In Fall 2023, EA Purdue barely existed. In fall 2024, EA Purdue had 35 people attend its intro meeting. In Fall 2025, EA Purdue had 33 new members attend its intro meeting despite doing dramatically more outreach.
Below, outreach method and scale is specified. It is followed by a discussion of the implications for university group organizers, community builders, and a request for help. If you’re not an organizer, feel free to skip to the “Why I think this happened” section of this post, as it should be more relevant.
| Outreach Method | Scale in 2024 | Scale in 2025 |
Club Fairs: Purdue has an all-club tabling fair and a computer science tabling fair. EA Purdue attended both of these in both years. These fairs yielded 100 and 32 mailing list signups respectively in fall 25. In fall 24, the fairs yielded 64 and 16 signups.
Side note: At Purdue, the freshmen tabling fair is incredibly important. It’s 3 hours long and ~40% of the current club was first contacted there. We don’t expect this to change. Try really fucking hard at this fair. Eat caffeine beforehand. If you were being scope-sensitive about how hard you focused on these conversations we estimate you would focus 214x harder during the club fair than your average conversation :). | 2 fairs | 2 fairs |
Lecture Outreach: After emailing 53 professors, I was able to give this 3-minute pitch in the beginning of 16 intro classes. With an average size of 135 students in attendance, I think 2,000 students genuinely listened to the pitch. I held ~80% of the class's attention for the full duration of the pitch.
Each pitch yielded an average of 3.5 mailing list signups, for a total of 57 signups. | 0 | 16 lectures
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| Departmental Emails: We emailed and followed up with 70 departments asking if they could include our blurb in their mailing list or newsletter. Close to half of the departments responded saying they had included us in some way. This yielded 11 mailing list sign-ups. | 18 | ~70 Depart-ments |
| Professor Emails: We emailed roughly 70 professors with large intro classes who we did not email for lecture pitching. We asked them to advertise our club in an announcement to their class on Brightspace, Purdue’s LMS. Only 13 of them responded favorably to our email, and Brightspace announcements led to 8 email signups. | 0 | ~70 Profes-sors |
Tabling: Before classes started, I tabled during freshman orientation handing out candy. Our tabling display had info about the club, and 3 buckets where visitors could place a club-sponsored $2 bill. This quantity of money was eventually donated.
We tabled for a total of 7 hours. ~200 people stopped by the table, 72 people interacted with this game, and 11 people signed up for the mailing list. | 0 | 7 hours |
| Posters: We were able to get posters up in nearly all of the dorms on campus, often with 2 on each floor. Our poster was usually posted next to about 10 other posters that the mostly-freshmen on-campus students would have walked by every day. We received 6 mailing list signups from this. Posters are a really bad method of outreach. | 6 posters | 300 posters |
| Word of Mouth: It’s hard to judge this. At least 4 of the new attendees at the intro meeting were confirmed to have been dragged there by friends who had previously been involved with the club. EA Purdue also had ~15 active members in 2024 that certainly mentioned EA to their friends. | 0 | More |
Background on Purdue
Purdue has ~45,000 undergrads with about a 50% acceptance rate. About 60% of Purdue students have a STEM major, and 30% of Purdue students are engineers. From conversations with other organizers, I feel strongly that EA has more appeal to more ambitious students in more competitive schools. I think this effect is very significant.
Most schools are smaller than Purdue. Only 22% of degrees are STEM nationally. Your school might have a higher or lower acceptance rate. In a small school, diminishing returns to outreach are probably even higher.
The idiosyncratic factors at Purdue might affect how much you expect these results to generalize. I would caution you not to over-rely on “selection bias” when considering if this might apply to your school. While this might account for some of the magnitude of our results, a different line of reasoning is necessary to dismiss the phenomenon entirely.
Why I think this happened
Strong diminishing returns to outreach: People are really good at getting the information they need to know. Charlie Kirk came to Purdue and thousands of people attended in spite of an negligibly small amount of advertising from Turning Point USA. If a student has ever died on your campus, the entire campus will hear about this within a week. The information often spreads before official announcements come out.
People almost always know about the opportunities that they might be interested in. After arriving on campus, students work extremely hard to surround themselves with friends and information environments that correspond to their interests. Figuring out which clubs on campus exist that you might be interested in is not a difficult task. It’s clearly worth the time, and most students take the time to do this. This isn’t just true for clubs. There is a reason companies reach an efficient quantity of customers and usually spend less than 10% of revenue on marketing.
You might object that it’s hard to communicate what EA clubs do and that this merits more outreach. I would counter with the fact that our lecture outreach included an in-depth 3-minute pitch with slides in front of a curious audience. About 3 of the 2,000 people that listened to it came to our callout.
Implications
For organizers, perhaps we should stress less about doing extensive outreach. I think you should have a strong prior that outreach is important and are not sure how much this should update you. However, it’s important to note that our “study” was quite high-powered, with no obvious confounders. Depending on how you measure it, our message got out to 5-10,000 people in 2025. Each of them then decided whether to apply for the seminar or attend the callout.
For university group community building, this should update us in the direction of thinking that a strong majority of our counterfactual impact is in starting/helping nonexistent/very small EA groups as well as improving the quality of programming for more established groups.
Request to you
If you have any insight whatsoever about why dramatically more outreach might have yielded the same results, I would appreciate you sharing it in the comments. Please disagree with me. University group organizing is really important and getting it right is crucial.
Thank you!
Thanks for doing this really important work :) I think it's great that you prioritised hard around getting signups at club fairs & around outreach near the start of the year! Sprints like this are super tough but I think are probably the right call for most organisers <3
I guess I think the main thing your analysis could be missing out is the quality / delivery of the message in 2024 versus 2025. I don't know how you decided on what to say, but e.g. I remember getting very different responses at my club fair based on whether I asked "What's the world's most pressing problem?" versus "Have you heard of effective altruism?" versus "Do you want to have a positive impact with your career?" (the first one was the most likely to stop people & engage them in a conversation).
Also, your outcome measure was whether people turned up to the intro meeting. It's possible there are confounders like: was the intro meeting at a place that was harder to get to than 2024? Was it at a time slot that competed with something else important? Was the intro event framed differently?
Anyway, thanks again for both doing and publishing your thoughts on this!! :)
I am organizing at Texas A&M University, which is just a more conservative and bigger version of Purdue. Things like engineering makeup and such are mostly the same, but there's a lot more emphasis on parochial altruism (helping your neighbor type) and "doing-the-work" culture. For example, Engineers Without Borders has a large chapter at A&M but when I asked about cost-effectiveness they were like "yeah we are spending $30000 to do provide X, (a lot of the costs are due to flights and trips) we care a lot about cutting costs."
At Texas A&M University for this semester, I did more outreach and got fewer fellowship applications this semester than last semester (38 to 41). I don't think this is actually bad, because last semester a lot of outreach attempts ended up failing and we had 7 applicants just two days before the deadline (which we extended twice already). Something like 34 people applied in the last 28 hours because of an engineering mailing list.
I am far more optimistic this semester about attrition than last semester. This is because last semester we accepted everyone to see who will attrition away, and it turns out people who applied last minute are very flaky. Also, it was public knowledge a lot of people show up to the kickoff and then attrition out, so it accelerated more people dropping out. This semester, we only accepted 24/38.
With this semester, we had like 7 show up for first fellowship meetings (compared to 12 last semester), but they seem to be much more engaged with EA. All of them have done the Week 1 readings and they really want to do stuff like evaluating different charities, and they definitely were surprised that they can save hundreds of lives in their careers by just donating money.
Also, what was interesting is that 6/7 fellows who showed up first meeting were girls (gender ratios tend to be opposite in EA groups). But I am going to follow up on everyone who didn't show up. I feel like many times students don't show up because they have exams they gotta study for. There's also an issue of competing with other clubs: I think the key way to fight this is by making the EA group valuable enough for EA-like people.
Hey! Firstly - massive kudos for this post and your marketing efforts. That's a LOT of work done in total. A couple of thoughts:
JLDC,
Thank you for your insightful comment.
2. Very interesting idea here! Thanks for bringing it up. The only thing is, about 2,000 people heard the pitch, maybe 1,000 of which were freshmen. This means we reached about 10% of the freshman population. I would expect the affect you described to happen, just not sure if it would be of a very high magnitude at all.
3. I agree with this. However, it would be very hard for me to believe that our outreach strongly filtered for interest levels this year, even though it wasn't substantially different in style than in the past.
Thanks for writing this up! It's great to know what [doesn't] work, and kudos for doing so much outreach!
Great post! I wish I was as proactive in documenting UChicago’s outreach data; this is really good data!
This post updated me towards thinking quantity of outreach does not matter so much, once you reach a high level. Though, I already believed this. I’m not sure this data alone should update someone else towards believing quality of outreach or quantity of outreach before a threshold matter less:
(a) Quality might still matter. I think EA clubs largely do a great job on quality (and Purdue seems to be at the top of the range of EA marketing) and low-hanging fruit is not easy to find here, but more A/B testing and creative approaches still could be very valuable.
(b) The year before, you did 2 fairs and 18 emails towards the department I assume are largest/most EA-prone at Purdue. That’s substantial outreach.
One other implication of this finding that I want to mention is that we should use different metrics than pure numbers to evaluate EA clubs and strategies if numbers are mostly a function of your campus’s student body. Not sure what this should be since conversion numbers are difficult to compare because of different demographics.
Thank you for the post - and holy shit that’s a lot of outreach.
I appreciate the appropriate hedging, but I would be even more hedged.
1) it’s unclear how much of this stuff generalizes. For some universities, general meetings are amazing, and for others, they’re boring. I think it’s pretty difficult to make generalized claims about this from a sample size of universities of about 1 (especially when there’s counter evidence - for instance, the amazing organizers at Yale EA just got 70 intro fellowship apps from just doing TONS of outreach. That’s a large number and is possibly the equivalent update in the opposite direction).
2) (controversial and speculative take incoming) maybe scaling past some numver of people (depending on university) is just very difficult at below top 30 universities (or that each university has some number like this, but if this is true, it feels like a higher cap would be correlated with prestige). In your case, perhaps there is some amount of potential EAs, you have good initial selection effects, and you just captured most people from that.
Would be happy to get pushback on all of this, though.
I somewhat agree with 2, although I would phrase it slightly differently.
The local maximum for outreach is a function of the quality of the organizing, the quality of the students, and the size of the student body. (Quality of students as potential org members, not in any objective sense). The latter two are essentially fixed, but organizing quality can shift dramatically over time. The form of the organization could also matter, but I feel this is pretty similar across EA groups and within groups over time. (I would love to see evidence that I’m wrong on this). Organizing quality has diminishing returns, but many orgs aren’t necessarily anywhere near this.
Without knowing Yale EA’s situation at all, I would be willing to guess that they had a substantial return on outreach due to an increase in organizing quality, which wasn’t previously close to diminishing returns, and which paid particularly large dividends thanks to very high student quality.
Thanks for this post! Your effort in outreach is truly unmatched-- and you make a good case for why that might be a good thing. I wonder, though, what you think your turnout would have been if you hadn't done all this outreach. Is it the case that you had a much easier time last year because you were pulling interested members from all years, while this year your potential pool included only first years?
Also, it's interesting that posters had such a bad turnover rate for mailing list sign-ups but brought in a significant portion of the Intro group. As a poster fan myself, I'd say this could be reason to keep up this low-investment marketing strategy, if only as a visual reminder to those already interested.
Thanks for your support!
Thinking about your "all years" question: Last year, our club skewed heavily toward freshmen, as did this year. At Purdue, many upperclassmen don't really look to join new clubs. For this reason, I'm not too excited about this explanation.
Yes, really uncertain on the poster thing, but it's a good point.