The first and most emphatic thing: everything is downstream of caring. Establish figuring out how much you care as your primary goal before diving into the tactical advice below.
EA organizers have two high-level goals:
- Find the existing (proto) EAs on campus.
- Create enjoyable spaces for them to explore that side of themselves and make friends.
This breaks into two phases: first, create as much surface area as possible for (proto) EAs to identify themselves; second, have rewarding conversations with them. The first requires careful branding and labor. The second requires conversational skill and substantive knowledge.
Find EAs
General principles
Use keywords that make it easy for people to give you evidence of their EA inclinations. This includes people who are familiar with the specific term “Effective Altruism” or specific orgs in the EA ecosystem. Be searchable online and cast wide nets.
Online presence
Have a fully SEO-optimized online suite for your school. Use terms like “Effective Altruism,” “High Impact Charity,” “Effective Giving,” “Giving Pledge,” and “Impactful Careers” paired with your school's name. You need a website, all major social platforms, and a Discord. The website should have great aesthetics and foreground calls to action:
- Your next event, with date and location.
- A booking link for 1-1s with 2–3 named organizers, each with a good photo.
- A short mailing list sign-up (name, email, and “are you familiar with EA or learning for the first time?”).
Platform outreach
Leverage large EA platforms. NEST will scour online hubs for leads and send them your way if you get in touch, but you should individually post takes on Twitter and Substack and make it obvious in your bio and the things you write that you run an EA group at [university].
Tabling
Use signage that makes both “Effective Altruism” and the general solve-big-problems vibe immediately clear. Run a quirky donation activity where you donate your own or the group's money to the charities chosen by passers-by who engage in the activity. Formats include:
- Push-ups and pull-ups (e.g. 20¢ per push-up, 50¢ per pull-up).
- Draw your charity and make someone guess ($3 per drawing, $10 if a stranger guesses it, $50 for best of day).
- Charity dart board (e.g. $5 for bullseye, $1–3 for other places).
- Chess puzzles at varying difficulty for varying prizes.
Have everyone register on a form asking about the mailing list and EA familiarity. Key: focus less on running the activity than on talking to participants about their charity choice and group familiarity. Make special note of especially interested people.
Poster campaigns for meetups
Run targeted discussion events for different nerd communities, each with tailored graphics. Good target audiences include:
- EA-curious students broadly
- Nerdfighters
- Kurzgesagt fans
- Veritasium quiz night attendees
- Sam Harris listeners
Speaker events & info sessions
Run one-off speaker events for visibility geared towards more topical things with an EA lens on them. For info sessions, have an individual organizer give a 20-minute intro to EA talk, followed by an overview of what the group offers: reading groups, socials, participant-led talks, and adjacent meetups.
Have great conversations
General principles
Find a way to learn a bit about people in advance so you can engage on their terms. Ask a lot of questions. Steelman their views—help them articulate themselves well, and add value by giving them small, selected insights from EA that are from their own perspective.
Specific formats
Cold 1-1s from web sign-ups or tabling are the highest-leverage conversations. Do many of these. Try to get a little information and prepare for each conversation ahead of time so you can give the person a great experience.
Socials should kick off with a 5–7 minute hot take from a group member—what's on their mind, what they're excited or confused about, or the latest news in AI safety or animal welfare. Serve good food in a comfortable space.
Reading groups need high-quality, motivated facilitators. Start with yourself. Make your own curriculum (we can help with e.g. this list of potential readings). Teach what you want to teach and feel excited about.
Frame the fellowship as a serious challenge with high expectations. The pitch: we're here to figure out what really matters and which actions actually work to advance what matters—these are the most important questions we'll face in our lives, and we're in a uniquely good place to pursue them.
Regional retreats are especially impactful for smaller groups. Getting longtime EAs who know a lot into the same place for a weekend is a high-fidelity way to generate the kinds of conversations that matter.
Follow through
You should spend most of your time staring at lists of names you generated through outreach and talking to them. Remember people's interests and what brought them in. Ask yourself: who is interested in the group? Have you spoken to them lately? Are people slipping through the cracks?
Match people with similar interests aggressively. Who should know who? Which pairs of people might have interesting disagreements? Call and text people when you have a specific thought for them—people gravitate toward organizers who take a genuine interest in their ideas and problems.
Be fast. If a message would take under a minute to reply to, reply the moment you read it, not later.
Offer officer and board roles to people who are ready. You need people to run outreach, general socials, and the fellowship, as well as ambassadors to adjacent groups—animal welfare societies, campus Democrats and Republicans, AI safety, quiz bowl, debate, philosophy, economics, and others.