These reflections came together mostly from a few conversations with my co-organizers, other community builders, and a long voice chat with chatGPT. After deciding on an outline, the text was generated and then heavily edited, before getting reviewed by my co-organizer and others, which brought up even more things to add.
After two years, the EA Berlin University Group failed to build a sustainable student community due to consistently small attendance, meaning the group will wind down for now. We experimented extensively with meetups, locations, and outreach but struggled to overcome two main challenges: a missing core group to provide a lively atmosphere for newcomers, and difficulties specific to Berlin and similar cities, namely, its decentralized nature, long commutes, weak campus identity, and numerous competing activities.
The most successful part of our overall effort was running the EA Intro Program.
For future organizers, the key lessons are to focus on building a core group first, recruit organizers with complementary skills (especially for outreach), and be highly cautious about copying models from smaller, centralized university towns. Despite the outcome, the experience generated valuable insights and was a great experience.
Probably the most important chapters:
3. What we tried
4. What went wrong & Challenges
6. Additional internal challenges
8. Lessons for other organizers
For the past two years I've been co-organizing the EA Berlin University Group. Unfortunately, things did not develop as we had hoped. Attendance remained small, and unless successors appear soon, the group will likely wind down. While that is disappointing, I still think the experience generated useful insights about what works and what doesn't in a place like Berlin.
Our goal was to create a student group connected to the broader community around EA in Berlin. Berlin already has several EA-related groups and meetups, but didn't have specifically geared to students. More concretely, we hoped to:
We wanted to provide a low-threshold starting point for students who were curious about EA but had not yet engaged deeply with it.
Over the two years we experimented with a variety of formats, schedules, and outreach methods.
Our main format was regular meetups where we would discuss topics related to EA cause areas. We started out with presentations we prepared, discussion groups just based on a topic, and most recently switched to start the session by watching a short video (often from Rational Animations or similar) and then used it as a starting point for discussion. We experimented with different schedules:
Additionally, we had a few sessions where we would go to the Effective Animal Advocacy Meetups instead of our usual meetup at uni. This didn’t really change much though for us, the attendance rate was about as bad as otherwise. The idea was that it might A) get people that are in our WA/Signal group to actually attend something and then maybe develop more interest in coming to our regular events, and B) make people of our group interested in Animal Welfare that usually might not have thought about it
In the beginning most events were a presentation from our side on a particular subject to give a brief introduction into that part of EA, followed by questions and discussions. With one of these we had a little Giving Game, which was fun and made things a bit more real and interactive.
We ultimately stopped the presentation format due to the large amount of prep it involved each week. If a group is large enough and participants are willing to also do these, then this seems like a good way to get deeper into topics and train presentation skills without the burden solely being on the organizers.
Each semester we organized an intro talk about EA. These were meant to be our flagship events and were advertised more heavily. We usually held them around a month after the semester started (it felt like the best option given the constraints, but maybe this was too late?). At the university information market we often saw quite a bit of initial interest. However, the conversion from expressed interest to actual attendance was much lower than expected (maybe around 5-7%; single digit number of attendees for many dozens of flyers that were taken).
We tried several outreach channels:
A fairly high amount of the people that ended up in our groups (both signal and WA, as well as those attending) had already heard of EA and found this one either through search or EA channels. They were not necessarily the target group, but those seem like good advertising options as well.
We also experimented with:
Unfortunately, none of these changes seems to have impacted attendance.
Toward the end we organized a speaker event, which ended up being the most well-attended event we had that semester (not by far, but still the best; not necessarily our target group though). However, we only ran this format once. With our typical attendance numbers being around 3-6 people (and often only 3-4 people towards the end of the semester; since we are 3 organizers and usually 2-3 of us were there, the non-organizer attendance was really low) , inviting external speakers didn't really feel like an option. It was difficult to justify asking someone to prepare a talk where maybe only the three of us, maybe up to 10 people would show up. This created a chicken-and-egg problem:
Primarily during the Intro Talks we announced that 1-1s are something we offer, as well as advising on anything where we can and bringing up connections to others where we cannot.
We had about two people that wanted to do 1-1s with us, plus a few more that reached out to us with questions.
From talking to other Community Builders in Germany, 1-1s are generally less known/common here, meaning that the general concept might have to be explained first.
One of our organizers also ran the EA Intro Program (by EA Germany x CEA) three times in total (twice in person, once online). Whilst this was open to anyone and not specifically dedicated to students, we advertised it heavily along with our own outreach materials.
Whilst it didn’t contribute as directly to our mission due to high % of non-students, this part was the most successful thing that came out of the EA Berlin Uni Group.
We tried to use surveys to gain more info. Those worked well for the EA Intro Program, not really for the Intro Talk / the general group.
Also see the Book Club section for another data point.
For one semester we ran a book club (Scout Mindset). Whilst the initial interest was large, in practice people seemed to like the idea better than actually doing it.
Or perhaps conducting it differently would have changed things.
In our case, the start of it got dragged out quite a bit because I was trying to make it very participatory by asking into the group what format options seem interesting, what book options, which date and times work well, etc. Since most people didn’t really engage with these (we did these in WA, so the barrier to reply was low), it took a long time until we found smth that works.
Perhaps, just finding the most excited people, texting them directly or talking to them and then just getting things started immediately would have made a big difference.
Several challenges made it difficult for the group to grow.
Often a new person would attend a meetup and see only 3 or 4 people present (of which 2-3 are us organizers). Even if the discussion itself was good, this could easily create the impression that the group was inactive or struggling. As a result, many newcomers attended only once. I suspect that without a stable core group, the atmosphere never quite reached the point where new people would feel that they had discovered a lively community they wanted to return to.
Spread out city
Another problem was the lack of spontaneous attendance. In my previous uni it was trivial to spontaneously join an event because it was a single campus and everything was close together. In Berlin, that is much harder. If someone goes home first, returning for an evening event might involve a 30-60 minute commute to a campus they might never have been to. Especially during winter, when going there involves leaving the warm comfort of home to venture into the cold darkness.
Cafeteria meetups
One thing that we’ve been suggested to try and that sounded good on paper was to have fixed dates and times during which the organizers would be in a specific spot in the mensa, perhaps with a little sign, so that others could just join, have EA (adjacent) conversations and to strengthen the group.
However, Berlin has at least 8 public cafeterias and they are mostly very full, making this extremely hard. On top, us organizers were from different campuses, making this even harder.
Hosting location
We tried 3 different campuses, one of which was probably the best located (easy to find, ground floor, more or less at the beginning of a popular hallway) but that didn’t seem to translate into more people finding their way there. At the same time, this was probably one of the less appealing ones once you were in there (bright, cold ceiling lights, large compared to the group size, very much a classroom feel).
The other rooms were typically harder to find, which is why we’ve created instructions on how to find the room.
The first room that we had (Hexenhaus at Charité) was by FAR the coziest room (sofas, different lights, incl. mood lights, this was generally a hang-out room, not a study/work room) and might have made things more appealing. However, it’s understandably popular and hard to get consistent access. Plus, the co-organizer that was at Charité left the group to focus more on their medicine studies.
Our organizer team also lacked a particular role that often seems crucial for early-stage groups: the high-energy hype-person. None of us were especially comfortable doing things like:
Having someone in your group that's good and willing to do these things would probably help a lot. Whilst we could have forced ourselves to do this, I don't think it particularly helps the cause if the people advertising for a group are clearly uncomfortable doing so.
Additionally, we could have asked more members for help (e.g. whether they can distribute flyers in their classroom/campus; hang up some posters; invite friends). We have done this to a limited extent and had an event where we invited people to help, which had no attendance.
We also started the group from scratch, which means there were no existing members, no existing structure, no established roles, processes, guidelines for how to best do things at this university, etc. Whilst this probably gave us more experience than we otherwise would've, it made things harder and detracted from our success of building a thriving student group.
When reflecting on this, I think some of these challenges might be specific to Berlin (and similar cities).
Berlin is polycentric and students live all over the city due to both distributed dormitories, many private flat-shares and the various campi being spread across the city. Commutes of 30–60 minutes are common.
In my experience, the sense of campus identity is much weaker than in smaller university towns. Students’ lives are often oriented more around the city as a whole rather than their specific university.
Berlin also offers an enormous number of alternative activities. Students do not need university clubs to find things to do or people to meet, compared to a smaller city with fewer options for students. This makes it harder for student organizations to compete for attention.
Another surprising discovery was how few student-run interest clubs seemed to exist. At the information markets we attended at HU Berlin, we found one student group focusing on religion, one on a political party, one on a student radio channel. Almost everything else was official university bodies or uni internal services or other things.
CEAs Organizer Support Program (OSP)
This was the first thing I’ve done to get better at community building. Overall, I think the program was really helpful in that it brought some structure into everything, however, the online and spread out nature made it less good to me compared to Community Building Retreats, which were more focused.
It’s been quite a while and I don’t remember what the specific advice was. I know we’ve tried some things, which at best only helped moderately in gaining new members. The primary benefit for us was making us more structured. Also, it would have probably been more helpful if we would have all done this together.
Community Building Retreats
One thing that was genuinely helpful were the community builder retreats organized by EA Germany. They were motivating, inspiring, and full of thoughtful people working on community building challenges. However, much of the advice implicitly assumed environments quite different from Berlin; often smaller cities with:
Whilst there were some promising suggestions (e.g. splitting the one intro talk into 2 events so that we can make it more interactive and give more time for questions, discussions, socializing, as well as so that there would be 2 opportunities to attend) didn't end up working for us, even if they were successful elsewhere.
Here, we had similar exercises to the OSP, but with reduced content and all done in 2-3 sessions. I think this has a higher impact per time spent; working this out together also really helped; but it could probably also be done by just deciding on a specific afternoon, ordering in some takeout and sitting down for a few hours, perhaps repeating the process a day or two later. But ofc the CB Retreat is a convenient way to actually do it.
Other
Also, when having talked to others at EAGx events that are doing community building, their advice rarely ended up being applicable to our situation.
Within the organizer team, roles were not always clearly defined since we had to first figure out what roles even were necessary, what tasks would come up, etc. I personally gravitated toward operations and logistics, which is something I generally enjoy, as well as outlining and preparing many of the meetups. But we lacked other important roles such as someone that's good at approaching random people or giving a good speech in front of a random classroom, as well as someone who could handle social media.
One of my co-organizers mostly focused primarily on the Intro Talk and Intro Program, as well as preparing meetups or sessions with a more specific focus and higher information density and workshops.
The other two organizers we had only were part of the team for a single semester. They (A and B) focused on A) content and direct/personal outreach, and B) on improving our website.
Generally, we all shared work like outreach (preparing & distributing posters & flyers), writing announcements etc and general hosting (being present for the meetings, Signal & WhatsApp groups).
This is more personal but during my first semester organizing the group, I took on far too many commitments (mostly studies related, but also personal things) and eventually experienced significant burnout followed by a long period of depression. The EA Uni Group was also 90% of my socializing time, so I also couldn't personally bring in friends I've made elsewhere. While I continued to handle logistical tasks, I had much less capacity for strategic thinking and proactive planning. This likely contributed to us remaining in a more reactive rather than strategic mode for much of the time.
If someone were to try again, here are some other approaches that we haven't tried but seem worthwhile:
Based on our experience, a few lessons stand out.
1. Build a core group first
The most important factor may simply be having a small core group of people who already enjoy meeting regularly. This provides:
Even if not everyone in the core group is deeply engaged with EA, having people who enjoy the discussions and each other’s company can make a big difference.
2. Recruit complementary personalities
Organizer teams benefit from having different strengths:
This is more or less the ideal case, but of course this might be difficult if there’s no abundance of interested organizers.
3. Be cautious about copying models from other cities
Advice that works well in smaller university towns may not translate directly to large, decentralized cities. Local context matters a lot, so adapting methods and advice to your local circumstances and context is important.
Despite the difficulties, I still consider the experience worthwhile. I learned a lot about:
I’m especially grateful to my co-organizers, the people who attended our events, and the support from both EA Germany, EA Berlin and CEA. If someone in Berlin is interested in continuing or restarting a university-focused group, I would be very happy to share experiences or help where I can. Even if this particular attempt didn't turn out as we hoped, I hope the lessons learned can make future attempts easier.
My co-organizers agree with this and also learned about how to conduct the EA Intro Program (which was the most successful part of the overall venture)
