Events Generalist - Expression of Interest

The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) seeks to add a team member who will help shape the future of the effective altruism community by supporting our expanding portfolio of conferences and retreats.

We believe, based on our own analysis and data collected by our partners and funders, that events are highly impactful. In particular, some attendees seem to make very high-impact connections: they find future mentors, employers, donors, and highly skilled collaborators. This helps them increase their impact, and helps organizations to find and train talented people. Events can also help people learn about ideas, improve their plans, and coordinate with each other.

Since 2015, CEA has produced the EA Global conference series, the largest gathering of the effective altruism community. Previous speakers at EA Global have included Nobel Prize winner Michael Kremer, U.S. diplomat Bonnie Jenkins, New York Times bestselling author AJ Jacobs, and Rachel Glennerster, the former chief economist of the UK's foreign aid department.

Alongside EA Global, we support EAGx events, locally organised events for the effective altruism community which take place around the world and help those newer to the effective altruism community build their networks and learn more about the field. Our Partner Events team also organizes and supports a variety of in-person events, focusing on enabling established and emerging leaders, researchers, and funders to make progress on solving pressing problems, with a focus on people working on AI safety and risks from other emerging technologies.

Responsibilities

We’re seeking to expand our capacity so that we can scale up our programmes and support more members of the effective altruism community and adjacent communities through our events. Your skills and interests would determine which aspect of our work (such as EA Global content selection or onsite retreat support) you are responsible for. We think that many different types of people could be a good fit for this role.

Projects we think would be particularly valuable (you might work on one or more of these):

• Build and support our admissions processes. We welcome thousands of people to our events each year, and we use admissions processes to identify people who we think will be able to best benefit and/or contribute. As well as managing admissions, you could help us refine our evaluation processes, identify back-end systems improvements, and streamline the user experience.
• Developing content plans for events, and finding better ways to produce and promote content. Our content gets thousands of views each year, and can help to highlight important themes in recent EA thinking. In the future, we're interested in producing even higher-quality content, optimized for YouTube. You could help to design a content plan for events and YouTube, and work with speakers to hone their talks.
• Developing our stewardship program, which links promising attendees with experienced mentors. We think that this sort of connection has been the most valuable aspect of previous events, and we've been trying to facilitate such connections for the last few years. Due to capacity constraints, the program is currently paused. You could help us re-launch and improve the program. Some ways we could make it stronger would be to better understand attendee needs and produce more mentor-mentee matches — with the goal of helping people get life-changing advice on their plans.

Other areas that might be helpful:

• Managing various aspects of our events, including selecting and coordinating with venues and vendors (for catering, AV, etc.)
• Liaising with volunteers and attendees
• Supporting our Partner Events team in executing retreats and summits throughout the year

Skills

Skills for this role depend on which responsibilities you're focused on, but the following skills are generally useful:

• A solid understanding of effective altruism
• A proactive attitude and the ability to rapidly make plans, test them, and iterate
• High standards and regular reflection on how to improve things
• Organization — you'll need to track emails, application processes, and timelines across multiple projects

Events experience is useful, but we would also like to hear from less-experienced candidates with strong skills in organization and project management. We have experienced event managers on the team who can provide mentorship.