Comments
Thank you for sharing Sarah! I've admired how thoughtful you've been about the strategy and getting feedback.
Thank you for sharing Sarah! I've admired how thoughtful you've been about the strategy and getting feedback.
Thank you so much, Charlotte! I really appreciate your kind words. It’s been helpful to think things through out loud and get input along the way—I'm always keen to hear your thoughts if anything comes to mind.
Thanks for sharing! We're still procrastinating on publicly sharing our 2025 plans...
I'd be excited to read about your plans on the forum — consider this a nudge to share them!
Effective Altruism Germany (EAD) is dedicated to building a diverse and resilient community of ambitious individuals in and from Germany who are committed to addressing the world’s most pressing challenges through impactful action. As a central hub for the German EA community, EAD provides coordination, communication, and professional services to guide individuals toward effective careers and projects.
In 2025, our focus areas include the following:
This document outlines EAD’s vision, mission, values, key challenges, and strategic priorities for 2025, providing a roadmap for increasing the organisation’s effectiveness and long-term impact. Our approach is grounded in a theory of change and a set of targeted programmes designed to guide individuals toward impactful action and measurable outcomes.
Note: This strategy document is being published in April, as we used the first quarter of the year to assess the feasibility of our collaboration plans and ensure alignment before sharing our strategic direction more broadly.
A diverse and resilient community of ambitious people in and from Germany who are thinking carefully about the world’s biggest problems and taking impactful action to solve them.
What do we mean by that?
Our mission is to serve as a central point of contact for the German EA community and those interested in EA and to continuously improve ways to guide people to take effective action.
We provide coordination, communication, programmes and professional services to help grow the impact of the community.
We aim to run a professionally managed organisation based on the values of
While organising our programmes (such as the introductory EA programme, the career planning programme and events such as EAD retreats and community building retreats) for the past two years, we found several uncertainties and challenges regarding our Theory of Change to become crucial for the overall impact of EAD:
We aim to address these challenges in 2025 with four focus areas.
We see ourselves as the connector of people in Germany to the wider EA landscape. This is harder for CEA as they don’t know most people in Germany in person, which leads to an additional barrier, and it is harder for local group organisers as they often have smaller networks and therefore miss offers for their group members.
We aim to collaborate more with international programmes and promote them to the German community instead of organising the same programmes ourselves to reduce duplication.
While we still plan to offer programmes in Germany where the community can meet, connect, motivate and support each other, we will open some of our current offers internationally when there is no similar offer yet.
CEA is active in many areas we cover for Germany. We aim to reduce duplication to increase the effectiveness of our activities.
First, we will collaborate with CEA on the intro programme.
CEA will take over the programme's operations and work with us to form in-person groups within Germany, while EAD will focus on outreach in Germany. We will continue to promote the programme twice a year.
Second, we will hand over the local group support to CEA, consisting of
For the individual calls: We experienced that the groups that profited from our help usually resolved their questions within one call. For groups that did not have any concrete questions, we could not provide additional value in the past. This was the case especially for city groups that have been stable for the past few years. We will continue to support community builders individually in 1-1s as needed, as trust has been established already.
As CEA offers the Organiser Support Programme (OSP), where they provide groups with mentors over a few months, we aim to refer to CEA programmes earlier than in the past and will not approach all local groups individually every 6 months anymore.
For the retreat: We received ~20 applications for the last community builders’ retreat, resulting in only 16 participants (compared to 20-30 in the past). Most group organisers were already relatively experienced, making the retreat a motivator but not a necessary step to community building knowledge/first steps.
CEA offers the OSP retreat (a retreat for local group organisers) once per year. We will encourage promising community builders from Germany to attend the retreat, and we believe this will be more impactful for them compared to a smaller Germany-only retreat as they will meet more ambitious people there . Group organisers in Germany who would like to connect with others in the German space are welcome to join the EAD retreat that we’ll organise once per year in the future.
Risks:
Collaborating internationally carries the risk of increased coordination costs. However, for the three programmes (intro programme, OSP programme, OSP retreat), we are confident that we can reduce the overall overhead and increase the overall impact.
Another risk is that individuals may choose EAD's programmes over CEA's, as they are more familiar with EAD. We believe we can resolve this concern by clearly outlining our collaboration with CEA on these programs and still being available as a first contact.
We will work with other national and local groups to organise a regular collaborative community builders call for local community builders in Europe (see European Community Builders Calls). We aim to set up the structure, but not to facilitate the call regularly ourselves.
We will align our activities better with EA Switzerland and EA Austria through quarterly check-ins to allow a better offer for community members and less duplication of similar activities in adjacent regions.
We will focus on testing our impact on a new target group that other organisations struggle to reach and that seems especially promising: scholarship holders of Begabtenförderwerke (organisations supporting gifted students) in Germany. We have a network that could enable us to do this successfully.
We will organise a weekend seminar for this target group as an MVP to see whether we manage to attract and activate the participants. Similar events have been planned by individuals in the past as a programme of the biggest support organisation for gifted students, and we will try to replicate this success as part of EAD’s programmes (see Weekend seminar for high-achieving students/young professionals).
We will iteratively adapt/change our approach opportunistically.
We will focus less on building a large community of people/supporting local groups, as CEA is doing this already, and more on building a focused community of (fewer) committed people who we can support on a more individual basis by
We will update our metrics to better evaluate our programmes’ effects and the organisation’s impact regarding
We will then define target values for our new/updated metrics that we expect to see based on our Theory of Change.
Additionally, we will evaluate in-depth whether our employer of record programme is adding significant counterfactual value.
We adapted our theory of change (previous one from 2024 here) to show more clearly what activities aim for which short-, medium- and long-term outcomes:
We also added a layer to explain how we aim to measure whether we reached the outcomes in Miro below the short version.
In this section, we present our 2025 programmes and provide an overview of our current strategic approach to each.
EAD strives to help as many suitable people as possible to transition into impactful careers. To that end, our communications activities have two main goals:
We will focus on three main strategies to reach these goals:
1. Emphasise the wide range of cause areas within EA more strongly, particularly highlighting their outcomes
Background: Currently, our communication does not effectively highlight the broad range of cause areas within EA. Instead, the focus tends to be more on the principles, methods, and ways to maximise the impact we can have. As a result, the emphasis is more on 'How EA works' rather than 'What EA does.' However, the cause areas – i.e., the people or animals we aim to help – are just as crucial for attracting new individuals and motivating deeper engagement as the theory behind them. These two aspects should be inseparable.
Our approach: Rather than focusing solely on the EA frameworks at the expense of highlighting the cause areas, we will aim to present the full range of cause areas and their positive outcomes alongside the principles. To showcase the cause areas, we don't need to be experts in those areas ourselves; instead, we will direct attention to the wealth of existing resources already available, e.g. by actively spreading the articles on various cause areas and careers that have been translated into German and well prepared for our website, but hardly specifically advertised; furthermore, we will proactively highlight the variety of cause areas and respective organisations.
2. Show more clearly who we are at EAD and what we do
Background: We lack a clear understanding of how our target audience perceives our offerings. Based on our current perception, apart from those deeply involved, few people know who we are, what we offer, or the value we bring. This is problematic because it means key individuals might be unaware of our services or may not seek our career advice, among other things.
Our approach: We will show more clearly who we are and that we offer relevant services and support. We will further establish ourselves as a pivotal point for the entirety of the German EA community – not in a leadership sense, but in terms of contact, services, programmes, advice and resources, for example by communicating our success stories more vocally (e.g. on the website or LinkedIn). This can help build trust and our brand, which can lead to more relevant people approaching us, participating in our programmes and following/engaging in our channels.
3. Focus on the target groups’ needs and how EAD can satisfy them
Background: Marketing theory suggests that directly addressing the needs of target groups is a more effective approach than simply describing the features of a product. This strategy can increase the likelihood of people sharing or recommending our offerings to others, creating word-of-mouth or earned media, which tends to be more impactful than owned or paid media.
Our approach: We aim to take an audience-led approach rather than a product-led one. This means identifying the traits and needs of our target audience and demonstrating how our offerings can meet those needs, e.g. explicitly highlighting EA as a field for careers that are both fulfilling and impactful, or by using messaging like “Use your talents and skills optimally for a better world” when addressing the ambitious, well educated, altruistic target group of scholarship holders.
Timeline: In August, we will review the KPIs of all communication channels along with the latest programme attendance numbers (e.g. the Intro Program) and compare the results before and after implementing the new strategy. We will also set concrete goals for the rest of 2025.
Background: We have run three iterations of this programme since 2023, improving the offer and testing different variations. Its goal is to support people’s career planning process, by providing an accountability structure and the opportunity to receive input from peers. The first two iterations proved successful, while the third had higher drop-off rates. We asked CEA whether they would be interested in running the programme together, but they do not have the capacity right now.
Our approach: To scale the programme and expand into gaps in the community building landscape, we will open the programme to all people within the European time zones.
To increase completion rates, we plan to improve upfront communication about the offer (expectation setting), raise admission criteria, and get expert feedback on the content and structure.
Background: We offered low-barrier 30-minute chats to everyone who filled in a very short form for 2 years now. In 2024, we received 99 applications and had 77 1-1s via this process. We realised that we could not help the people who did not fulfil any of the following criteria effectively:
Our approach:
Background: We organised two EAD retreats for community members in the past year and one in 2025, where they could meet others from the German community, learn more and also share their knowledge. In the past, this event was mainly targeted at people who took part in the (mainly online) intro program, which ran twice a year. The retreat was an event to connect with peer intro program alumni in person, as well as with more experienced community members. We accommodated 20-40 people.
We also organised two community building (CB) retreats per year in the past, but we will not organise the CB retreats anymore (see Collaboration with the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA)).
Our approach:
We’ve organised the EAGxBerlin successfully with project teams since 2022 and aim to continue to do so. Since the conferences were organised with high quality, it’s currently considered one of the 5 yearly recurring EAGx events.
Background: We received fewer applications to introductory programmes within the past 12 months, reducing the size of our top of the funnel. Therefore, we want to reach new potential EAs via a programme that aims to replicate past successes of weekend seminars aiming at gifted students in Germany.
Our approach: We will plan and execute an outreach campaign and organise a weekend seminar for a target group of gifted and engaged students and young professionals.
The event will contain several speakers who can inform participants about the most important cause areas and inspire them to take action, especially with their career (plans).
Background: We organised a monthly community builders (CB) call for group organisers for 2.5 years now. The average participation numbers declined from ~15 to less than 10.
Our approach: We are working with other national and local groups (see Collaboration with other groups) to organise a monthly collaborative community builders call for local volunteer/paid CBs in Europe (instead of just Germany/DACH). We aim to set up the structure, but then hand over the facilitation to a group of European community builders. We will monitor whether it takes place as planned and step in if not.
Background: We’ve sent weekly individual job recommendations to community members for 1 year. We reached out to 320 people with more than 100 individualised opportunities. Most of these opportunities were job openings, some were select fellowships. We also supported other organisations in their hiring rounds by suggesting suitable candidates from our database.
Our approach: We did not receive sufficient feedback to see whether our offer was impactful. Therefore, we updated the approach to ask everyone individually via an automation whether they have applied for the opportunity. We will reevaluate the offer in July to decide whether to continue it.
Background: We have supported community members with a community health contact for people seeking support in personally challenging situations or when there is a fight or a reported infringement of our Code of Conduct. CEA has a similar offer for the international community.
Our approach: We will continue offering our community health contact, as people are more likely to reach out to us than to CEA due to their familiarity with us and the ability to communicate in their native language. With the person’s consent, we aim to refer cases to CEA to provide them with a better overview while minimising resource use on EAD’s side.
Background: We’ve been offering fiscal sponsorship for local groups and individual projects for a few years now. Through our employer of record programme, we hired 12 grantees of international EA-aligned funders in Germany last year. We keep 6 % of the grant to cover EAD’s operational costs. We are currently uncertain whether the programmes provide sufficient value.
Our approach: We will map out in detail what other alternatives might be available to determine whether the programmes offer additional value to potentially adapt our offer.
Thanks for sharing!
Isn't OSP limited to university groups?
Yes, the current OSP is focused on university groups. CEA trialed one iteration with city groups last winter. In Germany, most groups are a mix of university and city groups, and those that engage in outreach typically target university students.
For any group that isn’t eligible but still needs support, we’ll continue to offer assistance through 1-1 calls.