Summary

I spent one day trying to compare retention in EA to other movements. I was unable to find anything that I was very happy with, but I’m sharing these comparisons in case they are helpful to others. Hopefully Cunningham’s law will kick in and someone will be spurred to do a better analysis.
I found semi-comparable estimates of retention for Southern Baptist megachurch youth ministry participants, vegetarians, and civil rights activists who participated in Freedom Summer. While none of these data sources seemed precise or perfectly comparable, my best guess is that EA is slightly better at retention than they are, and unlikely to be substantially worse.

How does EA compare to other movements?

Most interviewees remarked that, once someone gets to the point where their career is driven by EA considerations, it’s unlikely that they will leave. This might suggest that CEA should not focus on retention, as it is already going well.

For some insight on this, I tried to compare Ben Toddd’s estimates with estimates from other movements. My best guess is that EA has better retention than Southern Baptist megachurches and Freedom Summer participants, and similar or slightly worse retention to vegetarianism. Most of my uncertainty comes from how reliable these estimates are and how comparable they are to each other.

Because of how wide my error bars are, it’s hard to say too much with confidence. I don’t think EA has a severe retention problem (compared to e.g. Baptist churches). We also don’t seem substantially better at retention than others (e.g. vegetarianism). So my guess is that EA is slightly above average at retaining highly engaged members (compared to other movements), which makes me think it’s worth investing a moderate amount of resources into retention.

	Five-year dropout rate
Ben Todd’s estimate for top 2000 most engaged EA’s	20%
“High involvement” Southern Baptist megachurch youth ministry participants	54%
Vegetarians	14-26%
Civil rights activists who signed up for Freedom Summer	15-51%

Ben Todd’s estimates

Taken from More empirical data on 'value drift’.

Type of person	Five-year dropout rate	Implied expected lifetime[1]
Highly engaged, enthusiastic, and socially integrated	10%	45 years
Top 2000 most engaged people (I think this is roughly CEA’s definition of “engaged EA”)	20%	22 years
Answered >= ⅘ engaged on EA survey but not socially integrated	30%	14 years
GWWC memb

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EA Retention