). The UK has the highest proportion of male EAs (78%), followed by the rest of Europe (73%), and then the US and the rest of the world (67-68%). Europe has the lowest average age of EAs (28.1 years), followed by the US (29.9), the UK (30.6), and then the rest of the world (31.2). Overall satisfaction with the EA community is lower in the US and UK than in other regions and countries.

In this post we describe people’s self-reported levels of engagement in EA, what activities related to effective altruism they have completed and their group membership. We also describe differences in these modes of engagement across groups (gender, race, age, time in EA etc.) and present a series of models looking at factors associated with higher engagement. This may help identify which groups are currently more engaged, which groups are likely to become more engaged and which factors may lead to EAs becoming more engaged.

Like last year’s post, this post reports on a number of questions about people’s experiences of the EA community and what factors helped or harmed their involvement, many of which were requested by the Centre for Effective Altruism. Most of the questions requested are different from last year’s, though they address similar topics.

Global Poverty is the highest rated cause overall. We found support for longtermist and meta causes to increase with higher self-reported engagement in EA. We also observed higher support for neartermist causes in non-male respondents across engagement levels, though there was no gender difference in support for longtermist causes among more engaged respondents. Comparing ratings across separate EA surveys, we observe a decrease in support for global poverty over time, and an increase in support for animal welfare and AI risk

Personal contacts (16.3%) remain the most common way people that people have first heard about EA, throughout the history of the movement, followed by 80,000 Hours (12.8%). Among EAs who first got involved in EA in 2020, 17.1% first heard about EA through a personal contact and 16.5% from 80,000 Hours. Podcasts have increased in importance as a source of people first hearing about EA, accounting for 15.2% of people who got involved in 2020. More than half (50.7%) of respondents cited 80,000 Hours as important for them getting involved in EA. A much larger proportion of non-male respondents first heard about EA from a personal contact compared to male respondents. Significantly higher proportions of non-male respondents found personal contacts or local groups important for them getting involved in EA

The composition of the EA community remains similar to last year, in terms of age (82% 34 or younger), race (76% white) and gender (71% male). The median age when EAs reported getting involved in the community was 24. More than two thirds (69%) of our sample were non-students and <15% were undergraduates. Roughly equal proportions of non-student EAs report being in for-profit (earning to give), for-profit (not earning to give), non-profit (EA), non-profit (not EA), government, think tank/lobbying/advocacy careers. More respondents seem to be prioritizing career capital than immediate impact