Since December, we’ve been speaking to our core supporters about why they support us, whether they’d donate to us now or in the future and what would lead them to support us more (financially or otherwise).
We’ve already had the pleasure of doing 18 calls and received a lot of valuable feedback. Not only that but we’ve been reminded of the kind of people who are attracted to the work we’re doing. They are thoughtful, capable and thoroughly good people interested in building a positive future.
This is something we too easily forget when having our heads down on the kind of challenging, long-term work that the institute does. It’s a great feeling to start the new year knowing y’all are rooting for us even if we make mistakes, frustrate you or don’t give you the tools to advocate for us.
If we’ve already spoken to you, thank you! We really appreciate it. If you’ve not had a chance and would like to, we’d love to hear from you. You can email us at contact@leverageresearch.org, or email Geoff/myself directly if we’re already connected. Written feedback would also be great if that’s a more comfortable format.
As we’ve received a bunch of feedback, we thought it would be interesting to describe some of it here and how we’re planning to integrate it.
Better explain how we expect to have an impact.
We’ve always been confident in our approach but up until 2019 did not think it was necessary for the public to precisely understand our impact. Since then we’ve changed our view and now think that public understanding is really important. Still, we’ve continued to struggle with how exactly to explain our path to impact.
Our latest attempt, as prompted by feedback from one of our supporters, is this Evidence of Impact document that explains our approach.
Make more of our past work available
Leverage has had several websites over the years. Some have put our work out front, while others have either obscured or omitted it. During the supporters' calls, it was mentioned that some introspection material from a previous version of the website had been taken down and that this was viewed as a negative sign.
In response, we’re making that material available again. It’s to be included in the next revision of our website, and for now, you can access it here.
Being warmer and more community-focused
Despite being fun and friendly people (I think?), our online communications can come across as a little cold or detached. We’re not exactly sure why this is, but we’d love to do better ❤️
Relatedly, there’s the potential for a thriving Leverage community that we have not yet fully realized. Our main community effort right now is our Discord channel, although we believe there’s an opportunity for something more substantial. This topic keeps coming up, though we don’t have concrete plans yet.
Offering training
In the past, Leverage (or Paradigm) hosted workshops and other events where people could engage with our introspection material. Some supporters expressed interest in that work and suggested we could hold workshops again.
Leverage’s interest in workshops previously was research-focused. We’re not doing the same type of research now, so we don’t expect those workshops to resume. (Paradigm has also wound down, so it won’t be running them either.) However, through our Exploratory Psychology program we’re planning to distribute our research, which may take a variety of forms in the future. For those interested in learning the material and techniques developed at Leverage, we suggest subscribing to our newsletter for updates or joining the exploratory-psychology channel on our Discord for discussions.
An overall take
As well as these specific suggestions, we also got a general impression from people that we’ve not been communicating something that’s cohesive enough. While we’ve regularly published case studies, Substack posts, Twitter threads and newsletters, those communications haven’t connected clearly to our audiences' worldviews or needs.
Going into our annual retreat (next week), we’ll be discussing new ways that Leverage could present its work. We don’t expect a panacea, but we do think we’ll end up a couple of steps closer.
If you have thoughts about how we can do better or disagree with some of the feedback we’ve already received, we’d love to hear from you (contact@leverageresearch.org).
Until next week,
Oliver
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