6+ years as a THL volunteer here, so I'm an informed source but not an official one. I don't think the BCC will affect THL's efficiency much directly, since we've mostly been focusing on cage-free campaigns for the past couple years. Those have largely been going well. The BCC has been hard to get more traction on and probably requires mobilization on a larger scale than we currently have.

Companies reneg with some frequency (at least enough frequency to keep us busy), which prompts us to run campaigns to get them to recommit to their pledge. Those have mostly been successful. I'd estimate somewhere around 70-80% success rate with recommitting, but of course actual data would be nice.

Whenever I talk about Effective Altruism (EA) to someone new, I talk about EA-the-Movement and EA-the-Philosophy. EA-the-Movement draws a specific kind of person (quantitative, techy, philosophical) and has selected a few causes it has determined to be the most effective. EA-the-Philosophy is about asking whether our donations and volunteering are going to places that get the most bang for our buck and those questions can be applied to anything we care about. 

It's a way of easing people into our way of thinking without insisting that they join our particular group or adopt our priorities. I find it's especially useful if the quantitative or strong recommendations from EA-the-Movement to be offputting, or if they have previous associations with the movement. I think it's worth making people who are doing good in some way more effective, even if it doesn't end up getting them to do what we'd consider the most good. Although if someone spends enough time thinking with the EA Philosophy, it might end up leading the straight back to the EA Movement. 

I had a similar experience when I started volunteering for The Humane League. I joined because I was looking for unskilled EA-approved volunteering and I was under the impression that THL would have plenty of people. It wasn't until I became a local organizer and started digging into the numbers that I realized the activist population is tiny and there was an opportunity for individuals to significantly improve the movement base.

Part of my hope in writing this post was to tell more people about the need for non-crazy people with a pulse. I do think getting the word out about that while retaining the idea that we can make real change is a big challenge for organizers. 

Great additions!

I hadn't thought about the activist "uniform," but it is often geared towards being striking rather than approachable. There's also a danger of our identities as activists getting tied up in our apparel choices. I just started reading Change of Heart by Nick Cooney (one of the THL founders) and he tells a fitting story of an environmental campaigner speaking at a rally to an enthusiastic group of young campaigners:

“He shouted to the crowd, “Are you ready to get out there and fight for the environment?”
To which they responded an enthusiastic, “Yeah!”
“Are you ready to get arrested and go to jail for the environment?”
“Yeah!!”
“Are you ready to give your life for the environment?”
“Yeah!!”
“Are you willing to cut your hair and put on a suit for the environment?”
The crowd fell silent.”

The lack of investment in activating people makes sense. Maybe there's some instances of incentives shifting as well. Once you have a nonprofit, a big part of your time becomes justifying the nonprofit's existence, which will automatically syphon away attention from capacity building unless you intentionally redirect it. 

Agree that activating people is an end in and of itself. With the loneliness epidemic going on, activating people and building community is a public service in its own right (even if it might not reach the EA bar on its own). And the nice thing to building capacity is that we can redirect a lot of that power to different causes, especially if we don't tie our group identities too closely to any specific organization. I'd love to see different organizations playing up their different aesthetics while retaining collaborative ties - would really help with our recruiting surface area.