This post is part of the Community Events Retrospective sequence.
Earlier this year, I surveyed ~500 people who had attended an EAGx event or an event funded by the Community Events Programme. The key sources of value that attendees report getting are:
- New connections in their network;
- Learning about new career options; and
- Learning about EA cause areas.
This finding is quite rough and we plan on getting more clarity on sources of value from our events in future surveys.
Results
In the survey, I asked attendees about routes to valuable outcomes from our events, and then coded attendee responses into the following baskets:
- Connections
- Learning about new career options
- Learning more about EA cause areas or taking them more seriously
- Increased motivation or positivity for EA broadly
- Increased motivation or positivity for EA-aligned work
- Finding specific sessions interesting or valuable
- More likely to attend other EA-aligned events/opportunities
- Inspired or motivated to take a specific action
- Strengthening existing connections
- Making friends or social connections
- Event enjoyment (just having a really positive experience)
These are the results:
A key limitation to this analysis was that we explicitly asked attendees to report how connections were valuable to them, meaning the “Connections” response is likely artificially high. Learning about career options and EA cause areas (incl. via sessions) came through as a frequent source of value for our attendees. I had expected more attendees to report general positivity about the event, but this appeared far less frequently than learning or connections.
Some of these options have significant overlap. To get a slightly clearer picture of how “learning” in general might compare to “connections” in general, I grouped options together into the following baskets:
- Connections (“Connections”, “Strengthening existing connections” and “Making friends or social connections”)
- Learning (“Learned about new career options”, “Finding specific sessions interesting or valuable” and “Learning more about EA cause areas or taking them more seriously”)
- Motivation / Positivity (“Increased motivation or positivity for EA broadly” and “Increased motiviation or positivity for EA-aligned work”)
- Action (“More likely to attend other EA-aligned events/opportunities” and “Inspired or motivated to take a specific action”)
- Other (“Event enjoyment” and “Other”).
These are the results using the grouped baskets:
With this grouping, which is more favourable to the “Learning” basket (previously split into frequently cited categories), it’s striking that this basket outperforms Connections, despite the survey explicitly prompting attendees to report on connections.
This updates me towards thinking that learning (about career options or ideas) is a large source of value from EA community-building events. Like connections, it’s a source of value where tangible outcomes that might occur downstream of this value will be difficult to track - attendees might well just form a deeper understanding about a key EA cause area, take action later on, but not report an event as being a pivotal moment in their journey.
That said, providing opportunities for learning might not be the comparative advantage for events. Information about EA-aligned career opportunities and ideas can be found online (e.g. via the 80,000 Hours website, the 80,000 Hours podcast, the EA Forum or via the many EA newsletters) whereas in-person events are one of the few ways EA community members can meet other community members in person and build their network. This weakly suggests that connections might still be the source of value event organisers should focus on.
My thanks to Callum Calvert, Jona Glade, Michel Justen, Sophie Thomson, Oscar Howie, Ben West, Eli Nathan, Ivan Burduk and Amy Labenz for comments and feedback.
Some important qualifiers:
As I understand it, all this data about the impact of events is collected through surveys that are attendees fill immediately after an event. I think that this might introduce some biases. For example, maybe attendees get excited about new connections they made and think that they will collaborate but then never do. If that's not done already, one way to somewhat mitigate this bias would be to also ask at the annual EA survey about the impact of EA events (that year, and in their lifetime). I wonder if conclusions like the one in this article would hold up.
No, it's actually from surveys that were filled 3 - 8 months after the events took place. Sorry that wasn't clear.
I have added the results from the EA Survey below.
Connections actually seem somewhat more important in the EAS results than in the results reported here. That said, that could be partly because the analysis in this post combined more things into the "Learning" option (e.g. “Finding specific sessions interesting or valuable” and “Learning more about EA cause areas or taking them more seriously”), whereas the original survey question just asked about whether they "chang[ed] their mind or learn[ed] something important regarding their path to impact."
Another difference between the EAS analysis and this one, is that the EAS asked about the most important new Learning/Connection, rather than whether people received any new Learning/Connection from a given source. So it is possible that the events account for a disproportionately large number of people's most important new connections (per the EAS analysis), but that people are nevertheless also receiving a comparable number of new Learnings.