Lessons Learned from Running EA Purdue

This semester, EA Purdue was able to expand from 4 regular members to around 15-20 regular members. Partially, this was due to having a larger organizing team with more capacity for organizing events; partially, it was due to us running the group with a better strategy. The changes we made had a variety of impacts on retention, community structure, and potential succession, so we thought it would be useful to share what we learned and how other groups can adapt from our successes and mistakes.

TL;DR

• Organizer time and effort:
  Focus on putting in enough time and effort as an organizer—this often determines your success. Start early, meet often, have a clear theory of change, and be prepared for more work than you expect.
• Building Helpful Relationships:
  Build strong friendships among your organizers and leverage resources like OSP for strategy and support. Network with faculty and students to gain institutional backing, and take advantage of EAG/EAGx events to inspire and guide members.
• Know the College Club Market
  Offer both social value and content value in a competitive college club environment by presenting your club as polished, accessible, and worth members’ time. Aim for growth to leverage network effects, plan long-term to prevent the club from dying out, Your commitment to success is a competitive advantage over clubs with less-invested organizers.
• Fellowship:
  Expect and normalize attrition—follow up after missed sessions and don’t take drops personally. Start with larger groups to counter inevitable attendance drop-offs, and keep messaging absentees to maintain engagement.
• General Meeting:
  Host regular, well-prepared presentations interspersed with 1-1 discussions and casual dinners. Provide snacks, rotate conversation partners to build community, and trust that events you personally find engaging will appeal to others too.
• On Community Building:
  Be kind and use your role to set welcoming norms. Track what works at your institution, use icebreakers to foster comfort, and inspire new organizers to ensure the group’s longevity and success.

Organizer time and effort

We will start with what might be a controversial claim: The number one controllable factor that constrains success in most university groups is organizer time and effort. Much of the below advice takes a reasonable amount of work to implement, so be sure to plan for this. 

• You can just do things: One common failure mode of university groups is that they don’t get started in the first place. You may worry that a university group may fail - and many do - but you can likely do a better job than you think, and it’s still highly positive EV to try.
• Get a good theory of change: EA groups are organized around a particular purpose - try to do the most good possible with limited resources - and it’s useful to have a theory of change for how each event you organize advances this goal. Talking to other organizers and reading their forum posts can help a lot here; they have a lot of useful advice and ideas that can help your group do better.
  • A particularly useful model that I’ve seen from Henry at UChicago and Nikola Jurkovic at HAIST is that of an outreach funnel - new members can move from being completely unaware of EA, to knowing the basics, to beginning to help organize or get EA internships; and at each stage, you move from concentrating on a lot of people (everyone at your college) to fewer people (everyone who attends your fellowships) to a small, core group (everyone who sticks around). Each event has a place along this funnel - club fair tabling goes at the top; running fellowships goes around the middle; and organizing board meetings go at the bottom.
• Know your workload: Don’t be one of the many ambitious university students who falls victim to the planning fallacy at the beginning of the semester. Organizing takes a surprising amount of time.
• Start early: Ideally, create all of your advertising materials before people start arriving on campus. This means that once people arrive, you can focus all your efforts on deploying them. If possible, arrive on campus during freshman orientation to start outreach. There are likely some spectacular times for tabling during orientation.
  • To give a sense of how this worked for us, we had monthly organizer meetings throughout the summer, and started 2x weekly organizing meetings about 2 weeks before the semester. We felt like starting even earlier or hitting it harder after we started would have been better.
• Have a bunch of organizer meetings: More really is better here, you will very likely not hit the point of sufficiently diminished marginal returns to org team meetings.
  • This helps organizers hold each other accountable.
  • Having frequent conversations about the club does wonders to develop strategy. It also helps to ensure everyone is on the same page with said strategy.
  • These meetings help the org team grow closer as a friend group.

Building Helpful Relationships

• Be Friends: Classic team building advice applies here. Teams are force multipliers. The relationship(s) between the main organizers of the club are very likely to be the single most impact-multiplying relationships of your time in school.
• Do OSP: OSP provides another experienced perspective on organizing and further helps to develop club strategy. Good club strategy is the only ingredient that can allow your club to gain competitive advantage over other clubs and provide true value to your members. OSP also provides lots of resources that can save you time as you start up your club.
• Network with…
  • Faculty: Many faculty are excited about helping a club. Through ~8 meetings with professors and administrators, Matthew was able to find a department to sponsor the club, and two professors willing to provide a credit hour to members who completed the fellowship curriculum, and a number of professors happy to attend meetings as guest speakers. Unfortunately, the plan to provide a credit of philosophy to members was foiled by an Indiana state law on political neutrality. We definitely recommend attempting to achieve this project specifically in your school though.
  • Students: Matthew found his Resident Assistant network to be immensely valuable in outreach, and a good 20% of the club he was friends with before it began.
• Go to EAGs and EAGxs with your group: Suppose you’ve managed to get a few people through your fellowship and coming to your general meetings. If you’ve done recruitment widely, these people will be from a variety of different majors and focused on a variety of different cause areas. While this is great, you may not have the expertise to help them go further. This is where EAG and EAGx can help! Often, there will be more advanced people who can advise your group members on where to go next. Also, in our experience, EAG and EAGx are great confidence boosts for both organizers and non-organizers - talking to other people who share your values and plans works wonders for loneliness and social anxiety.

Know the College Club Market

Knowing the implications of the college club market dynamics is incredibly important as an organizer. First, clubs provide value to their members from two sources: the club social group, and content of the club. Successful clubs must deliver sufficiently on both of these dimensions. Prospective Members (PMs) join clubs that provide them the most value compared to the competition. The effects of this competition is that on any night you put on an event, the entire campus will be working to convince your members to do something else.

One important source of market failure to keep an eye on in the college club market is information asymmetry. PMs don’t know what your club is like, but you do. Communicating how cool your club is therefore becomes an important task. Some ways to do this are:

• Be Polished: Show the PMs that you put effort into organizing by practicing your presentations, being prepared for meetings, and having an aesthetically appealing table. Definitely buy a blue tablecloth.
• Lower the Cost of Information: To the PM, you are simply another club that they probably won’t be able to join. Since this is the case, it is only fair to reciprocate them for spending time listening to your pitch or investigating your club. This can be in the form of having food at your early meetings or giving them a small gift from your table. To further reduce the cost of learning about your club, buy a nice banner that has a design that clearly and concisely tells what your club is about. These small reductions in the cost of information will significantly increase engagement.
• Understand Network Effects: Because of network effects, the marginal benefit of membership increases as your group size increases. Put another way, people are more likely to join your club if it is big. Additionally, having a large club makes it easier to grow through word-of-mouth.
• Consider Club-Longtermism: Club-longtermism is an ideology that holds that planning the future of your club is a top organizer priority. Think of the potential 10^54 future club members! We think club longtermism is underrated. Zero members is an attractor for university groups. It’s a far too common occurrence for university groups to die. The two most common causes of this are bad organizer handoff or having too small of a “core” group to whether the intensity of intense exam weeks. To combat this, think years ahead about club handoff, and don’t forget about the benefits of scale.
• Encouraging Dynamics:  In all honesty, EA Purdue did everything on this (very much non-exhaustive) list only moderately well. Despite this, we still had a fabulous semester. In large part, this is due to one important fact: Most non-EA groups on campus have organizers that are only superficially invested in their club’s success. Considering the fact that you are reading about organizing strategy right now, a realistic estimation is that “normie” organizers are ~25% as committed as you are. Assuming your efforts translate into effective outreach and running engaging meetings, this gives your group a huge edge. This should be cause for significant optimism and excitement about your club’s future.

Fellowship

(Note: at Purdue, we called the fellowship a seminar for branding reasons. We’ll try to stick to using “fellowship” here, but we may forget.)

• Follow up after missed fellowships: In basically any fellowship program you run, whether it’s a single 2-person cohort or 30 people spread across five cohorts, people will sometimes miss your sessions, often without letting you know in advance. There are a number of reasons this can happen, especially at the start of the fellowship, and a large amount of the time, they simply just forgot. As a result, you can reduce attrition simply by messaging people (politely!) after missed sessions and letting them know they’re still welcome. Sometimes this may reveal that someone is unable to attend anymore due to over-commitment or conflicting events. This is also useful to know for planning.
• Don’t get demoralized from attrition: Attrition will happen, regardless of how good an organizer you are, and is quite often affected by factors outside your control. In our case, we ended up with 2 of 4 signups finishing our fellowship in Fall 2023, and 12 of 30 signups finishing our fellowship in Fall 2024. Most people who dropped did so before our first seminar! So, it’s important to keep in mind that losing a significant fraction of your attendees doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing anything wrong - it’s pretty much the natural course of events in any college club.
• Err on the side of larger groups due to attrition: A corollary of high levels of attrition is that your groups may, at times, become very small. At a few points this semester, we ended up having sessions where only one person showed up. (This was very unevenly distributed - some cohorts ended up having most of their members stay the entire semester.) In retrospect, we think this is because we deliberately made the groups to prevent a group from ever having too many people; next semester, we plan to be more comfortable with risking a too-large group in order to reduce the number of too-small groups. 

General Meetings

One particularly useful event we’ve developed is the general meeting: an all-invited meeting, where we put on a presentation mixed with discussion. We’ve found these typically get around half of our active members with good scheduling, and most of our active members attend at least once a month.

• Presentation: Typically, we’ll end up preparing a 10-15 slide presentation, and practice it a few times to ensure that it’s polished and ready to present. We try to present on a variety of EA topics, and in the last semester have had a global health vs animal welfare debate, an EAG Boston application workshop, and a guest speaker (or faculty advisor) presenting on meta-ethics.
• Discussion: During the presentation, we’ll have around 4 sets of discussion questions, during which we ask attendees to pair off in 1-1 conversations. Importantly, we also ask attendees to rotate between 1-1s to talk to someone they haven’t talked to before. This allows all our club members to meet each other and form a stronger community. In our experience, these may have an initial 5-10 seconds of awkward silence, but quickly become engaging - it’s often difficult to focus back on the presentation afterwards, and both of us tend to get sidetracked in conversations too!
  • We’ve noticed that people often talk more often in general meetings than in fellowships, especially at the beginning of the semester. We think this is because of the more casual environment - since there isn’t as much pressure to have “good” comments or any readings, people feel more comfortable addressing their confusions and applying the ideas of the presentation in novel ways.
• Dinners: To save on organizer time, we alternated the general meetings with dinners every other week. These were fairly simple to organize - we found a table in a dining court, sent our location in our group chat, and had a good conversation with whoever showed up. Usually, this would achieve a similar number of attendees to the general meetings, and it helped group members get to know each other better in a less focused setting. We think people enjoyed these nearly as much as the general meetings, so we’re planning to do them next semester alongside more frequent general meetings.
• Food: The simplest way to bring college students to your meetings is to offer them something to eat. In Fall 2023, when Nathan announced he would bring chips to meetings, attendance increased from 1 to 3; in Fall 2024, consistently ensuring we had chips and fruitsnacks helped with attendance. It was somewhat amusing to watch how often the start of every discussion section, there would be a rush to the chips table to grab a snack.
• Make your group something you look forward to: Often, it’s easy to get stuck trying to think of how to make your events better. For this, we recommend a simple heuristic: what would make your event something you would look forward to? This isn’t a perfect proxy for what other people will enjoy, but it is pretty good - if you, an EA, would find having a longer discussion more interesting, or want to try a particular meeting format, or found some particular EA forum post interesting and want to share, this is good evidence that other members of your group would like it too.

On Community Building

• Be a nice person: As an organizer, you have immense social power to set norms. Being a kind and welcoming person goes a long way toward setting the social groundwork for a great club community.
• Know what works: There is a large variance in what works, based on who and where you are organizing. Some organizers have comparative advantage in doing outreach through their own personal networks, you know if this is you. Further, some schools have different club cultures than other schools. Departmental emails were very unsuccessful for Purdue EA this last fall, but tabling at our club fair was huge. Keep track of what works for your school and adjust your behavior accordingly.
• Icebreakers, Dammit: As an organizer, you probably know everyone in the club better than the members know each other. This can cause you to reliably underestimate the need for icebreakers. Members are much more likely to share their thoughts in fellowship if they feel socially comfortable. Social coherence is an incredibly important subgoal for a community building, so don’t skip on the icebreakers.
• Inspire other organizers: The best thing I (Nathan) was able to do for the club last year was to bring Matthew onto the org board. Having two organizers instead of one made the work of organizing so much faster and easier, and we can now be sure that the club will continue on for at least a year after I graduate. We’re now bringing on some more organizers as well, which should hopefully make organizing every more efficient. Some of the best ways we’ve found to get people interested in organizing have been to just ask, or to bring them to EAGs or EAGxs where they can talk to other organizers from other schools.