Your First Event

What you do for your first event will depend on the type of group you want to run and the size of the audience you expect to have. Especially at universities, attendees will be trying to figure out whether your club is worth investing more of their time in, so do your best to run an attractive, exciting and inspiring event.

Don’t be discouraged if not many people show up. Many thriving groups started out small and built up attendance over the years.

Fellowships

Many university groups start by running a multi-week fellowship. This involves advertising the fellowship to students and having ~8 weeks of meetings. This is a great way for newcomers to become fairly knowledgeable. It also requires one burst of advertising for ~8 weeks of meetings, so while the upfront planning is high, you won't need to advertise every event. You could begin with an introductory event where you encourage attendees to sign up for the longer fellowship. Some groups have reported that this introductory event leads to fewer fellows dropping out over the course of the fellowship.

• Here's the virtual Introductory EA Program by CEA. However, if you want to facilitate the program yourself, you can ask for resources at virtualprograms@effectivealtruism.org.

Single session events

Here are some ideas for what to do during the first event:

• If you are expecting more than half of the attendees to be fairly unfamiliar with effective altruism concepts, it is best to focus the event on covering EA ideas – either by running a workshop or by using a reading or short video to introduce effective altruism and spark discussions. Social events where more than half of the people are new to effective altruism can result in new people talking mostly with each other and gaining an incorrect or incomplete impression of EA.

• Give an intro to effective altruism presentation or workshop. This might be a good idea if you have confident speakers and are expecting more than 10 people to turn up. We recommend making this interactive so that people get to think and discuss ideas. You could run quizzes, a giving game (where participants choose which charity to donate a pot of money to), and/or a cause-prioritization activity (where participants assess a few cause areas and try to work out which is the most pressing).

• Read or view an introduction to EA, and discuss it. Some candidates are the articles Introduction to EA and Do Unto Others, and the videos What are the Most Important Moral Problems of Our Time (by Will MacAskill) and Introduction to Effective Altruism at EAGxBerkeley 2016 (by Ajeya Cotra). Resources and tips for holding discussion groups are here.

• Invite a speaker to talk about effective altruism, if you have one in your area. Here is more information about how to run speaker events.

• If you are expecting most of your attendees to be people who are already quite familiar with EA, having a social event may work well. The social event could be held at a café, be a potluck at a member’s house, or be a picnic (weather permitting) etc. Since effective altruism will likely be new to some people, have a short explanation of effective altruism prepared so everyone knows what your group is about. Check out these approaches to explaining effective altruism to develop your own explanation. It is worth preparing a few questions that people can ask each other to spark discussion.

People’s first impression of effective altruism is likely to stick so if your event only covers one aspect of effective altruism, people might come away with the idea that this aspect is all there is to EA. So whatever you choose to do at your first event, make sure part of the event includes a clear explanation about what effective altruism is, and give people a taste of the different cause areas and ways to effectively contribute (through their career, donations, volunteering). This is useful to do whenever you have several new people attending. Check out these approaches to explaining effective altruism to develop your own explanation.

More guidance on how to plan and conduct events can be found here.

At the end of your first event, invite people to any subsequent events you have planned, even if you don’t have all the details confirmed.

Additional information

• Here is an EA Forum post about how EA Stanford uses the first few university weeks to their full potential.