Events Generalist
About CEA
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) seeks to add a team member who will help to shape the future of the effective altruism community by supporting our expanding portfolio of conferences and retreats.
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.
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. In 2016, CEA expanded the reach of EA Global by funding and supporting community-organized EAGx conferences in cities all around the world. We also began to run the EA Coordination Forum, a small retreat-style gathering for leading figures in the EA community.
Responsibilities
We hope to expand our events portfolio over the coming year. We may run additional EA Global conferences and targeted events for highly promising community members with specific skills or interests. Your own skills and interests would determine which aspect of our work (such as retreats or impact analysis) 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):
- Evaluating the impact of events, and helping to suggest goals for future events. As we grow our events portfolio, we'd like to better understand how our events affect the community and the world, so that we can set appropriate goals for future events. In this role, you would shape our plans for which events to run, who to invite, and how we measure success. We think that this could amplify the impact of our work.
- Developing content plans for events, and finding better ways to produce and promote content. Our content gets more than 150,000 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. While feedback has been positive so far, we'd like to improve the program still further. You could help us to better understand attendee needs and produce more mentor-mentee matches — with the goal of helping people get life-changing advice on their plans.
- Running targeted retreats, to bring together community members who would especially benefit from having a lot of time to interact with one another. Past retreats have included the AI Safety Retreat, Group Leaders Retreat, EAGx Organizers Retreat, Operations Forum, and Coordination Forum.
Other areas that might be helpful:
- Managing various aspects of our events, including selecting and coordinating with venues and vendors (for catering, AV, etc.)
- Application and registration management
- Liaising with volunteers and attendees
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.
This position is now closed.