Executive summary: This retrospective reflects positively on EA North 2025, a one-day regional conference in Sheffield that fostered meaningful connections and motivation among 35 attendees at a notably low cost, with the author encouraging others to replicate the format in underrepresented areas.
Key points:
Cost-effectiveness and impact: With a total cost of £1765, EA North achieved a low cost per attendee (£50) and per new connection (£11), making it significantly more cost-effective than larger EA Global events.
Positive feedback and connection-building: 51% of attendees responded to the feedback survey, rating the event highly (8.8/10 average recommendation), with an average of 4.56 new connections per person and strong motivation to take future action.
Event structure and highlights: The program included talks, 1-1s, a career workshop, and community-building discussions; the career workshop and professional/cause-area meetups were especially appreciated.
Logistics and turnout: Of 47 applicants, 35 attended; the author managed food and attendance logistics smoothly despite last-minute changes, and provided demographic data on attendees’ employment and locations.
Reflections and improvements: The author is satisfied with the outcome but may tweak venue/catering logistics, be firmer with deadlines, and experiment with broader promotion in the future.
Call to action and shared resources: The post encourages others to run similar low-cost regional events and offers free-to-copy materials like a website, forms, and slides to reduce overhead.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.
AI Use Note: Main body text entirely human written. Claude (Opus 4.8) helped develop models of animal life histories in the appendix.
Cross-posted from Good Structures.
Executive Summary
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Summary
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EA North was a one-day conference in Sheffield (UK) aimed at people in the North of England (Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds, etc.). The event had 35 attendees on the day.[1] The cost per attendee was £50 and the cost per new connection was £11. The total cost was £1765. By this metric, EA North is significantly more cost-effective than EAGs.
The attendee feedback was quite positive (see below). I am happy with how it all turned out and think it was a very worthwhile use of my time.
Thank you for everyone who attended! Special thanks to the speakers and meet-up facilitators.
venue
Our venue was The Showroom in Sheffield. I booked two rooms. The main room had a projector and was used for the talks. The second room was laid out like a cafe/bar. This was to allow space for 1-1s to happen at any point during the day.
agenda
Here is the schedule for the day:
The meet-ups were a mix of speedy 1-1s, self-directed discussions, and semi-guided group discussions. This was dependent on the facilitator and the number of people who showed up.
I gave the career workshop to an audience of five people. Three of them highlighted it on the anonymous feedback form as one of the most useful parts of the day. Feel free to steal my slides.
Just before wrapping up, I led a group discussion on next steps for building the EA community in the North. We discussed what types of things we would like to see in the short and long term (retreats, co-working spaces, events, culture related things, etc.). A few people expressed interest in actively working towards this.
feedback from attendees
18 attendees provided feedback (51%).
big ones
When asked “Overall, how likely are you to recommend a similar event to someone with similar interests?”, attendees rated it 8.8 (+/- 0.9) out of 10
As usual, I also asked about connections[2]. The average number of connections per attendee was 4.56 (+/- 2.29). This means that the cost per connection was only £11.
other things people care about with events
Here are some plots with other feedback results:
Attendees generally found the event valuable. They enjoyed the content, made useful connections, and most became more motivated. Many even indicated that they were inspired to take some action. People felt welcome and included and just overall had an enjoyable day. Almost all would like to come to a similar event in the future.
what people found the most useful
In the survey, I asked people “What parts of the event did you find most useful?”. Here are things that were mentioned more than once:
aspect of the event
number of mentions
cause area/profession meet-ups
6
group discussion on community building in the North
4
talks
4
1-1s
4
career workshop
3
speed friending
2
unstructured meeting of people
2
what people liked the least
I also asked about what people liked least. This was mostly spread out quite a bit and everyone mentioned something else (or nothing). Two people mentioned the food, though.
applicants and attendees
I let people apply until the day of the event. I used the numbers at the application deadline to organise food. In this case the cancellations and late applications roughly cancelled out, so I did not have any issues with that.
numbers
47 applications
45 invitations
35 confirmed accepts a week or so before the event
35 showed up on the day (some cancelled/did not show, others showed up without confirming)
who applied?
employment/student status
70% employed
16% students
14% unemployed
location
22% Manchester
20% Sheffield
7% Liverpool
7% Leeds
+ York, Blackpool, and lots of other cities in the North, and some from the South
here is what cause areas people were interested in:
what I would do differently next time
Overall, I am quite happy with how it went and would feel good about just doing the same thing again in a year or two. It would probably be even faster as I could recycle things like the website, forms, emails, and the rough schedule.
Things I might try if I feel like I have capacity:
trying to push harder for uncoupling the venue from the food, but that might just not be possible
being a little bit harsher about application deadlines
sharing the event a bit more (I personally hate seeing the same event advertised all over my Slack workspaces, WhatsApp groups, etc. multiple times before the deadline - it feels very spammy. I tried to avoid this and generally only posted once everywhere. I might have gone too far here and missed out on applicants.)
resources for you to steal
I strongly recommend that more people consider organising something similar if they live in an area that has some EA presence, but is not one of the big EA hotspots.
Save yourself some time and consider copying some of these resources from me:
"How many new connections did you make today? In this context, a new connection is a person you would feel comfortable emailing a question/asking some favour. This could be someone you met at the event for the first time or someone you have known for a while but did not feel comfortable reaching out to until now."
Executive summary: This retrospective reflects positively on EA North 2025, a one-day regional conference in Sheffield that fostered meaningful connections and motivation among 35 attendees at a notably low cost, with the author encouraging others to replicate the format in underrepresented areas.
Key points:
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.