EA Germany's 2024 report, 2025 strategy and funding

By Sarah Tegeler 🔹, Patrick Gruban 🔸 @ 2024-11-26T07:15 (+45)

In this post, we’ll report on our activities in 2024, outline our plans for 2025, and show our room for funding.

Summary

EA Germany (EAD) acts as an umbrella organisation for the German EA community, the third largest national community and biggest in continental Europe, according to the 2022 EA survey.

The non-profit has a focus on talent development (e.g. with an EA intro program and a career program, organising an EAGxBerlin), community building support (e.g. with community building retreats), and general community support (e.g. with 1-1s and employer of record program). EAD tested several new programs in 2024, especially in the area of global catastrophic risks.

In 2025, we plan to focus on refining our target group and testing tailored programs, guided by current data indicating that some individuals are several times more likely to shift their career plans towards impactful paths.

CEA's funding decision in February will determine if we have a full budget for 2025; a reduction could leave us with a funding gap of up to €74,000. Without renewed funding, we would depend on donations to secure a runway for our organisation, allowing us to continue activities and launch a new, targeted program regardless of CEA's decision.

About EA Germany (EAD)

We are a registered non-profit organisation with a team of four people (2.7 FTE) and are currently funded by grants from CEA (Community Builder Grants program and EAGxBerlin) and Open Philanthropy Effective Altruism Community Growth (Global Health and Wellbeing) via a regranting from Effektiv Spenden as well as operational funds from additional projects and private donations. This year, our communications manager was on sick leave for the entire year and one co-director reduced the hours significantly in August. Therefore, our capacity was more limited than expected, and we continue to have limited capacity in 2025. After scaling to 4 FTE staff in 2023, we downsized EA Germany to 2.7 FTE due to a talent bottleneck in the area of communications, funding constraints, and the absence of high-impact opportunities for the organisation’s general activities.

A six-member board provides oversight and advice. 

We have >100 members and act as an umbrella organisation for the whole German EA community, including people in and from Germany interested in the ideas of EA.

There are 29 active local groups with 5-50 active members each (the biggest according to the last EA Survey being Berlin, Munich and Aachen). In total, >300 people are regularly active in local groups. 

Based on the 2022 EA survey, Germany was the 3rd largest national EA community and the biggest in continental Europe. It had as many respondents as the next four countries by size (Netherlands, Switzerland, France, and Norway) combined.

Our Theory of Change gives an overview of our current activities structured in target groups and CEA’s concentric circles model. We might update this Theory of Change significantly within the next months.

Overview/Report 2024

Our main programs

To develop talents, we guided people through a funnel from

• communications (~650 monthly users on the website, >3,800 subscribers of the monthly newsletter, >200 monthly Slack users out of >1,100 users overall),
• the intro program (~40-45 applications each for two iterations, 22 successful participants in summer, winter program only starting in December in collaboration with CEA for the first time) and a following
• weekend retreat (“EAD retreat”, 2 retreats, ~30-40 participants each),
• a career planning program (2 iterations, ~50 applications each, 23 successful participants in summer, winter program only starting in December)
• the EAGxBerlin (~500 participants) 

to more impactful actions. 

“Through the program, I have gained clarity and reassurance in my career path, which allows me to acquire valuable professional experience in my consultancy role while passionately supporting underserved animal welfare initiatives with my financial contributions. I also believe that, in the long run, focusing solely on donations could be a meaningful way to create positive change." - Paul Wochner about the career planning program

“I realized that I'm actually not on the wrong path in my career just because I'm not working (and not planning to work soon) for a high impact charity! Because there are so many more ways!” - about the EAGxBerlin

“I was originally planning to stay in my field of software development, but I was convinced to try and get into technical AI safety research which was interesting to me, but felt very daunting. So I will be starting to tackle that right after EAGx. I also talked to some people in the field to get their advice and hear their experiences.” - about the EAGxBerlin

To guide people indirectly to impactful action, we supported community builders in Germany via 

• two retreats (~25 participants each),
• monthly calls for all organisers (~9 participants each),
• 1-1s (at least 2/year, we checked in with ~50 organisers/teams of 30 groups), and
• resources like presentations, templates (used by ~50 % of groups).

“The Strategy meetings were an excellent opportunity to make an effective outreach plan and to connect with other community builders.” - about the community building retreat in March

“Just thank you for a gorgeous retreat. I became more a part of a wonderful community and I feel inspired and motivated to community build successfully.” - about the community building retreat in September

We also support the community overall with 

• an employer of record program (hired 12 grantees of international EA-aligned funders in Germany, e.g. Max Räuker for a field building project in AI governance)
• fiscal sponsorship for local groups and individual projects (9 projects/groups, e.g. ML4Good Germany, EA Ulm and EA Freiburg)
• a community health contact point (15 cases from January to mid-November) for people seeking support in personally challenging situations, or when there is a fight or a reported infringement of our Code of Conduct, and
• acting as a central contact point (>200 meetings booked via our website or held at conferences, mostly about careers, but also to introduce people to EA or the German community in particular).

“The EA Germany EoR program allowed me to start-up an EA-aligned global health charity with near zero administrative hassle and very quickly. Apart from ease of setup, I love that the fee stays within the EA ecosystem rather than going to a for-profit entity.“ - about the employer of record program

“I don't think the fiscal sponsorship provided to us by EA Germany could be any more convenient. Thanks to this, receiving grants as a local group is quite easy and we do not need to worry about maintaining group bank accounts or tying group grants to private bank accounts. This means we can spend more of our time on organizing our events.” - Martin from EA Ulm about the fiscal sponsorship

Explorations

We explored several different ideas with some success. We are sharing our results here for others to pick up projects from here, take our experiences to not make the same mistakes or approach us if we can support similar projects in the future. Feel free to approach us for more information on any of these projects!

Projects to reduce Global Catastrophic Risks

EAD initially focused on guiding EA-inclined individuals to switch to high-impact careers. This included aiding local EA community builders to enhance their group's impact and giving EA organisation grantees operational support.

In 2024, we explored whether we could additionally help professionals directly transition to impactful roles and assist those interested in reducing Global Catastrophic Risks (GCR) in altering their career paths or starting GCR-focused groups.

Overall, we did not find a good fit for our planned interventions (AIS Professional Outreach, AIS website and newsletter, AIS Fundamentals, and Cause area-specific events) to start any specific projects in the GCR space. However, we’d still be keen to support initiatives starting in Germany. If you are interested in starting any of the projects, feel free to approach us for the information and assessments we collected.

Germany-wide online group

We organised two online events in May and July with 22 and 19 participants, respectively. At the second event, 3 German local groups took part as well. The feedback was positive, and people planned concrete next steps they wanted to take after the event and mentioned their motivation to plan their careers according to impact criteria increased. We won’t prioritise organising regular online events for now as we think others are equally suited for this – similar to other local groups in Germany.

We would like to hand over continuing online events to a group of volunteers. Feel free to approach us for more information.

Job recommendations

From January until November 2024, we reached out to 320 people with more than 100 individualised opportunities. Most of these opportunities were job openings, some were selected fellowships. We also supported other organisations in their hiring rounds by suggesting suitable candidates from our database.

Google ads

We received free ads from Google through their ad grants program and tried some campaigns with a professional in this area. After we didn’t see initial traction, we deprioritised the program.

Volunteer programs

We created an overview of volunteer roles and project ideas for people to apply to. We found several people to take over roles (4 volunteers for our newsletter, 7 volunteers for organising retreats, 4 volunteers to prepare career guides, such as this one). None of them went through the intended application process. They all reacted to individual messages or the engagement followed a 1-1 where the project idea came up. 6 people applied via the application form, but none took over a role either because they did not have the necessary skills or weren’t interested. The overview of project ideas and roles, therefore, did not activate people to apply for the roles and become active directly but helped our team communicate about the opportunities more proactively. We will keep the overview of the roles but remove the official application process.

Media outreach

We prepared a communication strategy and approached several smaller outlets focussed on careers. We were invited to 2 podcasts (1, 2) and wrote 1 guest article (1). This proved to be a lot of outreach and preparation work, and apart from a few 1-1s that the work resulted in, we did not see much traffic from it. Therefore, we aim to adapt our approach: While our target group was rather big and interested in career changes overall, we will now focus on a more narrow target group to offer a program that better suits their specific needs and interests (see planned changes for 2025).

Not started

In addition to the programs mentioned above, we aimed to organise 2 programs that we did not start

1. a policy program: We are in contact with potential volunteers to start such a program, but we won’t be able to spend significant time on creating this ourselves.
2. a project seeking local opportunities via a Delphi process - due to our reduced team size, we did not start this program, and we do not plan to start it on our own for now.

If someone is interested in taking the lead for or getting involved in any of these programs or the Germany-Wide Online Group, we would be happy to support you!

We explored a lot of different programs in 2024 resulting in our time being spread across many different projects. This did not allow us to focus and do the programs as well as we could have otherwise. One reason for this was the ambition to try out a lot, another was that we had less capacity than expected (see About EA Germany (EAD)).

Planned changes for 2025

We are still in the process of evaluating some of our programs and will make the final decisions on what programs to continue/how to adapt them at the beginning of 2025.

We plan to continue to organise and improve those of our main programs that have proved successful. Other than this, we plan to test reaching a more narrow target group as a new main program.

Reaching a clear, more narrow target group

For 2025, we focus mainly on narrowing our target group and trying out programs specific to them - based on the data we currently have on who is most likely to take relevant next steps towards an impactful career. Our current data, based on programs conducted by people in Germany outside of EAD programs, suggests that based on specific achievements, some people are several times more likely to change their career (plans) towards more impact. We aim to iteratively improve the project from there based on new information and data we receive. 

We are preparing the project during this quarter with the support, feedback and data of several other talent and meta organisations.

This focus involves a risk: If this project is not successful, then we will not be able to show impressive results at the end of the year. However, we think it is worth it to bet on reproducing the data we already have by filling the gap left by past organisers in the field and improving the project iteratively.

Team

After two years of exceptionally good teamwork, our co-director Patrick will leave our team to focus on his work at Successif and independent international projects.

We will welcome a communication manager from February on to manage our communications in a concise and clear manner, including a communications plan for the more specific target group we aim to reach. This role will be funded by a grant for communications from Open Philanthropy Effective Altruism Community Growth (Global Health and Wellbeing) via a regranting from Effektiv Spenden.

Funding

We currently have funds from CEA (Community Builder Grants program) and Open Philanthropy Effective Altruism Community Growth (Global Health and Wellbeing) via a regranting from Effektiv Spenden for 2025. In addition to this, we will receive some operational funds via the programs we operationally support and for organising the EAGxBerlin 2025. However, CEA will only decide about their full funding for 2025 for us in February. If CEA decides to renew its current funding in February, we will have no funding gap to keep the team and the programs planned. If CEA decides to reduce its funding for 2025, we will have a funding gap of up to €74,000.

We currently do not have any runway if CEA does not renew our funding from March 2025 onwards. If you want to support us (e.g. because we’ve helped you in the past) we would use the funds to create a few months of runway for our organisation. 

If you are considering donating to building the EA community, EAD is one of several organisations you could choose, check out especially those that posted on the forum’s Marginal Funding Week.