This post was co-authored by Peter Hurford and Joey Savoie.

The EA Survey team at Rethink Charity (including myself) recently released initial data from the 2017 EA Survey and will have more to follow it up. KBog made a comment on the EA Forum noticing that the 2015 EA Survey had 2532 participants, whereas the 2017 EA Survey only had 1837 participants. Does this mean that EA is declining in growth?



It’s hard to say, and the EA Survey team will have more analysis on this, looking deeper at what the data in the EA Survey tells us about EA membership growth and churn, if anything. However, Joey Savoie (unrelated to the EA Survey team) and I (Peter Hurford) were curious to look a bit more at other metrics of potential growth to get a clearer picture. Prior analysis on this has been done by Vipul Naik at the end of 2016 and by Eric Yu at the beginning of 2016 (in a post that I sponsored the creation of).

Joey and I thought it would be a good time to try to re-check the data and see if things have changed. We compiled the following data from various sources to look at EA growth rates.





Type of data January 2014 to Dec 2014 January 2015 to December 2015 January 2016 to December 2016 Non-OpenPhil GiveWell donations $13.3M $40M $30-40M (math) OpenPhil GiveWell donations[9] $8M $70M $50M Total OpenPhil donations $30.2M $34.2M $126.4M OpenPhil + non-OpenPhil GiveWell donations $21.3M $110M ~$80-90M Total non-OpenPhil donors 9044 14,287 No data available[10] Total recorded money actually donated (not pledges) from Giving What We Can members $7.1M $7.0M[11] No data available 80,000 Hours Newsletter Subscribers 262 23,000 76,000

Type of data EA Survey 2014 EA Survey 2015 EA Survey 2017 EA Survey respondents 813 2532 1837 Total amount of recorded donations in EA Survey $5.2M $6.8M $9.9M[12]

As an admin of the EA Facebook group, I was also able to access the built-in statistics, but they only go back 60 days. Right now, as of 30 August 2017, the EA FB group has about 8629 “active users” in the last 60 days as defined by Facebook (user has viewed, posted, commented, or reacted in the group). The last 60 days also saw 99 posts, 2073 comments, and 7042 reactions. 339 members were added in the past 60 days, to a total of 13,407 members right now. Comparing the past sixty days to the past 28 days shows roughly linear growth, but I would not expect to be able to see a trend in only two months of data, even if EA was growing very quickly.

This data is not very useful right now since it only goes back 60 days, but it might be valuable as a time capsule, since a year from now we could re-do this post and compare the numbers for the group as of 2018 to these archived numbers.

Commentary

Overall, it’s hard to get a good sense of a trend from only two to three data points for each trend. It looks like EA is growing somewhat and that the growth rate is somewhat linear, but it varies depending on the source and I would definitely want to see more data to be sure. A lot of the growth rate can vary depending on how much marginal resources organizations like the Center of Effective Altruism put into intentionally growing a particular source (e.g., the EA Newsletter) versus letting a source grow organically (e.g., the EA Forum).

I don’t really know what kind of growth rate I was expecting prior to seeing this data, so I can’t say if this does or doesn’t support my hypotheses about movement growth. Joey and I are trying to hold off from having firm additional opinions until we can look at the data more. I think it would be ideal to create concrete predictions around where these numbers will be within one year or so (e.g., see here, here, and here). We certainly invite discussion and predictions on this.

Acknowledgements

This post was co-authored by Peter Hurford and Joey Savoie. Thanks to Vipul Naik and Issa Rice for putting together some of the source data used in this report and referring us to the correct places for getting EA Forum and EA Wikipedia pageview data, and thanks Pascal Zimmer for supplying data on the EA Newsletter. Thanks to Kerry Vaughan for providing data on pageviews for the EA Forum in 2017, thanks to Rob Wiblin for some 80,000 Hours statistics, and thanks to Zeke Sherman for pointing out Reddit statistics.

Endnotes

[1]: Sociograph does offer to show member growth over time as a paid feature, which I got via a 14-day free trial, but the data looked incorrect and unusable.

[2]: I believe “reactors” refer to the number of people who like, haha, love, etc. I am not sure if this includes shares, but I do not think that it does.

[3]: It’s worth noting that the EA Facebook group engages in reasonably heavy moderation of Facebook posts and probably (my intuition as a Facebook mod) rejects about five posts for every one post that reaches the page. Given that moderation may have changed over time, it’s not clear how much to read into this decline in the post count.

[4]: These numbers are not search volumes -- they’re the mean relative “score” for that year, relative to the search volume for the highest day between January 2004 and the end of August 2017.

[5]: See some more wiki data here and here.

[6]: The EA Newsletter was relaunched and first had regular content and marketing in October 2015.

[7]: Both r/EffectiveAltruism and r/smartgiving have been simultaneous EA subreddits since September 2012. r/smartgiving was the default EA subreddit until an intentional migration on 28 Feb 2016. From Sep 2016 - Aug 2017, r/effectivealtruism had +1484 subscribers (1068->2552) and r/smartgiving had +93 (1466->1559); from Sep 2015 - Aug 2016, +869 (199->1068) for r/effectivealtruism and +230 (1236->1466) for r/smartgiving; and from Sep 2014 - Aug 2015, +91 (108->199) for r/effectivealtruism and +308 (928->1236) for r/smartgiving. I will use r/smartgiving numbers for the 2014-2015 period and r/effectivealtruism numbers for all periods after that, to reflect the transition. Note that this growth will therefore involve some inherent double-counting as people who were subscribed on r/smartgiving re-subscribe on r/effectivealtruism. Pageviews for reddit were calculated via http://redditmetrics.com/.

[8]: Reddit admin stats go back a year for pageviews. Looking at this, there were ~65,350 pageviews between Sep 2016 and August 2017. We can keep this number in this comment as a time capsule and then if/when we do a Growth Metrics 2018 we can compare the pageviews to this number.

[9]: Money from the Open Philanthropy Project is counted for the year in which the grant is announced, which may be different from the year the grant is decided or the year the grant money is actually dispersed.

[10]: GiveWell has not yet published their Metrics Report for 2016 data.

[11]: These numbers come from different sources, so I don’t know if they are directly comparable.

[12]: The EA Survey 2017 recorded donations from both 2015 and 2016. This is 2016 data only. There was $6.7M in donations recorded for 2015 in the 2017 EA Survey.