In August 2023, we shared that:

• EAGs from 2022–2023 each cost around $2M–$3.6M USD at around $1.5k–2.5k per person per event.
  • These events typically cost a lot because the fixed costs of running professional events in the US and UK are surprisingly high.
• We’re aiming to get these event costs down to ≤$2M each moving forwards.
  • We’ve already started to cut back on spending and will continue to do so, whilst also raising default ticket prices to recoup more of our costs.

Since then, our team has cut the cost of running EA Global significantly. Our average gross cost-per-attendee (CPA) has fallen from ~$2,000 in 2023 to ~$1,600 in 2024. We also met our target of getting total event costs down: every EA Global this year cost <$1.5M. 

We’ve cut costs by:

• Reducing the amount of food we serve. We cut dinners on Saturday and Sunday, reduced snacks, and negotiated with the venue to reduce food and beverage quotations, saving over $260K on food and beverages for EAG Boston 2024 while using the same venue as 2023. We will still serve dinner on Friday, snacks throughout the day, and lunches on both full days.
• Finding cheaper venues or negotiating better prices with ones we’ve used before. For example, we halved spending on the venue and catering for EAG London: we spent $1.7M in 2023 (~1,500 attendees) and $800K in 2024 (~1,400 attendees).
• Bringing production work in-house. We hired a full-time production associate to take on much of the production work we typically outsource to a production company. This has given us more control over the production budget, allowing us to negotiate directly with vendors.
• Reducing the number of talks. We tested whether we could reduce the number of talks without reducing the value of the event. We cut a stage for EAG Boston 2024 and spent ~$55K less on audiovisual services compared to the 2023 event. In the feedback survey from EAG Boston, only a couple of people mentioned that they thought there weren’t enough talks and workshops. We might still decide to increase the amount of content in the future, but our default plan is to run just one main stage at US EAGs in 2025, though plausibly more at EAG London, which attracts significantly more attendees.

We have also found cheaper videography production services and cheaper speaker reception venues, reduced the number of people doing international site visits, reduced pipe and drape for the organization fair, cut down on professionally made signage, and reduced the amount of security.

Importantly, we think our cost-cutting so far is not significantly affecting attendee experience. The likelihood-to-recommend (LTR) score^[1] for EA Global in 2024 was higher than it was in 2023. The average number of connections^[2] made per attendee in 2024 is slightly lower than in 2023, but still the second highest on record (see Appendix: Metrics).

We’ve also increased revenue substantially, receiving contributions from attendees of ~$675K in 2024 and covering 16% of program costs compared to ~$282K and 4.7% in 2023. 

We’re very grateful to every attendee who opts for a standard or higher ticket / donation option when registering for EA Global—thank you! More support from attendees means more resources available for EA community-building.^[3] 

Reducing costs while increasing revenue means that our net cost-per-attendee has fallen from ~$1,900 in 2023 to ~$1,300 in 2024. These costs are not adjusted for inflation.

We have heard feedback that people in our core target audience are not applying for fear that the value they expect to gain is still not worth the cost to our team. 

While we sincerely appreciate this thoughtfulness, we think that subsidizing EA Global attendance is a good use of EA resources, based on analyses of our feedback surveys and actions taken by attendees as a result of the event. Additionally, the marginal costs of extra attendees can vary due to a range of considerations, including various fixed costs that come with events. 

Our team has the best context on relevant cost considerations—getting admitted to EA Global means that we are willing to cover the costs of your attendance. Feel free to defer to our judgment.

If you’re considering applying to EA Global, we encourage you to apply here. Applications are open for EA Global: Bay Area (21–23 February) and EA Global: London (6–8 June). If you would like support from our team in deciding whether EA Global is right for you, please reach out to hello@eaglobal.org or comment below. 

Other 2024 updates and 2025 goals

EA Global

In 2024, the EAG program served 2,870 attendees across three events. Our events remain very well-received by the community, receiving an LTR of ~8.8/10. We generated over ~27,000 connections and ~11,500 impactful connections, and attendees thought that the event was ~6x more valuable than how they might have otherwise spent their time. 

In September, we hired Robert Harling as the new EA Global Program Lead. Robert was previously the Managing Director of Meridian, an office supporting EA-aligned projects in Cambridge, UK. Prior to that, he was Head of Community Strategy at EA Cambridge. He’s also worked as an Analyst at Cornerstone Research, an economics and finance consulting firm. 

We made two other two full-time hires and one part-time hire to the team, only one of which replaced a departing staff member:

• Sarah Gokhale joined as a Production Associate in May and is now a Project Manager.
• Jordan Pieters joined as our Content Coordinator in July.
• Hillary Grills will be joining us as our part-time Volunteer Coordinator in the new year. 

In 2025, the EA Global team will run four events:

• EA Global: Bay Area 2025 will take place 21–23 February 2025 at the Oakland Marriott, the venue we’ve used for the past two Bay Area events. Unlike 2024, this event won’t have a cause area focus; we’ll be featuring content from cause areas across the EA ecosystem. This is because CEA is focusing on principles-first community building, and because a large majority of attendees last year said they would have attended a non-GCR-focused event anyway. At the 2024 event, the cost-per-attendee was ~$1,900. For the 2025 event, we’ll aim for a cost-per-attendee of <$1,500.
• EA Global: London 2025 will take place 6–8 June 2025 for the second time at the Intercontinental O2 London. In 2024, we achieved the lowest cost-per-attendee at an EAG since 2019 while delivering a very well-received event.
• EA Global: Virtual (or “EA Virtual’) is yet to be scheduled.
• EA Global: East Coast will take place in October/November. We will hopefully announce dates and location very soon!

Our priority will be to expand the program; we’re aiming for 3,500 in-person attendees in 2025, up from 2,870 in 2024 (~22% increase). We’ll be investing more resources into outreach for our events, and supporting more attendees with travel grants. We also adjusted our admissions bar to welcome attendees who might fill skills gaps in the community but who haven't yet engaged deeply with the EA community. To make our events more impactful, we plan on investing more time in identifying mentors and attendees who might particularly benefit from mentorship. 

EAGx

In 2024, we supported more EAGx events than in previous years (11 in 2024 vs. 10 in 2023 and 9 in 2022) at a lower net cost-per-attendee. Our net in-person cost-per-attendee averages ~$580 for 2024,^[4] down from ~$845 in 2023. We’ve achieved this by:

• Managing EAGx team budgets more closely, and encouraging the teams to identify more cost-effective venues and suppliers.
• Encouraging teams to invest more time into venue negotiations. As one example, the EAGxNordics 2024 team secured a 45% discount on the final venue contract as a result, saving ~$93K.
• Reducing AV costs onsite, and instead procuring a “tech kit” for basic video recording. EAGx teams now ship this kit to the next event so that it gets repeated use.
• Increasing revenue, such that events bring in revenue to cover ~9% of costs (up from ~4% in 2023).

Like EA Global, EAGx events continue to be well-received by the community. The average likelihood-to-recommend score is 8.9/10 in 2024 (similar to 2023 and 2022). Attendees also typically report that EAGx events are ~5–6x more valuable than how they would otherwise spend their time, and help them to make ~9 new connections in their network.

We’ve been testing out EA Summits this year; these are smaller events, organized by a local group with a much smaller budget and less CEA support. We supported EA Summits in Brazil, Nigeria, and South Africa this year. We expect to expand this program in 2025 as a cost-effective and scalable way of helping more people join the community. We’ll be sharing more about this early next year!

We hired two new EAGx Coordinators this year: Arthur Malone, who organized EAGxNYC 2023 and worked at Effective Ventures coordinating a potential NYC office, and Dion Tan, who previously helped organize EAGx events in the Philippines and Singapore as well as EAGxVirtual 2023 and 2024.

In 2025, we plan on expanding the program. We aim to welcome 5,000 in-person attendees to EAGx and EA Summits next year, up from ~3,000 this year. We’re aiming for 10–15 EAGx events and 3–10 EA Summits for a total of 13–25 events. 

Partner Events

The Partner Events team ran two events this year—the Summit on Existential Security and the Meta Coordination Forum—and hired three new people to the team.

The Summit on Existential Security aims to help established and emerging decision-makers, researchers, and funders working on reducing existential risk make better and faster progress by sharing ideas and building networks. In 2024, we significantly improved upon the success of the first iteration in 2023, growing from 168 to 213 attendees while our likelihood-to-recommend score rose from 8.37 to 8.97. 

The Meta Coordination Forum saw similar improvements, with its LTR increasing from 7.70 to 8.94 between 2023 and 2024. We focused content at the retreat on the EA brand and funding diversity, and we facilitated discussions which we expect will lead to concrete progress in these areas. We also provided attendees with the opportunity to build new relationships and strengthen existing ones, which we expect will be useful for future collaboration and coordination. You can read more about the outcomes of the event here.

In 2024, we also focused on strengthening our organizational foundations. We welcomed Niko Bjork and David Solar as Events Associates, focusing on logistics and content respectively, and Shelby McIntyre as a Project Manager. During this transition, we paused our partner-led events workstream^[5] to focus on our core events and hiring.

Our plans for Partner Events in 2025 include running the Summit on Existential Security and the Meta Coordination Forum again and exploring 2–3 new events.

Impact stories from our events

We send out follow-up surveys 3–4 months after every EAG and EAGx event to ask attendees about any concrete outcomes resulting from their attendance, and ~5–10% of attendees respond to these surveys. The stories below are illustrative of the impact we hope to create via our events and the attendees involved agreed to us sharing their anonymised stories.

Donate to support our work

We’re uncertain about our funding gap for 2025, though we’d be extremely grateful for additional donations.

• A simple way to support our work: if you’re registering for an EA Global or EAGx event, please consider buying the higher-priced donation / ticket option. We hope our events are worth the cost in and of themselves, but more contributions from attendees means more EA community-building resources.
• You can also donate to CEA here.

See you at our events next year! Apply here!

Appendix: Metrics

1. ^{^}

   “How likely is it that you would recommend EAGx to a friend or colleague with similar interests to your own?” on a scale of 0 (“Not at all likely”) to 10 (“Extremely likely”).

2. ^{^}

   We define a connection as a person you feel comfortable asking for a favour. For example, if you were planning to publish a blog post, you would feel comfortable reaching out to them. 

3. ^{^}

   We don't directly allocate marginal revenue to a specific line item though travel support is something we would likely consider spending more on if we had more funding available. 

4. ^{^}

    This doesn’t include EAGxSingapore 2024.

5. ^{^}

   Our partner-led events workstream was focused on providing event management support to experts who had clear ideas for impactful events but lacked the time or expertise to execute them effectively.