EA - Lessons from taking group members to an EAGx conference by Irene H

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Lessons from taking group members to an EAGx conference, published by Irene H on November 14, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.We (Irene and Jelle) run the EA Eindhoven university group and went to EAGxRotterdam (4-6 November 2022) with 16 of our members.Our members told us they really enjoyed the conference and have plans for how they want to pursue their EA journeys. We are excited that almost all Dutch universities have EA groups now and felt EAGxRotterdam was the capstone of this year in which the Dutch EA community has really taken off.These are some of the lessons we learned and best practices we discovered in our preparation for the conference as well as what we did during the conference itself. We hope other group organizers can benefit from these lessons too. We of course hope to visit many more EA conferences in the future and grow as community builders, which means this guide is a work in progress. We are also excited to learn about the best practices of other community builders and welcome their suggestions. Feel free to place comments!Some things to keep in mind when reading thisCircumstance-specific things that were the case for us:Our group is only a few months old, our members all became engaged with EA only recently (most of them through our Introduction Fellowship) and our two organizers were the only people who had ever attended an EA conference before. This is why we put quite a lot of effort into encouraging members to apply and helping them prepare.Rotterdam is only a 1-hour train ride from Eindhoven, so it was relatively easy for us to convince members to attend. Some of our members stayed with friends or traveled back and forth every day.The conference was on the weekend between two exam weeks at our university and a few of our members cited this as a reason for not applying. One of our members got accepted but never showed up to the conference in order to work on a class assignment. We really regret these things but do not know what we could have done about them.Because this conference in the Netherlands was such a rare event, we also advised some members to apply even though we were not 100% sure if they were engaged enough in EA. We would probably be stricter with our advice to them about this for conferences that are further away.For members who had not done an Introduction Fellowship (or equivalent), we made it clear that the conference was not going to be useful if they did not do some kind of preparation. We agreed with them that they would go over the EA Handbook and scheduled a 1-on-1 to discuss the preparation. In the end, all people who were interested were willing to do this preparation and carried it out. We spoke to them after to conference and they told us they found the conference interesting and returned with new ideas.We had 3 people show up at our collective application night, which is not a lot, but they all applied. We had approximately 10 people in total show up at our preparation evenings (we hosted 2 in a student café on our campus).We were both volunteers at EAGxRotterdam, had a lot of 1-on-1s scheduled and Jelle was also a speaker. Irene also met a community builder at the conference who was mainly there to guide his members, but in our case, that was not our only priority.Encourage and help members to applyPlan other programs (especially the Introduction Fellowship) so that they finish in time to still have space for promoting the conference and giving members the time to apply.Pitch the conference during your programs and eventsHost a collective application nightGuide for Collective application night by the EAGxRotterdam team that we usedFocus on members you think would benefit most from the conferenceMembers who have already done at least an Introduction Fellowship (or equivalent)Have 1-on-1...