The Centre for Effective Altruism’s mission is to build and nurture a global community of people who are thinking carefully about the world’s biggest problems and taking impactful action to solve them.
To foster this community, we run conferences, support hundreds of local groups, and provide online resources and forums for discussion.
About this role
The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) is seeking someone to manage our portfolio of partner-run conferences, workshops, retreats, and other events.
We believe, based on data collected by us and our partners, 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 personal 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.
We have been running EA Global conferences since 2015 and supporting partner-run EAGx conferences since 2016. As the community grows, we think there are opportunities to offer more varied events and to further develop existing events. In particular, we've seen very high returns on relatively small investments in EAGx, and we believe that we could do a lot more, in collaboration with local organizers and subject-matter experts.
In order to do this, we need someone to design a portfolio of events, make grants to people who can run them, and build infrastructure and resources to ensure the events are highly impactful. You will also give input into the design and evaluation of our in-house events. Collectively, these events will likely reach thousands of people per year, and help promising people interested in effective altruism find the best ways to contribute.
Skills
You:
Have a solid understanding of effective altruism, and strong ideas about how we can use events to get our target audience more deeply engaged.
Have experience with community building, event management, or grantmaking.
Are comfortable providing direct, supportive feedback.
Are comfortable making plans despite high levels of uncertainty.
Set high standards, and regularly reflect on how to improve things.
Are highly organized --- you'll need to track emails, application processes, and timelines across multiple projects.
Responsibilities
You will:
Estimate event impact through surveys and interviews, and investigate how our target audience benefits from events.
Develop a plan for which events we should aim to run, and which groups or individuals we can partner with to run those events.
Build and maintain a network of EA community members who are skilled at running events, and provide them with the guidance they need to excel.
Build an effective process for evaluating prospective organizers and managing those who become grantees.
Work with the CEA Events Team to develop advice, how-to guides, and templates for organizers.
Design systems for application rounds, event organization, and data collection.
You will work closely with Amy Labenz (Head of Events) and Max Dalton (Executive Director).
If you are interested in managing people, we think you could end up building a team to work within this portfolio and/or manage related events work. This would be particularly likely if you have very good interpersonal skills and/or management experience, in addition to the above. If you have a background in management and would be interested in another project in the events space, we would also welcome your application.