Whoop - great work! Anec-data: I've been going to these conferences for years now; to my mind the quality/usefulness of them has in no way diminished, even as you've been able to trim costs. Well done. They are sooo value-adding in terms of motivation, connections, inspiration, etc; you are providing a massive public good for the EA community. Thanks!
In August 2023, we shared that:
Since then, our team has cut the cost of running EA Global significantly. Our average gross cost-per-attendee (CPA) has fallen from ~$2,000 in 2023 to ~$1,600 in 2024. We also met our target of getting total event costs down: every EA Global this year cost <$1.5M.
We’ve cut costs by:
We have also found cheaper videography production services and cheaper speaker reception venues, reduced the number of people doing international site visits, reduced pipe and drape for the organization fair, cut down on professionally made signage, and reduced the amount of security.
Importantly, we think our cost-cutting so far is not significantly affecting attendee experience. The likelihood-to-recommend (LTR) score[1] for EA Global in 2024 was higher than it was in 2023. The average number of connections[2] made per attendee in 2024 is slightly lower than in 2023, but still the second highest on record (see Appendix: Metrics).
We’ve also increased revenue substantially, receiving contributions from attendees of ~$675K in 2024 and covering 16% of program costs compared to ~$282K and 4.7% in 2023.
We’re very grateful to every attendee who opts for a standard or higher ticket / donation option when registering for EA Global—thank you! More support from attendees means more resources available for EA community-building.[3]
Reducing costs while increasing revenue means that our net cost-per-attendee has fallen from ~$1,900 in 2023 to ~$1,300 in 2024. These costs are not adjusted for inflation.
We have heard feedback that people in our core target audience are not applying for fear that the value they expect to gain is still not worth the cost to our team.
While we sincerely appreciate this thoughtfulness, we think that subsidizing EA Global attendance is a good use of EA resources, based on analyses of our feedback surveys and actions taken by attendees as a result of the event. Additionally, the marginal costs of extra attendees can vary due to a range of considerations, including various fixed costs that come with events.
Our team has the best context on relevant cost considerations—getting admitted to EA Global means that we are willing to cover the costs of your attendance. Feel free to defer to our judgment.
If you’re considering applying to EA Global, we encourage you to apply here. Applications are open for EA Global: Bay Area (21–23 February) and EA Global: London (6–8 June). If you would like support from our team in deciding whether EA Global is right for you, please reach out to [email protected] or comment below.
In 2024, the EAG program served 2,870 attendees across three events. Our events remain very well-received by the community, receiving an LTR of ~8.8/10. We generated over ~27,000 connections and ~11,500 impactful connections, and attendees thought that the event was ~6x more valuable than how they might have otherwise spent their time.
In September, we hired Robert Harling as the new EA Global Program Lead. Robert was previously the Managing Director of Meridian, an office supporting EA-aligned projects in Cambridge, UK. Prior to that, he was Head of Community Strategy at EA Cambridge. He’s also worked as an Analyst at Cornerstone Research, an economics and finance consulting firm.
We made two other two full-time hires and one part-time hire to the team, only one of which replaced a departing staff member:
In 2025, the EA Global team will run four events:
Our priority will be to expand the program; we’re aiming for 3,500 in-person attendees in 2025, up from 2,870 in 2024 (~22% increase). We’ll be investing more resources into outreach for our events, and supporting more attendees with travel grants. We also adjusted our admissions bar to welcome attendees who might fill skills gaps in the community but who haven't yet engaged deeply with the EA community. To make our events more impactful, we plan on investing more time in identifying mentors and attendees who might particularly benefit from mentorship.
In 2024, we supported more EAGx events than in previous years (11 in 2024 vs. 10 in 2023 and 9 in 2022) at a lower net cost-per-attendee. Our net in-person cost-per-attendee averages ~$580 for 2024,[4] down from ~$845 in 2023. We’ve achieved this by:
Like EA Global, EAGx events continue to be well-received by the community. The average likelihood-to-recommend score is 8.9/10 in 2024 (similar to 2023 and 2022). Attendees also typically report that EAGx events are ~5–6x more valuable than how they would otherwise spend their time, and help them to make ~9 new connections in their network.
We’ve been testing out EA Summits this year; these are smaller events, organized by a local group with a much smaller budget and less CEA support. We supported EA Summits in Brazil, Nigeria, and South Africa this year. We expect to expand this program in 2025 as a cost-effective and scalable way of helping more people join the community. We’ll be sharing more about this early next year!
We hired two new EAGx Coordinators this year: Arthur Malone, who organized EAGxNYC 2023 and worked at Effective Ventures coordinating a potential NYC office, and Dion Tan, who previously helped organize EAGx events in the Philippines and Singapore as well as EAGxVirtual 2023 and 2024.
In 2025, we plan on expanding the program. We aim to welcome 5,000 in-person attendees to EAGx and EA Summits next year, up from ~3,000 this year. We’re aiming for 10–15 EAGx events and 3–10 EA Summits for a total of 13–25 events.
The Partner Events team ran two events this year—the Summit on Existential Security and the Meta Coordination Forum—and hired three new people to the team.
The Summit on Existential Security aims to help established and emerging decision-makers, researchers, and funders working on reducing existential risk make better and faster progress by sharing ideas and building networks. In 2024, we significantly improved upon the success of the first iteration in 2023, growing from 168 to 213 attendees while our likelihood-to-recommend score rose from 8.37 to 8.97.
The Meta Coordination Forum saw similar improvements, with its LTR increasing from 7.70 to 8.94 between 2023 and 2024. We focused content at the retreat on the EA brand and funding diversity, and we facilitated discussions which we expect will lead to concrete progress in these areas. We also provided attendees with the opportunity to build new relationships and strengthen existing ones, which we expect will be useful for future collaboration and coordination. You can read more about the outcomes of the event here.
In 2024, we also focused on strengthening our organizational foundations. We welcomed Niko Bjork and David Solar as Events Associates, focusing on logistics and content respectively, and Shelby McIntyre as a Project Manager. During this transition, we paused our partner-led events workstream[5] to focus on our core events and hiring.
Our plans for Partner Events in 2025 include running the Summit on Existential Security and the Meta Coordination Forum again and exploring 2–3 new events.
We send out follow-up surveys 3–4 months after every EAG and EAGx event to ask attendees about any concrete outcomes resulting from their attendance, and ~5–10% of attendees respond to these surveys. The stories below are illustrative of the impact we hope to create via our events and the attendees involved agreed to us sharing their anonymised stories.
| EA Global: Bay Area 2024 (Global Catastrophic Risks) | An Assistant Professor of Law met a state legislator, and they are now working together to introduce an AI liability bill. The same professor also met someone working at an AI policy think tank in DC, and subsequently joined their board. |
| An attendee met the research manager of an AI safety fellowship. The attendee learned about the fellowship opportunity, applied, and they are now a research fellow at that organization. | |
| As a result of in-person conversations with people working at AI safety orgs, one attendee applied for several open positions and was eventually offered a COO role at a small AI safety field-building org. This person was also considering taking the GWWC pledge, and opted to take it at the event. | |
| EA Global: London 2024 | An attendee building a team for an AI governance-focused event found another member of their team at EAG London. They also invited someone to apply for an open position they were hiring for. |
| An attendee was encouraged to apply to be co-director for a national EA group in Europe and recently accepted the role. They reported that they were 50% likely to apply for the role before the event. | |
| Giving What We Can ran a pledge booth at the event, where they encourage attendees to commit to effective giving. 12 attendees took a 10% pledge at the event, and another 23 took a trial pledge. | |
| Someone from the AI policy team at an EU AI policy think tank working on a call for input on the EU AI Act reported getting valuable feedback on their plans from people working at AI labs, METR, Apollo, and other AI policy think tanks. | |
| An attendee met a donor at EAG London who ended up donating ~$35K to their organization, which works on farmed animal welfare. This attendee thought it was very unlikely (5%) that they would’ve met this donor otherwise. | |
| xLATAM 2024 | Two attendees mentioned joining a career planning program due to the event. One also joined the Introduction to Biosecurity Fundamentals by Bluedot Impact. They’re now helping with a biosecurity introduction at their local EA group. |
| xAustin 2024 | A group of AI safety organizers met up at the event which led to a larger group meeting later in the year to foster collaboration. |
| An attendee learned about an opportunity to co-found a project in the AI governance space and applied for the role. They reported that they were very unlikely to hear about this role if it wasn’t for this interaction. | |
| xNordics 2024 | Two attendees reported applying to the CEA Groups team’s Organiser Support Program due to the event, and one of these attendees also took part in the in-depth EA program. |
| A staff member at a national EA group hired an intern they met at the event, directed someone they were coaching toward organizations working on biosecurity, recruited a new organizer for a university, and found a volunteer to help their team with communications and video content production. | |
| xUtrecht 2024 | A group of attendees interested in helping set up new projects met at the event and launched a new EA-aligned entrepreneurship initiative. |
We’re uncertain about our funding gap for 2025, though we’d be extremely grateful for additional donations.
See you at our events next year! Apply here!
“How likely is it that you would recommend EAGx to a friend or colleague with similar interests to your own?” on a scale of 0 (“Not at all likely”) to 10 (“Extremely likely”).
We define a connection as a person you feel comfortable asking for a favour. For example, if you were planning to publish a blog post, you would feel comfortable reaching out to them.
We don't directly allocate marginal revenue to a specific line item though travel support is something we would likely consider spending more on if we had more funding available.
Well done, it's super cool to see everything you guys have achieved this year. One thing I was surprised by is that EAGxs are almost three times cheaper than EAGs while having a slightly higher likelihood to recommend. I assume part of this is because EAGs are typically held in more expensive areas, but I'd be surprised if that explained all of it. Are there any other factors that explain the cost difference?
Good question! Yes, TL;DR large venues in major US/UK cities are more expensive per-attendee than smaller venues in other cities.
Eli covered this a bit in our last post about costs. There aren't that many venues big enough for EA Globals, and the venues that are big enough force you to use their in-house catering company, generally have a minimum mandatory spend, and significantly mark up the costs of their services. Our best guesses at why (from Eli's post):
I suspect straightforward lack of competition also plays a role. As an extreme example, if there's only one venue in a city large enough for conferences and you want to run a conference there, they can basically charge what they want to.
Meanwhile, venues that can host 200–600 people (EAGx events) are easier to come by. EAGx organizers often secure university venues which are cheap but often more difficult to work with. Location does play a role, of course. You may not be surprised to learn that Mexico City, Bangalore and Berlin are cheaper than Oakland, London and Boston. But we also hosted events in Sydney and Copenhagen this year, so I think the above cost vs. size factor / availability of space plays a bigger role.
I do want to add that we are consistently impressed by EAGx and EA Summit organizers when it comes to resourcefulness and the LTR scores they generate given the lower CPA. The EA Brazil Summit team, for example, had food donated by the Brazilian Vegetarian Society. The bar for hustling in service of impact is continuously being raised, and we hustle on.
(Other team members or EAGx organizers should feel free to jump in here and push back / add more details.)