The most popular career paths that effective altruists in the survey (EAs) plan to follow are in earning to give roles (38%) and working at EA organizations (37%). 50% of EAs have only one planned broad career path. Two of the top four significant barriers to becoming more involved in EA were not enough job opportunities that seemed like a good fit for me (29%) and too hard to get an EA job (23%). 462 (38%) EAs have at least 3 years work or graduate experience in the most popular skills highlighted as important talent needs for EA in a recent 80, 000 Hours/CEA survey of EA leaders. 1,014 (58%) EAs want to become more involved in the community by pursuing a career in an EA-aligned cause area.

Global Poverty remains the most popular single cause in our sample as a whole. When pressed to choose only one of the traditional broad cause areas of EA (Global Poverty, Animal Welfare, Meta, Long Term Future, Other) the Long Term Future/Catastrophic and Existential Risk Reduction is the most popular (41%). 42% of EAs have changed their cause area focus since they joined the movement. A majority (57%) of those who changed cause moved away from Global Poverty, and a majority (54%) moved towards the Long Term Future/Catastrophic and Existential Risk Reduction.

This is the first in a series analysing the results of the 2019 EA Survey. We collected 2,513 valid responses from EAs in the survey. EAs in this year’s survey look demographically much like those in past years. A majority are between the ages of 25-34. 71% reported their gender as male. 87% reported that they identify as white. 86% reported being agnostic/atheist/non-religious. 46% reported being vegan or vegetarian. 72% affiliated with the Left or Center Left politically. Over 90% have attained or are in the process of completing a post-secondary degree. 20% have attended one of the top 20 universities in the world for their undergraduate studies.

We surveyed 176 local EA groups, from over 40 different countries, including 66 student groups, 78 city groups and 21 national groups. The number of local groups has rapidly grown, but has begun to plateau. The majority of groups are relatively new, with the median age being 3 years and 43.15% of groups founded in the last 2 years. Local groups are disproportionately made up of students relative to the EA community as a whole, with even city groups being on average 40% students. Overall, 14,392 people engaged with local groups in 2019, 2,124 people regularly attended EA groups’ events, and 1,498 members were reported to be highly engaged with the EA community.

Is EA growing? Rather than speculating from anecdotes, I decided to collect some data. This is a continuation of the analysis started last year. For each trend, I collected the raw data and also highlighted in green where the highest point was reached (though this may be different from the period with the largest growth depending on which derivative you are looking at).

Not everyone who joins the effective altruism community stays around forever. Some people value drift, some people leave altogether, and some people continue to do EA-aligned things but choose to withdraw from the community. Better understanding how and why people leave EA is important for assessing our overall community health and impact, but getting reliable data on this can be very hard to do.

RC Forward moved $4.4M CAD (~ $3.3M USD) from Canadian donors. $430K to $3.7M of donations may have been counterfactually caused by RC Forward. RC Forward appears to have increased donations by 11% to 500%, with a best guess of 25% to 35% Donating to RC Forward seems between 3 to 55 times more effective than donating funds directly to the EA charities which RC Forward regrants to.

A majority of EAs feel that the EA movement is welcoming. New EAs rank the movement as more welcoming than long-time EAs. No statistically significant trends in welcomeness by race, education, or religion could be identified. Selection bias, where those who find the EA community particularly unwelcoming are systematically less likely to fill out the EA survey, makes it harder to properly interpret these results.

In this post we explore geographic differences in EA across the globe. A plurality of respondents reported being located in the United States (36.33%), followed by the UK (16.19%). It seems worthwhile to investigate if these populations are distinctly different from EAs elsewhere. This may help to point to causes or dynamics in the movement that are being missed to due to the dominance of these two nationalities.

In this post we explore how people first hear about Effective Altruism, and influences on people’s involvement in EA.

In this post we explore which EA groups EA Survey 2018 respondents were members of. We find reasonably large numbers of EAs are members of some groups (such as EA Facebook and Local Groups), but much smaller numbers are involved across many groups.

EAs rate a wide variety of different causes as requiring “significant resources”. Global Poverty remains the most popular single cause in our sample as a whole. There are substantial differences in cause prioritisation across groups. On the whole, more involved groups appear to prioritise Global Poverty and Climate Change less and AI and Long-Term Future causes more.

Median donations were slightly higher than in 2016 and total donations much higher. A small number of very large donors account for the majority of the totals donated. A majority of EAs report donating less than they would like due to financial constraints

In this report, we will explore the difference between those who self-identify as effective altruists versus those who say they broadly subscribe to effective altruism but do not self-identify. As there is variation in levels of involvement in the effective altruism movement, we were interested in assessing people who are outside the scope of the typical analysis. Past reports in the EA Survey Series have exclusively reported only on respondents who are aware of effective altruism, subscribe to effective altruism, and describe themselves as effective altruists.

Where people first hear of effective altruism (EA) has changed over the years: 80,000 Hours is now much more influential, and Giving What We Can (GWWC) much less so. Personal Contacts, books, articles and blogs (other than those by major orgs) and 80,000 Hours seem to now be where most people first hear of EA. Peter Singer is sufficiently influential that he should probably be his own category

We’re excited to continue what should be a lot of analysis and thoughtful conversation over the results from the 2018 EA Survey. This post outlines methodology and subsequent posts will outline different facets of the results that we analyzed and found noteworthy for the community.

The EA survey provides an annual snapshot of the EA community. Although it does not sample randomly from all effective altruists, it does provide an important glimpse at demographic attributes among those who have taken the survey. From these respondents, we observe that the majority of effective altruists look demographically much like those in past years. After cleaning the data and limiting the data set to those who declared that they self-identified as effective altruists, we sampled a total of 2,607 valid respondents for this report. In total, we surveyed 3,537 people. More people took the effective altruist survey than ever before, and this additional data enables us to look at the demographics of the effective altruism movement in more depth. In this report, we also aim to explore the characteristics and tendencies of EAs, including diets, political beliefs, careers, and relationships.