EA - Starting and running your own mini projects: What I've learnt running a newsletter for a year by SofiaBalderson

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Starting and running your own mini projects: What I've learnt running a newsletter for a year, published by SofiaBalderson on April 16, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Tl;dr:There are many unmet needs in the movement that you can fill with a couple of hours a month (without anyone’s permission)My project - the newsletter itself was relatively easy to put together (2-4h a month basic running) and now has 457 subscribers (and counting!)The open rates are amazingly high: over 62% consistentlyIt’s really tempting to give up: please give new projects feedback and encouragementMy Story: how and why I started itI like to be aware of opportunities in animal advocacy and when I see something interesting, I usually can think of a couple of friends who might find it useful. After a couple of years of sending links to a growing network of friends, I realised that I’m spending A LOT of time sharing resources. I thought to myself, why not start a newsletter where I’d put all these opportunities and then can invite my network to sign up. So at first it was a time-saving opportunity. But also I noticed that existing animal advocates are in closed spaces and groups and all the best opportunities are posted there, while there are lot of new and existing animal advocates who don’t have access to these groups. I thought it wasn’t very inclusive and decided to create something that’s open to everybody.Some (very nice!) feedback I got:Reader surveysI ran a very easy, press of a button survey in autumn, and most people said they found the newsletter useful (albeit a very small sample size of 29 and a bias towards most active users, but that just shows how people don’t have time for surveys, as I sent a Google Form that didn't get many answers at all)Individual positive feedback:"I'm so grateful for the newsletter - I've been listening to the podcasts recommended in it during my work hours, and read posts with a cuppa in the mornings/evenings. Loving the resource as it covers so many different aspects and areas within EAA. It'll be heavily used by me as I want to learn as much as I can about the community as I figure out what career in EAA would be a good fit" - Shaileen McGovern, Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Ireland.From Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla, CEO at the Shimp Welfare Project:“For your poll [above], the only negative I have is that I open a dozen new tabs of things to read when I should be working! More seriously, this aggregation of news and events is at the very list inspiring to continue my own activism” - Josh Baldwin.Some stats:The newsletter consistently has on average 62.5% open rate. It started with 80% open rate on the second edition (the one that was the first edition for about half the subscribers to receive, then it gradually went down and it’s been consistent for about 6 months).At the time of writing the newsletter has 457 subscribers. I had a big jump at the launch to just under 200 and then consistently arrived at over 400. I haven't done much promotion until about a week ago (hence the spike).The country composition is very interesting, mainly US and UK, but also Germany, Spain and other countries.What I’ve learnt:If you have a good idea that is based on an actual problem/unmet need, just do it.Don’t listen to your own voice that tells you “No one needs it” or others saying it’s already been done. Check if it has really been done, or if people just think it has. If it has been done, has it been done well enough?If you need some help identifying a problem, listen to people's conversations online and see what people often complain about. Do they lack IT support? HR consultancy? No time to do ops?Don’t spend too much time thinking about counterfactuals. I know that EAs love to discuss whether this is really the best use of your...