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This is: EA Birthday Posts: An Alternative to Fundraisers, published by kuhanj on the Effective Altruism Forum.
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For my birthday earlier this year, I spent a fair amount of time writing an EA-themed birthday post (reproduced at the bottom of this write-up). I think that this post did fairly well - 5 messages and subsequent calls about career plan changes (!), and 170 reactions on Facebook. As such, I'd be excited for more EAs to make similar posts, especially other highly involved university organizers with experience communicating about EA. In this post I share my thought-process for making this birthday post, what I could’ve done differently, some considerations for other EAs interested in doing the same, and the post itself. I’d love to hear feedback on the post and the ideas in this writeup, and similar successful examples of leveraging birthdays and other occasions for EA purposes.
Choosing the content of the post:
I initially decided to make an EA-themed birthday fundraiser, thinking it might be a uniquely strong meta-EA opportunity. At first I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what cause area I wanted to raise awareness for. However in the end, I ended up going down a different route than typical birthday fundraisers. Rather than picking a particular charity and asking for donations, I decided to instead make a different ask - to consider high impact careers (in particular, by highlighting 80,000 Hours and its Key Ideas page). I did this for three main reasons:
A change in career choice is far more impactful than making a donation (and will probably lead to donations later on anyway). Even one person counterfactually making a career pivot towards addressing the most pressing problems as a result of reading my post could be worth upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations - several orders of magnitude more successful than I would expect for a regular birthday fundraiser.
Birthdays are a good opportunity to ask people to do costly things that would make me happy, like donating to a charity I care about, or in my case, reading a lengthy FB post and website).
I wanted to counter common misconceptions about EA. Many people I meet at Stanford who have heard of it already think EA = EArning (sorry) to give, or that it only focuses on donations to evidence-backed short-term well-being focused interventions. I thought my birthday post provided a good opportunity to address these misconceptions.
Ideas I wanted to convey through the post:
What we choose to do with our careers is likely the highest impact decision we’ll make.
80000hours.org is a really great resource for (especially young) people trying to figure out what problems are most pressing, and how we can use our career to tackle them.
Addressing common misconceptions about EA: That it is not just about donations or earning to give, or solely about global health interventions, or any single cause area for that matter.
Short descriptions of the current cause areas prioritized in EA and why they’re prioritized. I wasn’t thrilled with the wording I ended up with for each of the cause area descriptions, but it’s a start. I’d be excited to hear others’ thoughts on how to best communicate about these causes to non-EA audiences.
Impact of the post:
Most excitingly, five people so far have taken me up on my offer to talk to them about changing careers/career plans. I’ve had calls and planned follow up with each of them to discuss their thoughts on the 80,000 Hours Key Ideas page and applying the content to their careers. A few others messaged me saying they’d read the 80,000 Hours Key Ideas page and really liked it. The post has received 170 likes and 5 shares, which is my most well-received Facebook post so far by quite some margin (nearly twice as much engagement as my second most popular post...
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