EA - Improving EA events: start early and invest in content and stewardship by Vaidehi Agarwalla

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: Improving EA events: start early & invest in content and stewardship, published by Vaidehi Agarwalla on December 12, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This post is part of an ongoing series: Events in EA: Learnings and Critiques.TL:DR;The way many EA events are run is unsustainable for event organisers and does not leave sufficient slack for running excellent events and experimenting for learning.We share our models for better event planning and highlight some key challenges with current approaches to event operations (event ops). We make the case that hiring early, finding a venue and outsourcing logistics will create more capacity to invest in the most important (but relatively neglected) aspects of event ops - content, structure and stewardship. More capacity can also allow organisers to deviate from defaults and innovate with new event formats and styles, and engage in more resource-intensive programming.We aim to set realistic expectations and provide practical guidance for newer organisers to better prepare them. Good event ops people are not easily replaceable. We’ve observed a trend of event organisers being put under a lot of (unnecessary) pressure due to a lack of planning and capacity. We give a bunch of real (anonymised) examples throughout this post to illustrate our point.We don't go into specific suggestions because it's very event-dependent, but we'd estimate that adding ~20-40% of lead time and/or capacity would help achieve these goals.We’d love to hear if you're an event organiser and don’t find this helpful or actionable. Although we're only talking about events, we think it's possible there are similar trends in other areas -we’d love to hear about them if you've got observations!The Hierarchy of Events PlanningIn Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, needs lower down in the hierarchy must be satisfied before individuals can attend to needs higher up. Our pyramid is similar - components lower down in the hierarchy are more basic and are necessary for an event to exist. The exact configuration of each component affects the ones above it (e.g. if your venue only has 2 rooms, you probably can’t have an agenda with 3 tracks of events running simultaneously).However, influence is not strictly linear - so the structure of the event might influence which venue you choose (e.g. if you want to create an informal atmosphere, you might choose to host an event in a smaller, more casual venue instead of a formal one, or if you need a lot of stewardship for newer attendees, you might hire a larger team to manage those needs).Consider LeverageIf you could invest 1-10% more resources (time) for 10-30% return, this seems worth considering. In the following, we’re going to try and point out the highest leverage points of each step of the pyramid - the places where spending that extra time could make a big difference and open up more possibilities.Work backwards from specific goalsaka don’t start with “I want to run a conference”It may sound trite, but no event makes sense without specific, concrete, and measurable goals - you need to know the who and why, and then work backwards from there. Start with a specific goal like “I want to facilitate peer- to peer bonding for my local university group” and then list all the ways that could achieved, (host a social dinner, a retreat, a 1-day hike, a group project etc.), rather than do an event format because it's been done before and seems effective.Here are some goals an event might have - note that these goals are pretty different from each other, and it’s pretty hard to create events that could excel more than a couple at once:Networking - participants form important connections with others - either peers or mentorsLearning/Skilling up - participants learn from each other or experts on a particular topicId...