Proposed improvements to EAG(x) admissions process

Create a “Virtual Only” option for people who: 

This is something the team tested at EAG London 2021. The feedback suggested this wasn’t super well-received. Virtual attendees reported feeling on the sidelines, and they made a quarter as many connections as in-person attendees.

There are some other costs here. If we let people access Swapcard virtually, it could be confusing/frustrating for attendees to receive requests from people who just want to book video calls. This may sound minor but realistically, if we allowed people to attend virtually, a lot of people could ask to do this, making the event a bit strange and hard to navigate. It would also force the team to process a bunch of applications for people who aren't planning on coming.

Perhaps there’s more we can test out here; I like the idea of people listed as resources/contacts rather than attendees.

Re: your general thoughts and a general response.

As mentioned, I agree about the visibility of FAQs. We now have an FAQ section on every event page (instead of one FAQ tucked away on the site). The application form now also has some tips such as “A common reason applications are rejected is because they contain insufficient relevant information, so we suggest you err on the side of writing too much rather than too little”

This is all work in progress, and we’ll consider adding some more detail based on your points in this post. Thanks!

And thanks again for writing this post, we really appreciate your feedback here :)

• Removing the multiple conference check box so you can only apply to one conference at a time to improve intentionality.

I agree re: EAGx, and this is now the case. My original hypothesis was that it would make things easier to apply for multiple conferences at once, but EAGx events now have more distinct regions so a vast majority of people won’t be a strong fit for multiple EAGx events (purely on location reasons).

For EA Global, the bar for each event is the same, so we can just review one application rather than asking applicants to submit the same application multiple times and receive the same answer. That said, I think the intentionality thing is a cost here, thanks for pointing it out.

Experiment with adding different questions to the application, such as:  

These are interesting, thanks! I think EAGxBerkeley was unusual in a few ways such that this might be solving a problem that doesn’t exist for other events (e.g. it had a lot of late applications, a hard cap on numbers due to a tight food budget and possibly a higher no-show rate). 

I think a better solution might be to ensure that conferences can accommodate everyone you want to invite and to make greater efforts to ensure people apply early, to give you better attendance estimates.

Okay, adding some more detail.

General note: I notice that lots of the feedback here is quite specific to EAGxBerkeley and doesn’t seem to generalise across other EAG and EAGx events. There were a few things that were unusual about EAGxBerkeley:

• We were trialling out a new application form, so previous responses didn’t load onto the new form. This also meant applications launched later than we wanted to.
• As you know, we had to quite drastically cut down the catering budget from the initial proposal. This created an unusually hard cap on numbers since we didn’t build in much extra room.

I'll post lots of separate comments so that it's easier to respond to them individually.

Thank you for responding to the suggestions in detail Ollie - I really appreciate the recent efforts by the Events team to be more transparent and communicate decisions to the community! And also thanks for engaging with our draft feedback earlier in the process. 

Make the application deadline earlier or have multiple rounds of applications 

Broadly agree with this, though I think having a firm rule about no late applications (like EAGxCambridge) might mean the actual deadline is treated as such. I'm hoping to have earlier deadlines for EAGx events this year :)

Get confirmation of attendance (2 weeks before the event): Hi X, we’re so excited to see you for the event! We think you could add a lot of value and help newer attendees navigate the EA space. If you can’t attend (for whatever reason), please let us know by September 2nd. We have over 100 people on the waitlist.

This is the purpose of registration. Perhaps we can use some language to make this clearer though?

Note again that most conferences don’t utilise waitlists that regularly, or clear them before applications close. I think this was likely more of a problem for EAGxBerkeley than most events.

Tell applicants not to assume the organiser knows who you are (I think it's generally bad for culture and status).

Thanks, I like this suggestion. I’ll have a think about how we can communicate that well. 

Don’t accept applicants after the deadline has passed. If you do want to accept last-minute applicants, have a consistent and fair criteria for accepting late applications

Agree. I’ll be asking EAGx organisers to be firmer on this in future. EAG has a reasonably firm policy (e.g. only accepting people late who would’ve been invited directly if they had applied in time e.g. speakers or potential speakers). That said, I think we can probably do more to communicate the deadline clearly and refine late admissions criteria.

Release accepted but not registered  applicants' tickets after a certain date and clearly communicate that date to applicants.

Perhaps some confusion here: only registered applicants have tickets (more like “spots held”). See my earlier comment about EAGxBerkeley being unusual for having to turn people away.

Send more (at least 3) reminders to accepted applicants to register, with reminders about how many people are waitlisted to incentivise people to release their ticket

Reminders to register are sent every Tuesday and Friday once applicants are admitted (it used to be every 4 days), and this reminder includes the registration deadline. We don’t usually have very long waitlists, largely because we don’t want to keep applicants in the dark. But I like some of the other language here, and we’ll consider including it. Thanks!

Adding context to questions (e.g. for some questions, if the answer is not at all related to EA it's hard to know if the person misunderstood the question, or just has had very limited interaction with EA)

Do you have specific questions in mind here? Most of the new questions are relatively clear, I think? Note though (and I’ll probably repeat this a few times) that we don’t necessarily want the application form to be too easy to fill out because we don't want applicants to be able to game it.

Make important questions mandatory to reduce the rate of incomplete applications.

We make the core questions about applicant’s engagement with EA mandatory now. FWIW, we don’t want to make the application form too burdensome, so there are trade-offs here. Did you have specific questions in mind?

Thanks Ollie! Excited by the changes!

Consider making all tickets (barring needs-based applicants) paid so that people feel a greater sense of commitment towards attending. We will write more about this in a future post. 

Yeah, this could be right but I’m uncertain. We do want that sense of commitment, but many attendees (particularly students) might be less likely to come if they have to pay so I’m hesitant to pass on costs for commitment’s sake in this instance.

As mentioned earlier, I do think this was more of a problem at EAGxBerkeley than other events.

Make admissions policies clear (ex. this conference is for people in X region), both in public communications and throughout the application process.

Agree. I’ll be asking EAGx organisers to do this in future. EAGxCambridge, EAGxNordics and EAGxWarsaw have all done this :)

Asking applicants to provide specific, concrete answers to questions rather than vague generalities (e.g. “I’d like to learn more about EA” is very vague, it would be more helpful to know what specifically they’d like to learn, and what they already know)

We do ask applicants to “provide specific, clear details in your responses". It's possible this wasn't in the EAGxBerkeley form.

Agree. If you have feedback for the events team (or CEA), we're usually very happy to review a draft first. It helps us correct some small things in advance and gives us warning but, as in this case, we'll usually encourage you to then post on the forum so that we're held accountable more publicly (though, of course, you can post either way). This also happened here.