A note from Naomi Nederlof, Community Building Grants Program Manager:
I asked Andy, the lead organizer of EA DC, to write this playbook based on the approaches that have made his group one of the most successful city groups in our program. We initiated this project because we think many new organizers can benefit from concrete and experience-based guidance. I would be excited about more city and national group organisers adopting this advice!
Intro
I’ve been organizing the Effective Altruism DC group since 2021. I talk to a lot of new EA city, national, and career group organizers about the first things they should aim to do with their groups, and I often find myself repeating the same advice. I’m writing this as a short playbook for a new organizer, with concrete actionable advice I would give to make the first few months of starting an EA professional network go well.
This is my model of a successful EA city group. Every EA group organizer should aim for their group to achieve this in their first two months
1) It is very easy for anyone in the area to onboard to the group
Your online presence
- Maintain an up-to-date nice looking website with a clear "Get Involved" or "Join Us" button on the homepage.
- The primary call to action should direct interested individuals to a single, simple sign-up form.
- This form should automatically trigger a welcome email that includes:
- A brief explanation of the group and EA.
- A link to schedule a 15-30 minute introductory call with an organizer or volunteer. You can maintain a “welcome wagon” volunteer team to take these calls with new members if there are too many.
- A link to a "New Member Resource Packet" (a Google Doc, Notion page, or page to your website). The resource packet should contain links to foundational EA content (the EA Forum, key articles, 80,000 Hours, Giving What We Can) and an invitation to the group's primary communication channel (Slack or Discord).
- The website should also include:
- An events page.
- A resources page.
- A list of other relevant EA groups in the area (if applicable).
- Create and maintain a group page on platforms like Facebook, Meetup.com, or other platforms. Use keywords like "effective altruism," "charity," and your city group name.
- Ensure your group is listed on the official EA Groups directory.
Making individual members feel seen
- Conduct the introductory calls to personally welcome new members, understand their interests, answer initial questions, and direct them to the most relevant group activities.
- In the group's communication channel, have a dedicated channel where new members are prompted to introduce themselves.
Structured onboarding curriculum
- In each intro call with new members, aim to get a sense of what their current understanding of EA is and push back politely but firmly if they characterize it as just a general movement for doing any type of good. Keep an eye out for people who are pushing very specific causes and who don’t seem interested in justifying them under the importance, tractability, and neglectedness (ITN) framework. Make it clear that they will regularly receive pushback and debate about their ideas and will be expected to participate in discussions of why their ideas make sense as a serious candidate as a way people can do the very most good using their donations and careers.
- Consider running a structured intro to EA fellowship or reading group as the primary onboarding path. Use an established curriculum.
Reinforcing core concepts
- Frame all event descriptions and discussions around the core question: "How can we use our limited resources to do the most good?"
- During discussions, gently guide conversations that veer into "any good is fine" territory back to the principles of maximization and prioritization. For example: "That's an interesting point about its benefits. How might we evaluate its impact compared to other potential interventions?"
- Make a plan for how to have difficult conversations with members about whether the causes they’re excited about actually fit the ITN framework. This should include:
- Writing a clear way to explain that non-EA causes aren’t seen as useless or bad, only that they don’t fit the very narrow criteria of being the single most important cause in the world to work on.
- Making a list of recommended resources on understanding cause prioritization.
- Consider practicing having a dialogue with someone who can act as a member who’s confused about why their cause isn’t a main cause area.
3) The group makes the local and global EA network of ideas, people, and career and donation opportunities legible and accessible
Connecting people
- Host networking-focused events where members can share what they are working on and what they need help with. This mostly only works with groups with a higher number of engaged EAs in the area.
- Maintain an opt-in member directory (e.g., an Airtable or spreadsheet) where members can list their skills, career interests, and cause area interests to facilitate internal connections.
- Invite speakers from established EA organizations or professionals working in EA-aligned careers to give virtual or in-person talks.
Highlighting opportunities
- Create a dedicated job opportunities Slack channel for posting jobs from the 80,000 Hours job board, and job opportunities local members can advertise.
- Run an event or workshop focused on effective giving, sharing research from charity evaluators. Events specifically focused on effective giving can often be repetitive and might not add much new information to what’s already available online. I recommend limiting these events to once or twice a year, ideally around the holidays to overlap with Giving Tuesday.
- Promote ways to connect to the broader EA community via directories, the EA forum, and your connections to EAs in other cities. There are a few ways you could do that:
- Make a webpage collecting links to other relevant EA groups.
- Consider also making a page or document on professional norms around reaching out to other people in EA,
- Maintain a list of contacts in other cities who are knowledgeable about EA cause areas that may not be as popular in your group. In DC for example there aren’t many people doing AI technical safety work, so we rely on people in other cities when members reach out to us for connections in that cause area.
4) The organizers have taken significant time to learn about EA
- Make sure you’ve read the EA Handbook, the Precipice, the 80,000 Hours Career Guide, and Doing Good Better.
- Take notes about which topics come up a lot in your group that you’re less familiar with.
- Find knowledgeable EAs who can share resource recommendations on areas they know a lot about. See if they’re available to check in with you about your learning.
- Set up a discussion group with other community builders on your progress. Make a clear plan for when you’ll learn about each topic. It’s very easy to lose track of this and fall behind if you don’t make clear time for it. Set some kind of heuristic to track how you have learned.
- Set clear goals. “By x date I will be able to explain y concept or have an answer to this or that question.”
- Have an accountability buddy who knows more about the topic.
- Write to learn. Writing about what you’re trying to learn about is one of the most effective ways of retaining information.
5) The organizers themselves are welcoming, professional, knowledgeable, upbeat, and provide “generous authority”
Most people attending an event prefer it to have structure. Structure gives members freedom and ability to go deeper in conversations faster. For example, at the beginning of the event, it’s helpful to have people circle up and introduce themselves. If this doesn’t happen, new members might be left just wandering through groups who already know each other a lot. They won’t know anyone and might feel out of place, and would be more hesitant to talk. Their freedom in the event is constricted, and the organizer imposing more structure would give them more freedom.
There are two ways a group leader can fail to provide the right structure: They provide no structure, and they provide bad and limiting structure that closes off opportunities for members rather than opening them up.
The book “The Art of Gathering” has a useful framing of good, positive leadership of an event called “generous authority.” There’s a specific way you can be authoritative that’s a generous favor to the people at an event you’re hosting. You’re taking on the responsibility of making the event legible and accessible for new people. This is a useful idea to grasp when running events. David Nash summarizes the idea in more detail here. Here’s another good summary.
Here are a few general tips for keeping events clear and organized:
Event management
- Publish a clear agenda in the event description for every meeting.
- Your group’s code of conduct is linked to every event, and members have read it before attending.
- Designate an organizer as the explicit facilitator for each event, whose job is to keep the discussion on track, manage time, and ensure all voices are heard.
- During the event, make regular announcements to the whole group reminding them to welcome new people into their circles, give them updates on what’s expected, remind them of rules and norms, draw attention to opportunities, and mark the time. The overall goal needs to be that members always have a clear idea of what’s expected of them and how they can best access others in the event and get what they want from interactions. Your announcements and behavior should structure the event to open those opportunities up.
- Keep one eye on member behavior and act quickly on any
Interpersonal conduct
- Organizers should actively model a positive, curious, and friendly demeanor.
- Practice "active connecting" during social time: notice someone standing alone and introduce them to someone else with a shared interest (e.g., "Sarah, this is Ben. Ben was just telling me he's interested in alternative proteins, which I know you've read a lot about.").
- Maintain a positive, curious, and friendly tone. Use people’s names, maintain open body language.
Notice someone solo and introduce them to two others with shared interests. - For anyone new, define acronyms (EA has a lot of them) and avoid insider jargon.
Establishing norms
- Create and prominently feature your code of conduct on the website.
- Your code of conduct should include a simple, confidential process for reporting issues to a designated organizer or committee.
- Explicitly state community norms like "Assume good faith in others' arguments," "Challenge ideas, not people," and "It's okay to be uncertain."
- You can police language and ways of talking that make members feel uncomfortable if they’re not directly related to a major EA cause area. You can and should include something in your code of conduct that makes it clear that you prevent members from something that makes members uncomfortable without any relevance to EA. However, if a member says something like “I think it’s ethically okay to eat meat because I don’t think animals are conscious” or “It’s a waste of time to work on AI safety” or something related to an EA cause area, this needs to be allowed even if it offends some members for the purpose of the debate. In general, you should give the sense that your group is a place where serious and difficult debates can happen, but not where “anything goes” and people can say whatever whenever.
Defining the group's purpose
- Clearly state the group's professional and intellectual mission in the "About Us" section of the website and in onboarding materials.
- Frame events according to their purpose. Label explicitly social events to separate them from more professional events (“Happy hour” vs. “Networking event”).
- In official communication channels, gently moderate off-topic or purely social conversations to keep the focus on EA-related content. A dedicated random or social channel can be created for this.
- An EA group is, first and foremost, a collaborative space dedicated to maximizing each member’s impact. Its primary purpose is to serve as a conduit, connecting professionals seeking to leverage their careers and expertise to do the most good. New members should have the sense that their ability to access opportunities in the group will be determined by their professional and intellectual contributions and interests, not their social connections. Clearly spelling out why the group exists and how best to approach members for help and resources can go a long way in making it clear that the group does not rely on social favoritism.
An EA group should also aim to have each of these resources within the first two months. Many of these exist as templates you can copy from CEA
I’ve added links to guides and templates for many of these on the EA groups resource centre. I’ve linked them where they exist.
Do not reinvent the wheel. Use CEA’s resources page. Copy templates. Explore what other groups have done with their public resources. Ask other organizers for copies of their CRMs, websites, codes of conduct, and strategy documents you can either copy or learn from.
These are some general vibes I think the best EA groups consistently give off
- A sense of being organized around the ideas and movement rather than the specific social scene. The scene exists to connect people to opportunities to think about and do the most good. The social scene is a nice bonus, but is not a core part of the group. A member should be able to get a lot of value out of the group even if they have very little in common socially with the majority of the other members.
- A mutual push to be ambitious with impact rather than becoming just a neat intellectual scene.
- A sense of high accessibility. Organizers are friendly, upbeat, energizing, and easy to reach and talk to.
- Strong consistency in events, moderation, and communication.
Core activities I think most EA groups should run
- Consistent social or networking events. Host at least one casual, open social per month (happy hour, coffee meetup, co-working session).
- 1-on-1 meetings between members. These can be organized by a 3rd party app, or by making a community directory on AirTable members can add themselves to to make themselves available for meetings with new people.
- Aim to host at least one “high-visibility” event in the first two months, such as a talk by a speaker from 80,000 Hours, Giving What We Can, or a local professional in an EA-aligned field. These create a sense of momentum, give members exposure to the broader EA network.
- Clear cadence and public calendar. Publish an events calendar (on your website, Meetup, or Facebook page) that shows at least 1–2 months of upcoming events. Members should feel the group is active and reliable, with multiple opportunities to engage depending on their interests and availability.
- Some type of online forum where people can post and connect independently of the organizer. Most EA groups use Slack for this.
I would like to attest that Andy Masely is himself highly: "Welcoming, professional, knowledgeable, upbeat, and provides “generous authority”"
Second this! Andy is a phenomenal organizer, and lives up to this guide and then some.