First, I wanted to thank all of the Effective Altruism Global organizers and participants. I found it to be very valuable and overall well put together. There was obviously a ton of work put into it, most by conference organizers who I don't believe will get that much credit for it, and I very much commend their work.
That said, there's always a lot of room for new ideas, and I find I often get a bunch of ideas at and after these conferences. Because of the EAGx events, ideas described now may be able to be put into action somewhat soon and experimented with.
As may be expected, I recommend that people make all of their ideas be independent comments, then upvote the ideas that they think would be the most useful.
Really appreciate the response here, Kerry. Adding some extra feedback for calibration. Apologies in advance that I'm realizing I'm struggling to balance the strength of my opinion with my knowledge that this was well-intended. Just to be clear, my views only here, not my employer's.
I didn't end up nominating anybody because I'd rather reach out to people myself. The "via EAG" thing makes me really relieved that I made this choice and will prevent me from nominating people in the future. I'm actually a bit surprised at the strength of my reaction but this would've felt like a major violation to me. I really dislike the idea of feeling accountable for words that I didn't endorse. Just for example, I could plausibly have invited work contacts who I'm not super close with and whom I would be very sensitive to being perceived as spamming.
After your explanation the practice still does seem (very) deceptive to me. At the very least, I'd expect a lot of people to click on the email because they think it's coming from me and then to realize that it came from someone else. If I received this email, I'm sure I'd eventually figure out it wasn't from the person in the "from" line but I'd be confused for a bit and might assume that they approved it even if they didn't write it.
Moreover, if I wanted to not only nominate someone but also send them an email advising them to attend, I could easily do so. Some people may even have done that so their nominees would have felt like they received multiple unsolicited pings from the same person. I know it would have a lower yield but I feel like EAG should have emailed [Firstname at Lastname] and asked them to ping their nominee instead of spoofing their identity in the "from" line and taking this decision out of their hands.
I'd acknowledge that most of the other practices on this thread seem like basically standard marketing techniques. They seem off-putting according to my personal taste and I'd guess they're counter-productive but because they're so standard it also seems likely that I'm just being biased against them because I find marketing distasteful. I want to make clear that I'd put the "via EAG" thing in another category - substantially worse than I'd expect from a typical sales email.
Lower priority stuff:
Deadlines I don't have a problem with rolling deadlines if it's clear that's what they are. I didn't pay a ton of attention to this so I don't have a strong take. It did seem like discounts went up as it got closer to the actual date and I think that did feel a bit like taking advantage of the people who helped out by signing up early.
Looking through the attendee database This language feels off-putting and slightly deceptive to me. As Kit says, it's intended to make it sound like you were thinking of that specific person when it wasn't the case. Unlike the "via EAG," I think this practice is basically standard but I still really dislike it. Kit's comment that "my vanity fooled me for a solid few seconds, by the way!" strikes me as a really good reason to discontinue this practice. I think it's a bad experience and kind of embarrassing to feel like you're getting a personal compliment and then realize it's a form email.
I feel similarly about some other language Kit mentioned.