Update on EA Global costs and 2024 CEA Events Team activities

Update on EA Global costs and 2024 CEA Events Team activities — EA Forum 
 
 This website requires javascript to properly function. Consider activating javascript to get access to all site functionality. Hide table of contents Update on EA Global costs and 2024 CEA Events Team activities 

 by OllieBase , Amy Labenz Dec 20 2024 10 min read 3 122

 Building effective altruism Community Centre for Effective Altruism Announcements and updates Conferences EA Summits EAGx Effective Altruism Global Organization updates Frontpage Update on EA Global costs and 2024 CEA Events Team activities Other 2024 updates and 2025 goals EA Global EAGx Partner Events Impact stories from our events Donate to support our work Appendix: Metrics 3 comments In August 2023 , we shared that:

 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. 
 
 Since then, our team has cut the cost of running EA Global significantly. Our average gross cost-per-attendee (CPA) has fallen from ~$2,000 in 2023 to  ~$1,600 in 2024. We also met our target of getting total event costs down: every EA Global this year cost <$1.5M. 

 

 We’ve cut costs by:

 Reducing the amount of food we serve. We cut dinners on Saturday and Sunday, reduced snacks, and negotiated with the venue to reduce food and beverage quotations, saving over  $260K on food and beverages for EAG Boston 2024 while using the same venue as 2023. We will still serve dinner on Friday, snacks throughout the day, and lunches on both full days.
 Finding cheaper venues or negotiating better prices with ones we’ve used before. For example, we halved spending on the venue and catering for EAG London: we spent $1.7M in 2023 (~1,500 attendees) and $800K in 2024 (~1,400 attendees).
 Bringing production work in-house . We hired a full-time production associate to take on much of the production work we typically outsource to a production company. This has given us more control over the production budget, allowing us to negotiate directly with vendors.
 Reducing the number of talks. We tested whether we could reduce the number of talks without reducing the value of the event. We cut a stage for EAG Boston 2024 and spent ~$55K less on audiovisual services compared to the 2023 event. In the feedback survey from EAG Boston, only a couple of people mentioned that they thought there weren’t enough talks and workshops. We might still decide to increase the amount of content in the future, but our default plan is to run just one main stage at US EAGs in 2025, though plausibly more at EAG London, which attracts significantly more attendees.
 We have also found che

... (truncated, 20 KB total)