TL;DR I ran a retreat at the EA Hotel called the "Effective Giving Organisers Retreat" a week and a half ago. It went quite well, I learned a bunch from it, and here's a writeup to hopefully help other people.

The Aims of the Retreat

The primary aim of the retreat was to help people who want to raise money for effective charities do that better, by sharing skills and helping each other with project planning. Also to get some community feelings going, as it can be rather lonely and stressful to do this kind of work.

Specifically, the retreat was mostly focused on engaging volunteers. Essentially, the maximum value proposition of a volunteer effective fundraiser is that if you go and make a well-constructed presentation to a huge crowd of well-paid professionals about how giving to effective charities means you can save lives, and then ask people to pledge 1% of their income to GiveWell top charities via registering for a monthly donation on One for the World's automated donations platform, some of them will do that. Someone volunteering in this manner can raise £50k or more with just a few events in a year by helping people in their wider professional network do incredible good for the world. There being more people like this around is a great idea.

There are a variety of other ways volunteers can contribute to this sort of work. People find a sustainable niche that fits them.

I was also interested in engaging donors who want to contribute to effective giving event operations costs (as this is usually a significantly more effective way to move money to e.g. GiveWell Top Charities than donating to them directly), by showing them a bit of the ecosystem as it currently exists and also what it could be with their support.

The event schedule

I used the time-bucketed weekend event format with blocks of time dedicated to themes of past, present and future. It's my experience that this is a very flexible format that works quite well to manage emotional energy over a weekend. The exact sessions within each bucket were proposed and voted upon at the start of each time block.

Past: What's worked before with effective giving events? What hasn't worked? What can be learn? This became

• An appreciative enquiry session on what works
• A sharing circle about mental health and volunteer burnout
• A session on how to do community-building more generally

Present: Supporting and enabling our current projects, which included:

• Asset-mapping session on what we personally have at our disposal and how we can use them to run things
• Defining and writing up our "volunteer job descriptions" to ensure they were reasonable asks of and benefits to volunteers
• Helping adapt One for the World's presentation to better resonate with British audiences.

Future: Figuring out where effective giving is going and how we can help it go there, with sessions on

• The ideal future state of effective giving
• Resources and support within the effective giving movement
• Crazy ideas session

Ultimately I think this format worked quite well, as even though designing the agenda took time and effort at the event, it ended up maximally relevant to the attendees.

Takeaways

Here are a selection of the main takeaways for me as an event runner.

Entry Criteria on the Application Form

I have a bit of a bugbear about EA's application forms. Back when I worked in the Office for National Statistics on the Census, it was very common knowledge that keeping the cognitive load required to answer each question down as low as possible was absolutely critical to getting good response rates on any kind of form or survey ever.

EA is absolutely full of people who are put off by filling out complex or evaluated application forms (because they're neurodivergent and somewhat rejection-sensitive) but still entirely competent at doing the thing they do, or they will be competent in a few years once they've grown up a bit so you probably still want them to come to things. There's a serious inefficiency going on with application forms needlessly requiring written and evaluated applications that's hampering movement growth. That's my soapboax grumping.

I used a "Tick which entry criteria you meet" kind of application form. There were three entry criteria, and you needed at least one to qualify:

• Have organised an event related to effective giving in the past year.
• Will organise an event related to effective giving in the next year.
• Donate at least 1% of your income and are interested in supporting the costs of effective giving events.

The form itself was a simple tickbox for which ones you met. What this is, is a form that is quite easy to fill out, but also results in either people being in the correct categories for the event, or people who actively decide to lie on the application form.

People in at least this side of EA don't lie on this kind of form. There wasn't anyone at the event who wasn't entirely committed to the event and its purpose.

I had feedback that this kind of form was a better participant experience, and that at least one of the attendees wouldn't have gone if applications had been evaluated. Notably, I also had a couple of people who still believed that applications were being otherwise evaluated, even though I had repeatedly been very clear that if the form is open and you meet the criteria, you are in. I think the spectre of evaluated applications haunts us all.

Having multiple entry criteria also functions as a non-intrusive survey of your attendee base which can help with content design. I know, for example, that 80% of the attendees donated at least 1% of their income to effective charities, which would imply that I was mostly but not entirely attracting people in the category of "donor". This has relevance for the ways I speak about things.

Everyone is Burned Out

Effective giving volunteering has a huge volunteer burnout problem. Sessions on mental health, volunteer job descriptions, etc were some of the best sessions of the whole weekend, as well as the community social time. I like to think I am doing my bit on this.

Roles and Community

Half the point of this event was a community building exercise. There were people from wildly different backgrounds learning and having fun and eating together, and forming connections on an equal footing with each other around a shared sense of purpose. However, people present had very different roles in the effective giving ecosystem, often one or more of:

• Donors, who give money - in this case, a solid amount to operations costs of effective fundraising initiatives, and look to have impact and have fun.
• Volunteers, who give time and effort in return for impact, learning skills, and having fun.
• Paid workers, who give time and effort consistently and to more repeatable jobs than volunteers do, in return for salaries and impact.

Sometimes a person is more than one. Sometimes they are not. There are certain role boundaries that should be carefully observed so that being more than one does not become a social requirement to attend. Not expecting a fundraising volunteer to pay for their fundraising event's ops costs or take on job responsibilities they find annoying and stressful. Not expecting a paid worker to work for free or spend their own money on work-related items. Not expecting a donor to do anything other than give money and observe if it's spent well.

Sometimes, with the flattened out "everyone is equal" sense of community, people suggested things that blurred these boundaries. It was part of my job as the event runner to tactfully ensure that those propositions went nowhere and the conversation moved on.

I think I managed it fine, but it was always present in the back of my mind.

The EA Hotel is a great UK resource for retreats

I paid the EA Hotel for this event by allocating some of the money I was already considering giving to them and making them run a retreat for me using it. I was therefore pretty safe in the knowledge that if absolutely nobody turned up and nothing happened, the money wasn't wasted as it was already going to an effective charity, thereby establishing a baseline that it was impossible to really fail.

My expectations were massively exceeded. The EA Hotel staff and volunteers were really great and an absolute joy to have around, and it made the whole event feel way more "spirit of EA" than just renting a hotel or group hostel would have. As a UK community, we should use the EA Hotel more for our community-building residentials.

I also got the chance to hear exciting new details of their upcoming strategy (which I won't be sharing on the Forum) and give my own thoughts.

You can find out more about the EA Hotel by visiting https://www.ceealar.org/ , and indeed by just booking a stay there at their £30 a night patron rate!

A Different Event than Planned

Overall, I feel that the retreat failed at one of its core aims: to be an easily accessible entry point for people who were ambivalently thinking of getting into this type of effective fundraising volunteering. This is mainly because no such people turned up. I guess that either these people were not present in the spaces where I advertised, or my advertising did not speak to them. I am going to have a serious think about how I redo my advertising to make it more newbie-friendly.

Instead, it became much more of a strategy and coordination retreat for a group of people who were already deep into the world of effective fundraising and EA meta work, whether that was as a volunteer, a donor, or a salaried worker, or some combination of these. Some of these people were international and flew in or dialled in online in order to attend, because nothing like this was reachable in their country. It turns out if you call your retreat participants "effective giving organisers" these are the people who turn up. Viewed in this light, it was I think a spectacular success and I can count to several concrete outcomes about reducing inefficiencies in effective giving through better coordination and burnout reduction that probably show a very large return on a £1k investment. Best anti-malaria money I ever spent.

However it was not the thing I signed myself up to run, and running it put I think a lot more pressure on me than on reflection I was comfortable with. Quite frankly as a volunteer, I really shouldn't be running international inter-organisation strategy retreats. That is surely somebody's job. (Surely?!)

Update: It probably is somebody's job, namely this one https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/partnerships-associate and they are currently advertising, deadline March 8th. Would you like it to be your job? Please apply! (Note: I have no inside information on what the actual job description is)

My plan for next year is to enact the original aim: reach primarily a UK population of people who are looking to get into volunteer effective fundraising but don't know where to start. They can come and hang out with me and my friends who already do effective giving volunteer things, and we can help each other plan our stuff. It can be pretty chill. I will have to call it something else, I think.