EAGxAustralasia 2025 Retrospective - It went well and we learnt things that might be useful for you

This report highlights the key takeaways from EAGxAustralasia 2025

It is primarily written by Tom Hutton (Conference Team Lead), with direct input from Bridget Loughhead (Conference Coordinator), and incorporates ideas and notes from the rest of the organising team.

Opinions expressed are generally those of Bridget and Tom, though we’re not aware of any opinions the wider conference team disagrees with.

“We” generally refers to Tom and Bridget for matters of opinion, and the wider team for matters of delivery.

Bridget and Tom were also lead organisers for, and wrote a more in depth report about, EAGxAustralasia 2024. This has much more detail about our operations, processes, and decision making. We stand by most of it.

We’ve tried to note currency throughout. If currency isn’t specifically noted it should be assumed to be AUD.

You can read this as a google doc here. The content is the same, the tables are formatted slightly differently.

This report is written in a governing thoughts structure; the contents serve as a high level summary:

• This report highlights the key takeaways from EAGxAustralasia 2025
  • This report is written in a governing thoughts structure; the contents serve as a high level summary
• Most metrics we track improved
• Operationally the conference was similar to 2024, with some key differences
  • Our new “goal review” process was light-weight and useful, and we’re looking to refine it
  • We grew our team from 4 people to 6, and found having a generalist who could add capacity in different areas to be very useful
  • By wrap up we’ll have spent around 1580 hours organising the conference, with Tom working ~540hrs, and the rest of the team between 140 and 250 each
  • Our “ways of working” doc details how we operated as a remote, asynchronous team - and it’s a useful high-level resource
  • Opening applications and launching Swapcard both took longer than we expected
  • We were significantly under budget, with our major expenses being venue + catering + AV, organiser time, and attendee travel support
  • We spent less on Speaker Travel, and more on event expenses than in previous years
  • On request, we allowed children between 10 and 18 to attend the conference. This went ok, but could have been managed better over the weekend
• We invested time and money on marketing, it was hard to know what was impactful
  • We struggled to find balance between marketing widely and avoiding an influx of applications below our admissions bar
  • We could invest more in finding consistent messaging and interesting content that communicates what EAGx is
  • We did targeted outreach on Linkedin, resulting in 7 counterfactual attendees
• Attendance was lower than previous years, but not as low as we feared
• Despite more marketing and applications opening earlier we saw (approved) applications coming in later in 2025 than 2024
  • The attendance rate from people who have been accepted has declined since 2023
  • Attendees were older and more gender/pronoun diverse than in 2024
  • Since 2023 there’s been a decrease in attendees from NSW and ACT
  • We identified multiple scam applications attempting to gain upfront travel support
  • We had a couple of issues with the application/admissions process, these were short-lived but caused attendee confusion and may have lost us some attendees
• Our programme achieved our goals!
• We ran a more streamlined programme, and we think this was the right call
  • Feedback indicated that we had a wide range of “good” content
  • Our content lead for the last two years (Will) has outlined his thoughts on EAGx content. We think this will likely be useful reading for other content lead
  • We successfully replaced the Friday Night Keynote with an Organisation Fair.
• We invested in inventory for future years
  • Our badge printer (purchased in 2024) allowed us to print badges ourselves, including last-minute requests on site
  • Buying our own Chromebooks for displaying slides worked really well
• We are overall (very) happy with our branding and merchandising
  • A contracted designer accelerated us by giving us a logo, colour palette, and great-looking templates for our content
  • We provided t-shirts, high-quality stickers, bookmarks, and books as merchandise
• We aimed to “Provide fantastic attendee experience with a culture that welcomes everyone” and we think we did this well
  • We used a “conference” style venue, and were very happy with it
  • Our menu was nut-free and vegan
  • Our catering was rated significantly higher than previous years, and we had no major issues with dietaries
  • We directly followed up with attendees who shared dietary restrictions or accessibility requirements, and suggest other organisers do this too
  • We ran a light-touch buddy programme and one third of our registrants signed up
  • Feedback on the buddy programme was overall positive, though with a significant number of buddies not meeting up
  • A single day of professional photography was very valuable.
• We have more specific learnings! If you’re organising a similar event and are keen to hear these please get in touch
• We think these resources of ours might be useful templates/inspiration for others running similar events
• We have some open questions and uncertainties and think input from others with high-context may be useful

Most metrics we track improved

Numbers are averages except where obviously not averages.

Operationally the conference was similar to 2024, with some key differences

Our new “goal review” process was light-weight and useful, and we’re looking to refine it

In short we set fairly broad goals e.g. “Foster connections between attendees” and reviewed these as a team every 2 months, with everyone scoring each goal 1-5 and the team talking about low or conflicting scores. We wanted a system that avoided the fail states of “set and forget”^[9] and overindexing on metrics^[10].

You can find a template and slightly more information here. We’re more than happy to chat to other organisers about our specific goals and our thinking behind them. Feel free to reach out to [email protected].

Benefits of our process:

• Visibility across the team
• Forced to take the big-picture perspective
• Prompted discussions about whether we had the same understanding of a goal, different ideas for changing course to meet the goals
• Very cheap to run: minimal time deciding on goals, metrics, KPIs in advance

Ways to improve:

• Break down the biggest, most vague goals into concrete things that individuals could see themselves working towards.
  • For example, specific subgoals regarding the Content that spell out how we’d meet a larger goal about empowering attendees
  • (But do this in a way that avoids overly investing in specific goals / KPIs)

We grew our team from 4 people to 6, and found having a generalist who could add capacity in different areas to be very useful

Our team consisted of:

• Bridget: Coordinator
• Tom: Team Lead
• Ahmed: Marketing & Comms
• Will: Content
• Philippa: Production
• Francesca: General

By wrap up we’ll have spent around 1580 hours organising the conference, with Tom working ~540hrs, and the rest of the team between 140 and 250 each

For reference EAGxAustralasia 2024 spent 1450 hours across 4 organisers, and EAGxAustralia 2023 spent 2440 hours across 23 organisers.

Our “ways of working” doc details how we operated as a remote, asynchronous team - and it’s a useful high-level resource

This was put together for onboarding and an ongoing quick reference for the team and outlines how we work together, particularly how we used various platforms including Docs, Drive, Asana, and a shared email inbox.

You can find a shared version here. Note that there are many links out to other places that you won’t have access to.

Opening applications and launching Swapcard both took longer than we expected

This is probably just a reminder of the planning fallacy.

Specific causes of delays were challenges with CEA capacity and timing (timezones, sickness, retreat, etc) and having more pre-work than expected to get done. For applications this was having branding / marketing ready, and for Swapcard this was finalising content details (names of sessions, descriptions, speaker bios, and speaker availability across the weekend etc).

We were significantly under budget, with our major expenses being venue + catering + AV, organiser time, and attendee travel support

Venue, catering, and audiovisual are interdependent enough that it makes sense to consider them as a combined package.

If we were to spend more money we would spend it on marketing, travel support, and other costs that scale with more attendees (catering, merch, etc)

We spent less on Speaker Travel, and more on event expenses than in previous years

On request, we allowed children between 10 and 18 to attend the conference. This went ok, but could have been managed better over the weekend

If you'd like to chat more about this topic or see a more detailed private write-up, please reach out to Bridget at [email protected].

We invested time and money on marketing, it was hard to know what was impactful

We struggled to find balance between marketing widely and avoiding an influx of applications below our admissions bar

We aren’t aware of anyone applying based on our marketing and not being admitted. Though there was at least one attendee who had a negative experience at the conference based partially on low-experience, and probably should not have been admitted.

In the future we’ll probably market slightly more widely.

We could invest more in finding consistent messaging and interesting content that communicates what EAGx is

We spent some time this year on planning / copy writing using the “Building a StoryBrand” framework.

It would be valuable to have a consistent set of messages that we share across all our channels: website, email list, in-person conversations, all our social media channels. We could then adapt these messages to separate audiences, nuanced for different contexts.

We could invest more time outlining “what to say” about EAGx - How do we communicate what the conference is, and make it seem appealing and like it will solve attendee problems?

We did targeted outreach on Linkedin, resulting in 7 counterfactual attendees

This cost ~$160AUD per counterfactual attendee. Part of that cost was a one-off cost of attending a workshop, so we’d expect cost per attendee to be cheaper in future years.

You can read a more detailed write up here.

Attendance was lower than previous years, but not as low as we feared

Despite more marketing and applications opening earlier we saw (approved) applications coming in later in 2025 than 2024

^[17]

The attendance rate from people who have been accepted has declined since 2023

We are unsure why this is.

Attendees were older and more gender/pronoun diverse than in 2024

Since 2023 there’s been a decrease in attendees from NSW and ACT

We identified multiple scam applications attempting to gain upfront travel support

We won’t go into detail of how we identified these, but think it’s worth highlighting that this happened multiple times and other event organisers should be aware of the risk.

We had a couple of issues with the application/admissions process, these were short-lived but caused attendee confusion and may have lost us some attendees

Applications closed early rather than being extended. This was noticed in the morning NZ time but, due to the timezone difference between Aus/NZ and the CEA team that handles the website, wasn’t fixed until late in the evening. We had a couple of second hand reports of people thinking they’d missed the application window, and think there may have been some potential attendees that never applied because of this.

There was an issue that prevented attendees from registering in the days leading up to the conference. This caused some confusion, especially in light of additional communications telling them to “register now”.

Our programme achieved our goals!

We ran a more streamlined programme, and we think this was the right call

Some underlying beliefs we have about EAGx Programming:

1. A core part of EAGx is networking - whether that’s in workshops, meetups, 1:1s, or serendipitous meetings.
2. Sessions are valuable to some attendees, to impart knowledge and inspiration, and provide a structured space for connection, but the quality of sessions is more important than quantity.

   1. Poorly attended sessions are usually^[23] bad vibes and low impact for attendees and speakers

   2. It’s not a requirement (or even desirable) to have a session of every type (workshop, talk, etc) at every experience level for every cause area
   3. However we do want to consider the attendee experience for different types of attendees, including various experience levels and interest in different cause areas
3. At any given time <50% of total attendees will be in sessions, with the rest networking, taking breaks, not present on site, etc
4. With this in mind we aimed to run fewer, higher quality sessions

Feedback indicated that we had a wide range of “good” content

Almost all of our talks and workshops were mentioned by at least one person in response to the feedback survey question: “Were any sessions you attended particularly good?”.

18 different sessions were mentioned 2 or more times, as well as talks and workshops this included a couple of meetups, and (surprisingly to us) an office hours!

Our most mentioned sessions were:

• Alex Catalán Flores - From Theory to Operations: How Effort (Not Intellect) Scales Impact - Talk
• Michael Noetel - Taking Care of Yourself and Each Other: A Conversation About Mental Health in EA - Workshop
• Kat Dekker - Give Industries: Starting and sustaining a business that donates to effective charities - Talk
• Terrence Wood - Does the Pacific need aid? Does it actually help? - Talk
• Patrick Gruban - Challenges in Mid-Career Transitions and What to Expect from Career Advising - Workshop
• Luke Freeman - Hands-On Policy Advocacy Workshop - Workshop

Our content lead for the last two years (Will) has outlined his thoughts on EAGx content. We think this will likely be useful reading for other content leads

You can find a link to this short doc here.

We successfully replaced the Friday Night Keynote with an Organisation Fair

Historically EAGxAus^[24] has used the Friday of EAGx to run a keynote talk that’s also been open to the public. This hasn’t had particularly high public attendance, and it has been hard to put on a one-size-fits-all keynote that is engaging and impactful for newer people and highly experienced people across a range of interests and cause areas. You can read more about this in our 2024 retrospective^[25].

For 2025 we looked into a range of options for Friday night, and decided to bring our Organisation Fair forward to Friday, and run it alongside networking opportunities in the form of slots for 1:1s, speed networking, and a couple of likely-high-attendance meetups.

We also decided to add lightning pitches for each Organisation at the start of the night before the Org Fair opened. Each organisation had 30-45 seconds to say who they were, what they did, and why attendees might want to talk to them. We tasked our MC to keep this flowing in a lively and energetic manner.

Despite some uncertainty beforehand, we think this went really well. Attendees had more context on who they might want to talk to, and everyone headed into the Org Fair at the same time, creating a lively atmosphere.

We invested in inventory for future years

2024 was the first year that EAGxAus was housed under EA Australia rather than passing between ad-hoc committees.

As well as providing some structural and digital consistency (in terms of hiring, file storage, finances, etc), and meaning we can claim back GST (effectively saving 10% on most event expenses), this has allowed us to more confidently^[26] purchase inventory to use from year to year.

Our badge printer (purchased in 2024) allowed us to print badges ourselves, including last-minute requests on site

Bridget did a write up on this in 2024.

The biggest change in 2025 was printing double sided badges at a cost of ~$1AUD extra per badge. This also led to a slightly higher error rate as the badges have to be manually flipped and reloaded for the second side.

Buying our own Chromebooks for displaying slides worked really well

For 2024 we borrowed devices from the community to save on costs, this did not go well.

In 2025 we purchased 3 Chromebooks to use as display devices. This cost us about the same as hiring display devices for a weekend, and we expect to get multiple years of use, as well as having these available for other EA Australia events if needed.

It also meant we had access to the devices ahead of time to get everything set up, and test speaker slides etc.

While cheaper than other devices, chromebooks come with the downside of needing our speakers to use google slides or bring their own device to plug in directly.

We are overall (very) happy with our branding and merchandising

A contracted designer accelerated us by giving us a logo, colour palette, and great-looking templates for our content

They had previously done good work with the EA Australia team on EAA Connect, so were a low-risk contract.

We provided a design brief^[27] and our team provided feedback on different options before deciding on the final design.

Our intention is to continue to use the logo for EAGxAustralasia going forward, with some variations on colour schemes and overall look.

The contractor provided a range of templates, and was able to adjust these as required. Eventually we asked for editable versions to decrease turnaround time. We should have done this earlier/by default for everything.

We provided t-shirts, high-quality stickers, bookmarks, and books as merchandise

150 total t-shirts was about the right number for 242 attendees. We over corrected from 2024 and had t-shirts too large on average rather than too small.

As well as regular stickers we had *special shiny stickers* for our volunteers, and for the organising team to give out to others doing good things to help us out.

We aimed to “Provide fantastic attendee experience with a culture that welcomes everyone” and we think we did this well

We used a “conference” style venue, and were very happy with it

The table below outlines the pros and cons for different styles of venue. We expanded on this in our 2024 retrospective.

Our menu was nut-free and vegan

After issues with nut allergens at two of the last three EAGxAus conferences we made the call to be entirely nut-free.

Our catering was rated significantly higher than previous years, and we had no major issues with dietaries

We were locked in to one supplier through the venue and initiated communication with them early. They were responsive with providing a custom nut-free, vegan, and cost-effective^[28] menu.

We were able to organise a tasting to check the quality of the food.

We think our proactive communication was useful here, and that we also got lucky with a responsive and competent caterer.

We directly followed up with attendees who shared dietary restrictions or accessibility requirements, and suggest other organisers do this too

In the week before the conference we reached out to everyone who had shared dietary restrictions or accessibility requirements and let them know what to expect:

You're receiving this email because you shared your dietary requirements when registering for EAGxAustralasia. I wanted to let you know what to expect from our caterers over the weekend.

We've requested that all food over the weekend be Vegan and Nut Free. This may mean you'll be able to eat from the regular service, and won't have separate food prepared.

All food will be labeled with allergen information. If in doubt check the labels, or talk to one of the catering staff.

I've copied the processes from the caterers below. If there are any issues with catering over the weekend please inform a member of the catering staff AND a volunteer (wearing gold t-shirts) as soon as possible.

If you have any questions, please let me know.

We also sent a notification on swapcard, at the start of the first food service, reminding attendees that all food at EAGxAustralasia 2025 was vegan and nut free.

We ran a light-touch buddy programme and one third of our registrants signed up

We incorporated the opt-in for this into our registration form. Registrants who were interested indicated whether they wanted to be a less-experienced buddy, a more-experienced buddy, or to be connected with anyone regardless of experience, and let us know cause areas they were most interested in, and any other information they wanted to share.

We were surprised by the number of sign ups (after ~1/10 attendees signed up through a google form in 2024).

Pairing was done manually by one of the team, mostly focusing on more/less experienced preferences, but also taking into account other attendee details.

Once paired attendees were sent the following:

You are receiving this email as you both signed up to participate in our buddy system. We've matched you up due to [shared interest].

If you are no longer interested in participating, please let me know as soon as possible so that we can rematch your buddy.

We suggest messaging your buddy on Swapcard and organising a time to meet up, but I'll leave this up to you! If possible, we recommend trying to connect earlier in the conference.

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns, or if you can't connect with your buddy. We'll connect you with someone else if this is the case.

Feedback on the buddy programme was overall positive, though with a significant number of buddies not meeting up

Most of those who didn’t meet up said it was due to sickness/non-attendance on the part of their buddy, or due to them (the person giving us feedback) not reaching out.

We’re fairly happy with the buddy programme MVP, and are keen to expand on it in future years.

A single day of professional photography was very valuable

This cost $800AUD after splitting the cost with EA Australia^[29], and means we have some high quality photos to use for marketing in future years.

Many of our speakers and attendees also have high quality photos of themselves at the conference^[30].

We have more specific learnings! If you’re organising a similar event and are keen to hear these please get in touch^[31]

You can reach us at [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected], or you can comment below! 

We think these resources of ours might be useful templates/inspiration for others running similar events

• Guides and handbooks
  • EAGxAustralasia 2025 Attendee Guide
  • EAGxAustralasia 2025 Org Fair Guide
  • Meetup Hosting Guide
  • EAGxAustralasia 2025 Speaker Handbook - Email us for access
  • EAGxAustralasia 2025 Volunteer Handbook - Email us for access
• Shared with context above:
  • Goal Review Template
  • Ways of Working doc
  • Linkedin marketing retrospective
  • Will’s Content Thoughts
  • DIY Badge printing guide and reflections
• Other
  • EAGxAustralasia 2025 Code of Conduct
  • EAGxAustralasia 2024 Public Report

We have some open questions and uncertainties and think input from others with high-context may be useful

1. How do we explain 1:1s to first time attendees who may or may not read the attendee handbook?
2. What’s the best way to run meetups?
   1. I.e. not just the structure, but also how do we find specific people who will facilitate this well.
3. How do we make the logistics of social dinners smoother?
   1. So we don’t have too few or too many attendees at each
4. What is the appropriate place for our admissions bar?
   1. We had >0 attendees who had a negative experience due to being over their heads. One who we are specifically aware of was a last minute application we took a chance on. Several other newer-to-ea people had a (very) positive experience.
5. How do we make EAGx valuable for annual attendees (and should we)?
6. How do we make speaker onboarding operationally smoother?
   1. If you do this well we’d love to chat!
7. How do we market EAGx?
   1. We think our context in Australasia might be different from other places, but we’re keen to hear from people who do this well!

1. ^{^}

    As far as I can tell this is how other EAG/xs count this. It counts both ends of a connection, but this makes sense where some impactful connections might be one-directional.

2. ^{^}

   Based on exchange rates on 2025-12-28

3. ^{^}

    As far as I can tell this is how other EAG/xs count this. It counts both ends of a connection, but this makes sense where some impactful connections might be one-directional.

^{^}

Based on exchange rates on 2025-12-28

^{^}

 Approximate, includes attendee travel support and GST paid

^{^}

 Estimate as of 2025-12-19

^{^}

 Trying to include relevant data without getting too deep in the weeds here.

^{^}

 Based on exchange rates on 2025-12-19

^{^}

 I.e. Define goals in early planning then don’t refer back to them until the final review.

^{^}

 Often metrics don’t work well, either due to goodharting, or only having clear data after the conference/not at all, and/or metrics become incredibly time consuming to track.

^{^}

 The main reason this is significantly lower than the grant amount is contingency (10%), and uncertainty over venue, catering, and AV costs.

^{^}

 EA Australia is able to claim back GST (10%) where it’s been paid, this is applicable to most event expenses

^{^}

 Reflects GST claim back,

^{^}

 Includes $4400 venue discount applied after AV issues

^{^}

 Reflects GST claim back

^{^}

 Includes $7400 venue discount applied after catering issues

^{^}

 Note that this is comparing all approved in 2024, with approved minus cancelled in 2025

^{^}

 Based on application/registration data. Note some events report feedback survey data which covers a subset of the attendees

^{^}

 I (Tom, a non-binary person) have put a bit of thought into how to collate this data and how to frame it. We’re interested in if there are demographics that are under-represented, and if our attendees will see people like them represented at the conference. The raw data has ~25% of attendees not stating gender, and ~25% of attendees not stating pronouns, but only 7.4% not stating either. So when trying to understand our demographics I think it makes sense to attempt to reconcile these two different data into a hybrid set. I’m not convinced this is best practice for data management OR for accurately reflecting people’s identities. LMK if you can think of a better way of doing this!

^{^}

 Based on application/registration data. Note some events report feedback survey data which covers a subset of the attendees

^{^}

 TAS and QLD combined in 2023 data

^{^}

 Opening Talk, Closing Talk, Organisation Fair, Welcome to Friday/Organisation Lighting Pitches, 3x Speed Networking

^{^}

 Office hours seem like an obvious exception here

^{^}

 “Australasia” since 2024, “Australia” 2023 and prior

^{^}

 Where “The Friday night keynote didn’t do numbers despite a great panel” is conveniently located right above “The Org Fair works well and can take more investment.”

^{^}

 This was done prior to 2024, and we have a bunch of clickers, dongles, etc that have been passed on. But investing in more expensive items was harder as these could be more easily lost between years with no official “owner”

^{^}

 Reach out if you’re interested in seeing this

^{^}

 After discussing our needs they gave us a package that was significantly cheaper (and less “fancy”) than their standard conference packages.

^{^}

 They were getting some photos/videos for non-EAGx specific purposes

^{^}

 Which is great for positive user experience and a potential on-ramp into word-of-mouth marketing e.g. “That’s such a great profile photo, where was it taken?”

^{^}

 We’re both taking a break over the new year, so won’t be that responsive in the weeks immediately after posting. Happy to chat even if you’re reading this months/years in the future!

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