TL;DR:
- 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.
Throughout this post, for legibility I discuss the direct costs behind running our events and don’t include other indirect costs like staff salaries, software, and our office space (which would increase the costs below by ~25%).
Introduction
This year (2023), EAG Bay Area cost $2M and EAG London cost £2M (including travel grant costs).[1] Our most expensive event ever was EAG SF 2022, which cost $3.6M. This gives us a range of about $1.5–2.5k per person per event.[2]
In-person EAGx events typically cost $150–500k, with smaller events in cheaper countries on the lower end (e.g. EAGxWarsaw) and large events in the US on the higher end (e.g. EAGxNYC). The cost per person for these events is $300–900.
You can see historical attendance figures on our dashboard.
People are often surprised by how expensive our events are — this post seeks to explain why our events have historically been so expensive, why they’ll continue to be somewhat expensive, and how we’re working to reduce costs (see an earlier post here). We’re writing this partially in response to requests from the community, but we’ll also be raising our ticket prices soon, and hope that this post will add some useful context as to why.
We know event prices matter a lot in a community where people care so much about what donations can achieve and the importance of using money well — our staff feel the same way. And it’s worth noting that we still think our events are worthwhile, as they seem to have had a large effect at shifting people into high-priority work (though we plan to run them in a cheaper way now). We think that short events can be an effective way to accelerate people in building professional relationships, applying for jobs, and making other critical career decisions.
In this post I primarily discuss EAGs because they’re a much larger portion of CEA Events team spending and it’s hard to generalise across EAGx events, which occur in a wider range of contexts. However, similar principles and themes will apply to EAGx events (you can see more details in Ollie’s posts here). I’ve ended this section with an example budget breakdown for EAG London 2023, though I’ll note that the precise breakdown tends to vary a fair bit between events.
EAG London 2023 | |
Item | Cost |
Catering | £739,680.00 |
Venue | £532,918.00[3] |
Audiovisual and video recording | £170,975.93 |
Printing and signage | £106,658.40 |
Travel grants | £110,000.00 |
Production company fee | £98,810.00 |
Furniture hire | £33,610.50 |
Other costs[4] | £161,316.96 |
Total costs | £1,953,969.79 |
Venue and catering
Our biggest spending items are venue and catering.
In a given city there are surprisingly few venues that can host 1500+ people. Some of these venues instantly get ruled out for being too expensive/flashy, being too far away from easy transit, not having suitable availability, etc.[5] This means that in the Bay Area for example, there are maybe four venues that I would consider viable for a 1500+ person EAG (as it exists currently, with a main networking area, multiple content/meetup rooms, etc.).[6]
Most venues force you to use their in-house catering company[7] and don’t let you bring in your own food (i.e. we can’t buy a bunch of Oreos ourselves). These catering companies generally have a minimum mandatory spend, and significantly mark up the costs of their services. For the upcoming EAG Boston for example (prices include service charge):
- $65 a head for dinner[8]
- $55 a head for lunch
- $4 for a bag of chips/crisps
- $8 for a cup of tea (i.e. hot water and tea bag)
And these numbers assume everything gets consumed. It’s pretty bad to run out of food and it’s hard to predict what people will eat (i.e. more snacks get eaten if the meals are bad), so we usually have a bit of extra for everything.[9] This means that for EAG Boston, we’re expecting to spend $550k on three meals and some (minimal) snacks and drinks. Doing breakfast, lunch, and dinner throughout the event would cost us ~$1M. And for reference, these numbers aren’t the most expensive we’ve seen — at the Oakland Marriott in the Bay Area, dinner averaged ~$80 a head.
I’ve talked to other people who run events to get a sense of how much their costs breakdown, though it’s been hard to find good information (budget breakdowns are generally not very public and I’ve struggled to get good information from organisers outside of EA). I’ve found that non-profit conferences will often charge attendees ~$400 per person (tickets often being subsidised) — though most of these events don’t provide much food and often have fewer attendees in a less functional space (fewer rooms and less space for meetings). On the other side of the spectrum, for-profit conferences often charge people $1–2k for an event with less food and production value than an EAG (and are often subsidised by sponsors/vendors).[10]
Why is everything so expensive? Here are some reasons we think may be significant (not a comprehensive list):
- Big venues are just generally quite expensive to run (big properties, lots of staff, etc.).
- These venues are often empty, forcing them to charge more when they actually do host events.
- Catering costs are marked up in order to mark venue costs down. Many customers will anchor on an initial venue cost; by the time they hear the exorbitant catering fees later, they may feel it’s too late to switch. (We always ask to see both venue and catering costs up front.)
Other costs
Similar principles apply to other items too. That is, generally things cost a lot more than one might think due to large markups. For audiovisual (AV) setups, companies will charge us $1,000 to rent a single laptop for a week that the AV technicians will need to use in the rooms that are being recorded. And labour is also expensive, at ~$1,000/day per AV technician you use. (We have plans to save on these costs — see below.)
There are also lots of other random costs that are hard to avoid:
- Trash haul fees
- Wi-Fi fees (to allow attendees to use Swapcard from different parts of the building)
- Security fees
- Printing and signage fees
- Contractor and other labour fees
Prices have also risen a fair bit in the last couple of years due to inflation, meaning that in general I expect it to be more difficult to reduce nominal costs, even while we are using fewer services like these where possible.
What are we doing to save money?
Due to the new funding environment, we’ve been cutting down our spending for the past few EAGs, and we’re planning to cut it down even further. In making these judgement calls we’re mostly optimising for trying to get as many high quality attendees networking together for a reasonably affordable rate. We’re aiming for scrappier events, with fewer meals, though we think we can retain a significant proportion of the value at ~75% of the cost. Some things we’re doing:
- Cutting the number of meals served down to ~3 rather than 5 or 6 (cutting dinner at EAG Bay Area seemed to make the event a bit worse, but not massively so[11]). And also cutting snack and drink variety — only having a few basic snack and drink options available.
- Selecting cheaper venues (which may be in slightly more annoying locations, have fewer suitable rooms, have less natural light, etc.).
- Cutting the number of sessions we record and making AV setups more basic — largely because our uploaded talks have historically had low view counts.
- Generally negotiating harder and more aggressively on prices.
- We’ve kept on doing travel grants but are being more conservative in how much money we give out.
- Cutting other bits where we can, including inventory and certain types of labour.
We’re also considering moving back to running two EAGs a year rather than three, though we’re planning to wait and see how EAG Boston goes before making a decision for 2024. We’ve explored whether it would be worth it to make the events smaller, and it seemed like it didn’t cut costs sufficiently (per person) for this to be worthwhile, though we’d like to dig into this more in the future. We’re also thinking about whether we should change the structure of the event to open up our venue options (e.g., remove nearly all the content rooms), which could help us to create a more cost effective event.
We looked a bit at running our events in other locations or further out from cities. Generally things didn’t seem sufficiently cheaper but this is something we’d like to explore further. I do also think there’s a fairly substantial cost to running our events in non-hub locations, because some of the best-networked people in the community (people who can provide mentorship, advice, funding, and so on) will be much less likely to attend. It would also take more time and travel costs for non-local people to attend, reducing the appeal of doing an event outside of a hub.
We’re still working out the details, but we also expect to raise default ticket prices. That is, instead of people paying $200 for a ticket that costs us $1500, they’ll be paying maybe $500 for a ticket that costs us $1000. We still expect to have discounted tickets for students and people on lower incomes, and on the other end of the spectrum we may ask some people to pay for their ticket price in its entirety. This means that people can start expecting to pay more for a (hopefully only slightly) lower-quality event, and we still expect folks to get a lot of value in attending.
If you'd like to give us anonymous feedback you can do so with Amy (who runs the CEA Events team) here.
- ^
The venues and large parts of their set-up were booked before the FTX collapse. Our venue for Boston was booked afterwards, and we did re-check whether it still made sense to proceed with it. We concluded yes, though I regret not thinking about it harder (as I don’t feel super confident in our conclusions), and plan to do so for 2024 if we go ahead with a Boston event.
- ^
These costs don’t include CEA salaries and other indirect costs. They also don’t include revenue generated from ticket sales, but this has been fairly low in recent years and doesn't strongly affect the overall figures.
- ^
As we explain later, many “venue” costs are instead categorised as “catering” by large event venues. It may be more helpful to think of this as a “venue + catering” cost of £1,272,598.00.
- ^
This includes things like the speakers reception, radio hire, Wi-Fi costs, Swapcard fees, and inventory items like stationary.
- ^
For example, the Ritz Carlton San Francisco seems like it could work for our events, but would just be more expensive than the Hilton or the Marriott hotels in the area.
- ^
These are the Palace of Fine Arts, the Oakland Marriott, Hilton Union Square, and the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport. (We’ve searched SF, Berkeley, and Oakland thoroughly over the last few years, and we’re fairly confident there aren’t other suitable options in these areas, though there may be other feasible venues located further out. If you have questions about a venue we didn’t name, or a suggestion for something you think might work, we’re happy to hear them, and may be able to clarify why we’ve ruled out a particular venue.)
- ^
You can generally get out of this if you pay a high enough fee, but it’s not usually worth it.
- ^
People sometimes ask whether doing all vegan food costs more. The answer is not really, though sometimes these caterers will mark you up a bit if you request certain fake meat products.
- ^
Our attendees also seem to eat more than most conference attendees (we’ve frequently run out of food or come close to doing so even when our attendee estimates were accurate).
- ^
If anyone runs large events or knows anyone who does, I’d love to chat!
- ^
It seemed like the number of overall connections reported and meetings booked throughout the event were not very different from events where we did serve dinner.
I enjoyed this, thanks!
Brief thoughts:
1. Very thankful for the teams that run these! I got a lot of value from them.
2. Obvious comment, but I'd be interested in more EAG Virtual conferences. It's possible they don't seem as cool, but maybe that's partially fixable. I'd expect this to cut down on much of the expense. I liked the EAG Virtual, during the pandemic, that I went to.
3. It seems healthy to me to raise prices over time, maybe up to full-cost or even over (small profit margin)? I think EA would be better if people paid more for services they used.
4. If one were to estimate the value of EAG in terms of something like, "quality-adjusted person times interaction-time", I would expect that there could be more small events that could be cost-effective.
5. I'd feel good about experimentation. Even, take a year or two off from EAGs and try out very different kinds of events. We're in this for the long-term, I think more exploration could make sense.
6. If OP is paying for much of it, I'd really like for them to state what their logic model for what they think the value is. I feel nervous being subsidized to do something, when it's not very clear to me exactly what that reasoning is.
7. On that note, I'd of course be interested to better understand the model of where CEA is thinking the value comes from. I have multiple hypotheses here.
8. I've noticed that at some of the EAGs I attended, the venues would kick us out pretty early, which seems to have created some lost value.
+1 that I'd love to know the assumptions behind the subsidies. I'd also like information that makes it easier for people to self-select into different EA events, beyond simply "knowledge of EA". Historically, what kind of people in what kind of situations have gotten the most value out going to an EAG conference? Who's added the most value? What kind of people do you really wish would attend? Obviously it couldn't be exhaustive, and maybe this would end up in the same kind of bad place as people over-indexing on 80k's advice, but I'd definitely be curious!
Sorry yeah, they cost way less, and if we were purely optimizing for connections per dollar then virtual conferences might be all that we do. So we are going to think about doing more of these moving forwards, though I do think it would be a mistake to optimize solely for connections per dollar.
There's not even a vague feel on the cost effectiveness of EAGs? Or a price at which CEA/OP no longer think they'd be cost effective to run?
There's also the implicit cost of people's time that is not similarly reduced.
This is a very helpful post. I'm surprised the events are so expensive, but breakdown of costs and explanations make sense.
That said, this makes me much more skeptical about the value of EAG given the alternative potential uses of funds - even just in terms of other types of events.
As suggested by Ozzie, I'd definitely like to see a comparison with the potential value of smaller events, as well as experimentation.
Spending $2k per person might be good value, but I think we could do better. Perhaps there is an analogy with cash transfers as a benchmark - what event could someone put on if they were just given that money?
For example, with $2k, I expect I could hire a pub in central London for an evening (or maybe a whole day), with perhaps around 100 people attending. So that's $20 per person, or 1% of the cost of EAG. Would they get as much benefit from attending my event as attending EAG? No, but I'd bet they'd get more than 1% of the benefit.
Now what if 10 or 20 people pooled their $2k per person?
Worth noting these aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. It's possible both running EAGs and running these smaller events are above current funding bars.
Actually, I'm not sure this is right. An evening has around 1/10 of the networking duration of a weekend, and number of connections are proportional to time spent networking and to number of participants squared. If this is 1/10th the attendance and 1/10th the duration, you're getting around 1/1000th the networking value for 1/1000th the cost, so not obviously better than an EAG weekend that costs $2M and has 1000 participants, maybe worse when you factor in people's time cost of getting to the pub as a fraction of the event duration, or maybe better if they prefer not to spend a whole weekend.
This seems wrong, 1-1s are gated by the fact that there are only so many 30 minute slots in a day. Doubling the number of attendees might allow someone to be slightly more selective in who they network with but it doesn't let them do 4x as many meetings.
Firstly, I agree with Daniel that we should just do both. Smaller events like the one you're suggesting here are worth doing (and I expect local EA groups do exactly this)
But I think there are effects that kick in only when events reach a certain size, e.g.
FWIW, we have funded lots of small retreats and compared their cost-effectiveness with EAGx events, the post about that is here. The retreats were much more expensive than the pub idea, but we found that they produced a similar amount of value per person despite being almost twice the cost per person. EAG is even more expensive per person, but has the effects described above.
Just want to add that many of the retreats organised by national organisations or uni groups are a fraction of the cost of the retreats analysed in the link Ollie posted. Our most expensive retreat had a per-person cost of around EUR 260. The average retreat analysed in that post had a per-person cost of just under EUR 1,500. See my comment for further details.
Agree, our most expensive retreat this year was at EUR ~160 per person, which was fully funded for participants (excluding our working time though).
Other retreats we did were either cheaper or partially funded by the participants themselves.
To add my 2 cents: For me as a father of two children the cost of spending a whole weekend working is a huge and potentially prohibitive cost and one of the reasons I didn't attend EAG London this year (for me much more relevant than 200US$ more or less).
So I'm wondering why you have decided not to do EAGs during the week? My assumption is that especially more senior people would be more willing to come. Maybe even if that would include travel (to a cheaper location).
Thanks for sharing this Sebastian! We haven't explicitly asked people whether weekends work better than weekdays, though this has now come up a couple of times such that I'd like to do so in the future.
But my expectation is that weekends would work much better for most of our attendees as few of them have children (even the more senior folks). A lot of our attendees are students who might have classes during the week and many others work jobs for which they can't easily take time off for our event (jobs in government or academia for example).
I ran a Twitter poll (n = 297), and the results were fairly decisive in favour of weekends:
Obviously not a representative sample or a carefully crafted survey, and it's possible people are anchored on weekends because that's when EAGs have historically taken place, but that's quite a large margin.
Still, it sucks that this doesn't work for everyone!
I don't think it's quite that it's a side hustle for them — it's mostly just that it's only a minority of attendees are working for EA orgs that are likely to be okay with them taking time off for an EA conference. If you're a biology student planning on working in biosecurity in the future, my guess is that you won't easily be able to move or skip your classes. Similar things might apply for people working in government or people who are skilling up outside of EA (e.g. as a law clerk).
Especially as I seem to recall EAG was put on Easter/Passover weekend one year.
I want to quickly note that we often don't have that many options for what dates we can get. Large venues are often booked out well in advance, and sometimes you need to take what you can get. It's also pretty likely that you're gonna clash with something, such as a particular university's final exams. I also doubt expect that having it on Passover/Easter affected attendance that much.
I'll note that I don't think the above is a great excuse — I still think it was suboptimal to host an event then, but it can be quite tricky to get everything right here!
This seems really surprising to me! In the Bay Area I remember EAG 2015 was on a corporate campus (one of the Google campuses) and EAG 2016 was on a university campus (Berkeley). I'm more familiar with options in Boston, where I remember EAG 2017 was on a university campus (Harvard) and I've also been to a large annual non-EA event that rented a few different high schools over the years. Is the problem that corporate / university / high school settings aren't classy enough?
I do wanna note, I thought the experience of using the google campus was much worse than many other EAGs I've been at – having to walk 5-10 minutes over to another part of the campus, hope that anyone else had shown up to the event I wanted to go to (which they often hadn't) eventually left me with a learned helpnessness about trying to do anything.
Thanks! I appreciate you taking my questions, and I apologize for being somewhat out of touch here -- I haven't attended an EAG since Boston in 2017 and I've heard they've changed a lot.
I talked some yesterday with a friend who works in venue negotiation for conferences (mostly on the hotel side, though) and in addition to the four places you mentioned other Bay Area places he thought might work included: Fort Mason, Moscone (too big, but commonly split), Yerba Buena (but looking now seems too small), and the South San Francisco Conference Center.
(Fine to stop engaging if I'm not being helpful)
No problem, all good! Re those venues:
- Fort Mason kinda works but has a similar issue of having lots of spaces kinda spread out over a wider area (some of which are kinda hard to find). The main networking area it has is the Festival Pavilion, which is huge but is also just an empty warehouse and would probably need to be built out a bit with lighting and furniture. This venue is weird and annoying enough that I'd only go for it if it was notably cheaper, but my understanding is that it's sort of similarly expensive to some of our other options.
- Moscone is great but yeah it's too big. To host an event there you need to commit to something like >1000 hotel rooms at their partner hotels. As you mention, you can apparently split the venue or like sub-let out rooms if a bigger event is going on. We tried investigating this for 2024 but it seemed risky (you'd sort of be at the larger events whim, and perhaps only getting confirmation very close to the dates themselves). I would be keen to investigate this further, but my guess is that it's not likely to be worth it (unless our event got much bigger).
- Yerba Buena is too small as you suggest.
- South San Francisco Conference Center is also a
... (read more)Is this just a guess or do you have information on the actual costs of the event? (Just from their website, they seem to have various sponsors who are likely covering a substantial amount of the costs, and yes, their venue costs might be very low (or even close to zero) because Harvard/MIT are likely not charging them commercial rates, but that doesn't give any info of the actual costs and why they would be lower than EAG costs.)
I’m concerned this change will contribute to making EA more insular by raising the costs of becoming engaged with the community. $200 instead of free means people only go if they’re serious, but $500 feels like a real chunk of money, and may be particularly hard to justify for people who aren't already highly engaged.
One possible remedy here would be to also give discounted tickets to first-timers.
I share your concern, but I think it would be more than offset by the competition with EAGx. My understanding from the dashboard, and from personal experience, is that EAGx has roughly the same value as EAG for first-timers (and many/most non first-timers) while being ~3x more cost-efficient. (If you went to both, would you rather pay $2k to go to an EAG or $600 to go to an EAGx as a first timer?)
I think this is good also because EAGx are mostly organized by different community members and national groups staff, so different groups could try different strategies and we could see what works best (e.g. minimize printing, have the many bored idle volunteers record talks with their phones instead of paying thousands per recorded talk, ...)
It might also help move EA towards being more of a do-ocracy and less of an "EV-ocracy".
Another great advantage imho is that people and community builders would be more mindful of other opportunities, or even try to start alternatives to EAGs, that have been crowded out by the current subsidies.
Thanks for this comment, all seems basically right (I run the EAGx programme).
Yes, we do exactly this (EAGxNYC recorded talks on phones, in fact). We've even had a few instances where an EAGx team tried something, it worked really well and then EAG incorporated it. One example is that EAGxBerlin 2022 put up posters with contact information for the community health support team, which attendees appreciated and which EAG copied.
This is sideways to the main point in the post, but I'm interested in a ticket type that's just "Swapcard / unsupported virtual attendee" where accepted people just get access to Swapcard, which lets them schedule 1-1 online videoconferencing, and that's it.
I find a lot of the value of EAG is in 1-1s, and I'd hope that this would be an option where virtual attendees can get potentially lots of networking value for very little cost.
(Asking because I don't want to pay a lot of money to attend an EAG where I'd mostly be taking on a mentor role, but I would potentially be happy to do some online 1-1s with people during a Schelling time.)
Update: Just learned about EAGxVirtual, which seems very relevant!
Have you considered cutting down on EAG attendees overall by reducing the proportion of AI-Safety participants, and instead hosting (or support others doing so) large AI-Safety only conferences?
These in turn could be subsidized by industry - yes, this can be a huge conflict of interest, but given the huge cost on the one hand and the revenue in AI on the other, could be worth consideration.
Thanks for sharing this!
I believe you that this is the case, but I'm also curious as to why. At least in the private sector, more senior people (and even junior people) seem to spend a lot of their time traveling, to meet clients, do deals, visit conferences, and so on. And similarly academics seem happy to fly quite a long way to go to conferences. In fact attending conferences or offsites is often seen as a perk. So I don't quite understand why senior EAs seem so averse to flying to Vegas or Atlanta. Do EA employers not let people expense the travel?
I'm not sure I count as 'senior', but I could understand some reluctance even if 'all expenses paid'.
I consider my EAG(x) participation as an act of community service. Although there are diffuse benefits, I do not get that much out of it myself, professionally speaking. This is not that surprising: contacts at EAG (or knowledge at EAG, etc. etc.) matter a lot less on the margin of several years spent working in the field than just starting out. I spend most of my time at EAG trying to be helpful - typically, through the medium of several hours of 1-1s each day. I find this fulfilling, but not leisurely.
So from the selfish perspective EAG feels pretty marginal either re. 'professional development' or 'fun'. I'd guess many could be dissuaded by small frictions. Non-hub locations probably fit the bill: "Oh, I could visit [hub] for EAG, and meet my professional contacts in [hub] whilst I'm in town" is a lot more tempting to the minds eye than a dedicated trip for EAG alone.
Speaking for myself, my org would definitely be happy to reimburse travel. But I very much dislike travelling for a number of reasons including travel time and jet lag increasing the cost significantly. I don't want to be away from my family longer than necessary, in part because I already optimise fairly strongly for working long hours. So I'm most likely to go to EAGs nearby. Like Greg, going to another EA hub has advantages that sometimes offset the cost of needing to travel for me.
How much above the catering minimum spend are EAGs? What would spending the minimum look like?
Non-EA conferences I attend (academic ones mostly) typically don't have any food or drink except lunch, coffee, and maybe some biscuits. If you want more food than that you (as an attendee) bring it with, which is clearly much cheaper because it isn't ridiculously marked-up.
Hi Eli, thanks for this update.
On the particular point of cutting the number of sessions you record, I wanted to quickly mention:
1. You say that the videos have few views, but maybe that is also due to a lack of advertisement? I recall finding the Youtube channel after having been involved in EA for quite a bit -- nobody had ever mentioned it to me as a good source of info. Now I'm a regular viewer (see also point 2).
2. I have the cached heuristic that you record most of the content on the primary+secondary stages, which I believe reduces quite a bit of my FOMO, so probably not having the anticipated recordings to watch later would make me have a couple fewer 1on1s, to be able to watch the talks live. Not sure how common this is, but should maybe be a factor in the calculation of (impact) cost.
3. The videos are also particularly useful for staying kind of up to date with things that are not in my immediate cause areas. These talks do not cross my bar for impact to attend at the event directly (because they likely won't guide any actions of mine), but are great to watch over dinner to not feel like I'm becoming an "AI-EA", but instead still engaged with other parts of the community.
(as an independent aside, fwiw, the cost category that has the highest delta to my expectations, in relative terms, are the 100k Printing and signage costs. The maps are always really professional and pretty, sure, but wow!)
I think part of the disconnect, from my perspective, is that I have experience with small scrappy conventions that deliver good talks and an enjoyable time and a large central room where people can mingle. The scrappier science-fiction conventions seem to charge in the range of $60-$120, usually on the lower side, and, while relying very heavily on volunteer labor and physical assets, about break even. The fancier ones might charge $250/person/weekend. That's not the true price, since it excludes what dealers pay for access, advertising, etc. But my sense of con budgets is that it is at least half of the true price.
Obviously a large chunk of that is the $240 on food that you're spending and they're not. Another chunk of the cost is location: said cons tend to be out in the boonies of their relevant cities, passing along to attendees costs of travel or increased hotel prices.
The context that non-profit conventions tend to be $400+ is helpful: thank you. I really appreciate the transparency.
Is my impression correct that EAGxs tend to cost vastly less than this? If so, what explains the difference? (EAGxCambridge cost around $0.25M, and I think other ones had smaller budgets?)
If it's that larger venues cost more in a super-linear way, that suggests having more and smaller events.
Having just gone to EAGxNYC, I'd be really alarmed if I walked into an EAG and it had higher production value than that. The chairs were so many different-but-coordinated styles. There was Listerine and contact lens fluid in the bathrooms. The soap was from a perfume house!
Encourage you to revisit the idea of venues in smaller/less expensive cities. In addition to lower venue costs this imposes much lower accomodation costs on participants or their organizations.
May also have good signaling benefits and attract people who may be underrepresented in the usual EA “bubble”. See all the posts discussing why Oxford, Boston, and SF bay should not be the main/only hubs for further arguments.
Also may allow larger quieter more relaxed spaces enabling calmer conversations and impromptu meetings and work sessions on and off site.
Friends of mine rented a venue for 1200+ people for a weekend in a central location in Germany for some €60k iirc. There was no catering, but we were allowed to buy food at nearby diners (with great vegan options) and bring it into the venue.
Do the practices around forcing catering companies on organizers maybe vary by countries, so that EAGs could move to nearby countries where the venues are cheaper and more chill? Maybe countries with smooth air and rail connections from (e.g.) London?
There’s also the Zuzalu model. Zuzalu itself may be an option. Or something similar closer to the UK, maybe in France, Germany, Poland, or the Czech Republic. In many cases you’ll be able to just interview the EAGx organizers in those regions to figure out what the costs and customs are around catering. That would increase the cost for travel compensations a bit but probably reduce the other costs much more.
I vaguely remember that Eunkyoung Kwon of the ICNK (at the time at least?) was able to organize a great number of tiny conferences in many countries at no extra cost. Not the right scale for EAGs, but if EAGs should get replaced with single-topic conferences at some point, maybe some should ask her for her secrets.
This is a pretty minor thing: I'm not sure to what extent the CEA events team is aware of (or members of?) Meeting Professionals International, but I just learned about them recently and it might be worth seeing if they have best practices, training, or just general suggestions regarding running events.
How about reducing the number of catered meals while increasing support for meals outside the venue? Silly example: someone could fill a hotel room with Soylent so that everyone can grab liquid meals and go chat somewhere--sort of a "baguettes and hummus" vibe. Or as @Matt_Sharp pointed out, we could reserve nearby restaurants. No idea if these exact plans are feasible, but I can imagine similarly scrappy solutions going well if planned by actual logistics experts.
Thanks so much for your work and this information!
Thanks to @Eli_Nathan for responding to all these, though I hope you don't feel obliged to do so.
@MichaelPlant makes a good case that the right way to think of these is that attendance has a large positive externality - that it creates a lot more benefit to the world at large than to attendees themselves.
In this sense, increasing the price presumably suggests that CEAs funders don't believe the externality is as large as they used to or that the funding bar has gone up, or both.
It seems that explicitly thinking about it in these terms is useful:
- Orgs
... (read more)I'm wondering how this is going to work logistically. Will CEA ask everyone to report their income, and anyone who isn't comfortable reporting it is assumed to be rich enough that they have to pay the entire cost? This outcome feels like it would be invasive. Is instead CEA going to just ask those who are publicly known to be well off to pay the entire cost? This would presumably only raise a small amount of money, and I'd worry that it would make those people who it applied to feel like they were somewhat arbitrarily being nickled-and-dimed and rub them the wrong way.
Thinking this through for a minute, it seems like the obvious answer would be: let people choose either (say) $500 ticket price or $1,000, and also have a note saying "If your annual income is above XYZ, we would like to ask you to choose $1,000, though this will be done on an honor-code basis. If your income is below XYZ, feel free to choose either option" (or something like that)
AV cost surprised me. I think I’m on board with using less professional AB but I would hate to see fewer sessions recorded. This seems like a false economy. If few people are watching or listening to them, it might be because they are not promoted well … If they could be made prominent and easily accessible, and even offer comment spaces that the speakers respond to, I think this Could add a lot of value and substitute for conference attendance for some people
Wow venues seem really expensive! It might be cheaper to acquire large tracts of real estate just for running large events. For instance Italy is giving away free castles to people willing to upkeep them and use them for some public, productive purpose.
There may be room for more effective price discrimination here. When one buys a ticket to EAG from a corporation that is not price sensitive, ideally they would pay (at least) the complete cost of their admission. I recall their being tiers beyond "full price" - to sponsor other attendees - but this would not be a legitimate corporate expense. Could there be an easy way for corporate attendees to pay the full price?